We have neglected this medium for a while, and intend to put a stop to this by quickly writing something.
I thought I should write about the ‘Everywhere That Wog Army Roam’ video from the new album ‘England Is A Garden’. The song had been earmarked for release a few times, but was put back a few times because the fear of offending those that go weak at the sight of the Wog word. I mean they are offended by Wog, not the word word, that would be silly.
To take out the harshness we thought an animated video would help soften the hurt, and be a good way to move a lot of ground quite quickly. As a result, we got in touch with graphic artist Ian Viggars whom we have worked with quite a few times now, over the last few years. His previous video for us was ‘Double Denim’ where he created a whole musical group of characters to depict double-denim nights, people used to do these things not so long ago.
At a cafe meeting we talked about ‘Everywhere That Wog Army Roam’ which he heard prior, and within minutes many ideas came out. As we love reggae the idea of a cartooned reggae record cover such as was prevalent with Yellowman or Scientist cover art in the late 70’s early 80’s became the focus. Character types were decided, and Ian went away to create them. After a few weeks his ideas were very strong, and excitement began to built. His big scene was going to be fight between Police and Thieves, but we decided that might be too expected, so the Policemen, whom look very India military to me, join in rather than let all hell break loose, with music being the common denominator.
There are some many nuances in the characters that he brought to life with special effects and humour. The smoking cricketer is a favourite. Ironically, I used to have a deputy head that was an amazing cricketer, ex of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Team who smoked a lot of Embassy number1.
The audio I cut down to keep the video single edit sized, and Ian continued to work hard on putting it all together. The result was excellent, but we hit a lot of resistance as the Black Lives Matter movement, one which consider most splendid was hitting most streets across the world, and no establishments would really chance putting out the video, and certainly not gamble on talking about it too much. It seems timing to put out such a song was always going to upset someone’s applecart.
