Midlands post-punk originals Cult Figures have a new album Between Us And Heaven out through Gare du Nord on 20 October. They’re trailing it with the album’s opening cut ‘Mr Producer’, with a video made by guitarist Jon Hodgson.
The band were part of the same Birmingham scene that brought the world The Prefects, TV Eye, The Hawks, etc and featured on the successful Un-Scene collection that came out a couple of years ago through Easy Action. Art school friends of the legendary Swell Maps, the Figures called on the Maps to assist on their classic ’79 debut single ‘Zip Nolan’.
Following the sad death of founding frontman Gary Jones last year, the band reconvened with new singer Fraser Gillespie and additional guitarist Steve May and set about work on Between Us And Heaven with producer John A Rivers (Love & Rockets, Buzzcocks, Dead Can Dance), who they’d originally worked with on ‘Zip Nolan’.
“For the ‘Mr Producer’ video I had the idea to shoot the film in slow motion, but have Fraser appear to sing the song at normal speed,” explains Hodgson. “We chose to shoot one summer Sunday in Borough Market near London Bridge. Fraser had the tough challenge of performing the song sped up by 250%. He looked quite ridiculous in real time, but once it was slowed down the film had a pleasingly dreamy effect as the hoards of shoppers and tourists floated past, mostly unaware that they were being filmed. We shot the video as a single shot in one take, which is just as well as we didn’t have permission to be filming there!”
Between Us And Heaven is available to pre-order here.
