The way they were in 2007...
The picture quality of these clips is firmly located at the low end of the scale, but they are rare enough to justify being passed around again all these years later. Some of the posts I do here at the Archive are specifically designed to try and attract the attention of new or more casual fans, while others are targeted at those with a similar level of addiction to myself. If that's you, this is the really good stuff that's buried in amongst the regular memorabilia.
Fans in the United States probably won't be able to watch the videos on YouTube because they got blocked in your location. If that's the case, there's download links here for all of you.
The time period covered by this post fall somewhere between May and June of 2007, when Kitchenware Records released a series of videos in preparation for the upcoming release of Editors' second album An End Has a Start. They originally came out on the band's MySpace profile (see photo above), and that's where I "relocated" them from. This was a time of high anticipation for fans of Editors. They were still a very new band, we were still curious/cautious in our devotion but ready to go all in. There was already a lot of excitement for the new album, and these teasers only increased the intensity. What the videos show are some behind the scenes footage of the band rehearsing for their impending tour, and in the studio at Grouse Lodge putting AEHAS together. There's also some footage from a photoshoot in Prague which is where they also filmed the video for Smokers. Finally, I'm sharing what I personally find to be one of the most important videos from Editors' history, purely because of what it meant at the time. Enjoy ;)
This is all footage shot by the band themselves from within the confines of Grouse Lodge, as they laboured with future returning collaborator Jacknife Lee to make the ideas that made up An End Has a Start into something permanent. Features some epic armchair-dancing from Russell.
stream it here or download here
stream it here or download here
Clip 2 - Prague, Photoshoots and Airports
A compilation of material shot by the band in Prague and at the airport. It also includes a classic social interaction fail involving Chris and a shop assistant who appears to be offering up a high-five, when in fact she's protesting at being filmed. An incident that's also available to watch in this post, only the one I'm sharing here includes the uncensored obscene finger gesture that MTV blurred out. The allure of filming in airports is something that never really went away with this band, with Justin bringing it back when he joined later.
stream it here or download here
The soundtrack here is a
shortened version of Smokers, and it shows the band being filmed
in rehearsal and then watching the playback. It runs at a lean 1 minute
and 4 seconds and the dodgy picture quality means that it is best watched
small. This was the preparative stage of the live process that would keep them busy for almost the next two years.
stream it here or download here
stream it here or download here
The
short film in this post that ran for just 1 minute and 27 seconds, yet
to me it's one of the most important pieces of Editors history we have. Filtered
in grainy black and white, this looks like an artefact from a very long
time ago, which I guess it is now. It marked the start of the band really using the internet
to spread the word about what they were up to at a given time (and to
mess with their fans' heads prior to a new release!). It shows snapshots
of the band in the studio, but what makes it so special is the
soundtrack. It contains what was, at the time it was released, a small
fragment of the studio version of Bones.
It's difficult to convey the excitement that surrounded this little video without putting it all into some kind of perspective. Bones had only ever been played live, and whilst we as fans all had bootleg versions of it in varying quality (the version played at Hultsfred in 2006 is, in my opinion, still the best live version prior to AEHAS
coming out), we were all dying to hear what it sounded like
professionally recorded and mixed. Of course, we didn't know that the
structure of the song had been changed around so that some of the
"Retreats" had been removed, but this was a definite moment. I
remember ripping the video the day it went live,
converting the clip to an mp3 and just passing it around by direct message to as many people
on the band's official forum as I could. I must have played that small
sound file hundreds of times, and it definitely helped to build up
anticipation for the album release that followed it. Even hearing it now
in preparation for this post gives me those beautiful chills all over again.
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
