Vincent Haycock Directs New Spiritualized Video

Vincent Haycock directs Spiritualized’s latest semi-expurgated video from their new album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light. The video follows a young girl running away from home on her father’s motorcycle hoping to escape the dead-end reality of her moribund, post-Soviet town. Her independence is met with all the pitfalls of a young girl on her own in the world: questionable choices clouded by the prospects of danger, seduction and violence.

 

Haycock’s concept for the video was inspired by a collection of Sam Shepard’s writing titled Cruising Paradise. “Shepard writes soliloquies of people out in desert lands, lonely people,” explains Haycock. “Spiritualized work with a similar language of loneliness, and it made sense to apply that feeling when I heard the track.”

 

The video, shot in Iron City, Germany, which borders Poland, stars freestyle stunt rider Chesca Miles, who makes her unceremonious escape on a Ducati Monster – a bike that, as it turns out, she’s very comfortable testing the limits of.

 

“The casting process took a really long time,” said Haycock about the video’s lead actress. “But eventually we found Chesca, who is one of the best female stunt drivers in the world. We had her riding with no hands, running red lights, flying down the autobahn, and doing huge wheelies. There were even these huge crashes that she just walked away from. She's 20 years old and she pushes this bike around like a toy, it's insane.”

 

The video was filmed over three long days that included two full-on crashes, twelve burnt-out tires, one wrecked bike, a broken whipped cream charger, and a near-arrest after police caught the crew filming a high-speed tracking shot on the autobahn toward Berlin at 4am.

 

“Chesca was doing a full inverted wheelie and was going past us at 90-degrees – basically upside down – with the back of the bike scraping on the road,” said Haycock, describing one of the near crashes. “On car commercials there are all these union regulations. We went to Germany so we could really push the limits of what could be done.”

 

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