Playlist: Paul Minor

What’s the best music video you’ve seen recently and why? 

I have to be honest and say that I don’t make it to the end of many music videos these days, but I was transfixed by every frame of the Abteen Bagheri directed video for Benjamin Earl Turner - HEADSPACE/BENT.

It is, without a doubt, the best video I’ve seen in a long, long time. It has everything you could want in a music video, and it never goes where you think it’s going. The shot of Ben and his animatronic buddy (who looks like a fucked up reject from the 90s sitcom Dinosaurs) vibing in front of the liquor store is like early Chris Cunningham-level stuff.  

What’s the first music video you remember being impressed by? 

Speaking of Chris Cunningham, Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy was the one that really broke my brain and made me see the potential in the art form. 

It was just so different from everything else at the time. It was hilarious, horrifying, and had absolutely nothing to do with some dude trying to look cool in an oversized parka, strumming a guitar in an empty warehouse or something.  

And what’s your all-time favourite music video? 

The best music video ever made is Johnny Cash - Hurt, directed by Mark Romanek. 

Honestly, this video is so good, it’s not even close. I don’t think I’ve seen a video before or since that moved me like this one. The raw emotion, the song, the visuals. No gimmicks, No bullshit. In my mind, the music and the video are inseparable. When I catch a piece of the song in passing, it hits me like a ton of bricks. I see the haunted look on June Carter’s face. Johnny slumped at the piano. It manages to do something that I think is so rare: to transcend the song itself and become this emotional arrow that burrows its way into your cold, cynical heart. 

What other directors/artists do you look to for inspiration? 

I look at a lot of contemporary photography, particularly photo books that have a bit of a narrative bent. Maria Lax’s Some Kind of Heavenly Fire is a current favourite, along with Ewan Telford’s The Ecology of Dreams. Robert Darch’s The Island blew me away when I first saw it.  

As far as filmmakers go, there are too many to list, really. Everything from 80s video store shlock to Tarkovsky. I tend to gravitate towards the atmospheric. Early Michael Mann, John Carpenter, William Friedkin (especially that wild period of his career that stretched from Sorcerer through Cruising, and then To Live and Die in LA). 

What are you listening to at the moment? 

I’ve been doing research for a feature film project that has me listening to a lot of 1970s South East Asian psychedelic rock which has been a real vibe.  

Lately, I’ve been starting the day with a little Alice Coltrane to cleanse the palette, and then I just see where the day takes me.  

What’s your favourite bit of tech, whether for professional or personal use? 

Celluloid.