Capturing the Chaos in LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER’s DIY Eurovision Video

When Sam Battle’s track ‘Eins, Zwei, Drei’ landed in director Johnny Goddard’s ears during a tour stop near Hamburg, the plan for a music video was immediate.

“Sam only played it to me once,” he recalls, “but he knew I wanted to make that music video.”

Tasked with translating LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER’s inventive, analogue world into a visual story for Eurovision, Jonny and his production team at A Running Commentary combined DIY ingenuity, museum-raided props, and cheeky visual gags, from office distortions to animatronic pizza faces, to create a video that is as absurd as it is meticulously crafted.

With a rapid three-week turnaround, minimal VFX, and the full buy-in of the BBC’s Eurovision team, the video captures the chaos, humour, and maximalist energy fans have come to expect from LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER (LMNC) , while introducing him to a broader European audience.

LBB> How did the opportunity to produce the official UK Eurovision music video for LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER come about?

Johnny> I heard the track in a service station somewhere near Hamburg whilst we were on tour together. Sam only played it to me once but knew I wanted to make that music video.

LBB> When you first approached the track ‘Eins, Zwei, Drei’, how did the visual concept begin to develop and what direction did you decide to take the video?

Johnny>We weren’t trying to re-invent the wheel with this music video we just wanted to have fun with it, the visual concepts are generally pretty literal to the lyrical content just exaggerated or subverted. What else were we gonna do with a line about ‘Jam rolypoly and custard’?

Sam and I both wrote down a load of potential ideas and met at our local, Ramsgate Megaspoons (the largest Wetherspoons in the world) to try and reign it all in. Sam’s never had a proper 9-5. So the whole first section of the video is sort of distorted version he imagines working in an office is like. We still haven’t figured out what his actual job title is though.

We also run a museum together in Ramsgate called ’This Museum Is (Not) Obsolete’, this project has been a big part of our lives for the last few years and was definitely a big inspiration for the music video. Production designer Matt Gant and art director Megan Bo came down to the museum and we spent a day digging about raiding the place for props and shoving it all in the back of a LWB transit destined for Pinewood. There’s not many music videos where you have access to your own private prop house! The fact we managed to include so much of Sam’s world is what makes this video really special IMO.

LBB> Johnny Goddard and Sam Battle have collaborated for more than a decade. How did that long-standing creative relationship influence the process this time around? How closely did you work with Sam throughout the process?

Johnny> Our pre-existing relationship means that you can bypass a lot of teething problems you get when first collaborating with an artist. In addition to the museum, we’ve made a range of film / series projects together over the years, including a travel / music documentary series 'JUNK ROCK TV' made with A.R.C, which was another euro themed project that turns out channeled some 'Eins Zwei Drie' energy. We’re pretty aligned in terms of taste and there’s an element of trust there, Sam is pretty good at letting people just crack on. We worked pretty closely getting the treatment to a place where we were both happy before presenting it to the BBC, it was just a case of hitting the ground running after that.

Normally it’s a struggle to get decent ideas or useful input from an artist, it was the opposite on this. Sam mucked in with the rest of us to make this happen. He broke down multiple times getting that Mini to and from the shoot and even spent the night before building the furry TV heads for the Kosmos (you’ll see what I mean when you watch the video). He came through with the goods, they (mostly) worked and added yet another layer to the absurd nature of the video.

LBB> Eurovision is known for its spectacle and theatricality. How did you balance making a promo that felt ‘Eurovision-worthy’ while also still staying true to LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER’s analogue, experimental aesthetic?

Johnny> The Euro team at the BBC were great to work with and fully behind our decision to not dilute the ethos of LMNC and try and make it fit neatly into a Eurovision shaped box. As left-field and weird as Sam comes across, he’s actually a massive cheesy bastard at heart, so Eurovision was always going to be the perfect fit so we didn’t overthink that aspect. We obviously included a dodgy costume change courtesy of Bucks Fizz but balanced it out with an animatronic pizza face.

There was a request at one point to include some ‘britishisms’ in the set design so we stuck an animatronic portrait of Henry VII on the wall and filled a Withernsea lighthouse museum mug filled with baked beans. Of course we made sure to dip a digestive biscuit in there. That’s a pretty standard British thing to do right?

LBB> What were some of the biggest production or technical challenges you faced while bringing those ideas to life?

Johnny> Time and budget as always. It was a quick turnaround on this one too, three weeks total, from getting the job to delivering it This was only possible with our small but incredible team on this one. There was zero time for VFX so we tried to do as much in camera as possible with crude animatronics and simple but effective set design. Obviously making the car actually fly at the end was really hard and getting all those permits was a nightmare. Luckily, we used these specialist aerodynamic ironing boards for the mini wings so we managed it in one take, otherwise we would have been screwed.

LBB> How much does the music video for a Eurovision entry contribute to the artist’s wider Eurovision moment? How much does it shape how audiences experience the performance and the artist’s identity ahead of the live show?

Johnny> That remains to be seen, however it was very interesting to get a first hand look on exactly how the UK Eurovision sausage is made. These music videos are more important for countries like the UK where we don’t have a national TV competition to choose the contestant. For most Eurofans, this will be their first introduction to Look Mum No Computer, so it was so important to us to keep the video true to Sam's visual universe and aesthetic.

LMNC fans are pretty detail orientated so we wanted to fill the video with as many little easter eggs and tiny details as possible so you’d spot something new each time you watched it. Eurovision fans it turns out are just obsessive. Someone sent me a ‘reaction video’ where two German’s were convinced that all English people eat baked beans from mugs. They were incredibly impressed by the efficiency of this bean delivery method. This is exactly the type of false English stereotype we wanted to reinforce.