White City Video Shoot

Ru: yesterday we started filming the first video clip for ‘Space Cadet’, one of the songs that appears on our debut EP, which we recorded in Pakistan in June.

Our brilliant team, consisting of Jake Simkin, David Gill, Ellie Kealey and Pedrow & Qasem from District Unknown, took us down to the abandoned Russian Cultural Centre in Karte Se, off Darulaman Road.

This imposing building took a lot of damage in the civil war of the nineties and is covered in bullet holes. Nowadays, its grounds are used as a parking lot by locals, an impromptu football pitch by kids and inside its cavernous buildings, which still bear faded murals of Lenin, Kabul’s junkies gather to shoot up, buy and sell junk and, occasionally, die.

We shot in three different locations – inside a dusty vestibule amongst a questionable build-up of dust, mud, needles and fecal matter next to the above-mentioned mural, which had images of barely-recognisable cosmonauts floating up around the great Illyich.

Then we moved to what must have been a sort of amphitheatre with huge ceilings and mangled metal arches bending over us. Daubed on the walls were more recent graffiti-efforts. A burka-clad woman sat on the stairs looking at a giant skull spitting earth-bound rockets. A broken heart throbbed opposite a spattering of bullet holes, which had gained the caption, “you missed”.

At this point, we filmed the rock-out section of the song as Pedrow and Qasem threw red smoke grenades to each other, their trails streaming only inches from my face. It was an effort to sing and not flinch!

Finally, we moved to a huge outdoor stage and attracted the usual crowd of Afghan locals, who streamed from Darulaman road to see what the crazy foreigners were up to. Even the police were clapping and cheering with their AK-47s slung across their backs. Perhaps it was we were dressed in old, Soviet flight suits and furry hats, but the animosity that can sometimes turn a crowd like that nasty, never appeared. Instead, people came up to us and congratulated us on our mimed, performance with ‘Harasho! Harasho!’, clearly thinking we were Russian.

We’ll get a proper Flickr Set up soon. These are just crappy photos from my mobile. Stayed tuned!