Three Music Videos Shot In Australia That Are Way Better Than That Awful Coldplay One

Kings of beige-rock Coldplay filmed and released a fairly terrible music video for their new single ‘A Sky Full Of Stars’ in Newtown earlier this week. It features bubble machines and other things that scream “whimsy” to middle-aged men, a bevy of earnest local 20-somethings desperately keen to be in a Coldplay video for some reason and white people cheerfully appropriating Newtown’s iconic Martin Luther King mural. What’s worse, local band Sticky Fingers did the exact same thing only better in their video to ‘Australia Street’ last year, raising the weird possibility that one of the biggest bands on the globe ripped off creative ideas from a bunch of scruffy dags from Newtown. Either way, the whole sorry mess is a bit off.

What’s really disappointing about all this, though, is how much better it could have been. Australia’s been the backdrop for some of the world’s great artists and their picturesque lip-syncing, and the results are usually a whole lot better than the limp, infantile pap Coldplay managed to come up with. To do justice to our music history and basic good taste, here are the best music videos that captured a genuine piece of ‘Straya.

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David Bowie — ‘Let’s Dance’

According to home-grown Bowie fansite and group of very interesting-looking people Bowie Down Under, the video to ‘Let’s Dance’ was filmed when the Duke was in Australia in 1983. The tiny dust-bowl town of Carinda in far north New South Wales was chosen as the setting, and as a result a decent whack of the video is just footage of dirty old legends getting wasted in a country pub while Bowie jangles around like a bleached peacock in the background.

Despite the seeming randomness of choosing a town in remote New South Wales to set your big music thing, Bowie evidently put a lot more thought into it than Daft Punk did. He had a love-hate relationship with Australia, which he described as “one of the most racially intolerant in the world, well in line with South Africa”,  and felt compelled to highlight the rampant racial discrimination that he saw here, particularly in rural areas.

Given that it’s still hard to think of a mainstream Australian show with black actors that isn’t Redfern Now, Bowie was way ahead of the times when he cast two young people from Sydney’s Aboriginal-Islanders Dance Theatre as the clip’s main characters. Starting out by scrubbing floors and working in factories for white overseers, the young couple briefly try on white culture before deciding that it’s a bit rubbish and go hang with their mates in the bush instead. It’s a powerful and positive message from a time when Aboriginal Australians were still expected to abandon their own culture, and is yet another reason to acknowledge David Bowie as the one true king.

That, and photos like this:

Flawless.

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Beyoncé — ‘No Angel’

Australia flipped its collective lid when photos emerged of Bey hanging around a shitty fibro palace in suburban Melbourne as part of a photo shoot last year. It spawned the #BeyoncéinBrunswick meme, which in its short life did a pretty solid job of Photoshopping Beyoncé into places where Beyoncé has almost certainly never been.

Two months later Queen Bey dropped an entire goddamn visual album she’d recorded in secret, and it turned out that the photoshoot was actually a film spot for the clip to ‘No Angel’. The song’s become a point of pride for Houston, given that the video name-checks some of the city’s hip-hop landmarks and features some of its most respected rap veterans like Scarface and Z-Ro. It’s a proud and unapologetic shout-out to Bey’s hometown, which in no way explains why she didn’t just pick a scabby house in Houston to stand in front of instead of one on bloody Beith Street.

Still, if you can’t feel a faint glimmer of pride at seeing the world’s biggest pop star sticking her head out of a good old-fashioned Ford Falcon (in left-hand drive, no less), you can leave quietly, thanks very much.

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AC/DC — ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Want To Rock ‘n’ Roll)’

An ode to dingy motel rooms, getting ripped off by agents and all the crappy parts of being on tour, ‘Long Way To The Top’ is Bon Scott’s legacy and perhaps AC/DC’s greatest hit. The clip is as timeless as the song — featuring the band and all their gear thrashing around like mad bastards on the back of a flat-bed truck trundling down Swanston Street, the video is the musical love-letter Melbourne deserves and possibly the most ‘Straya thing to ever ‘Straya.

Filmed in a single day in February 1976, the clip takes loving shots of a Melbourne as daggy as it is wonderful. Old-timey trams stop and seas of mulleted heads turn to watch the band roll past, along with their bagpipe-playing guests the Rats of Tobruk Pipe Band, who play their bladders of shrieking air fully decked out in kilts and those funny Scottish hats.

Both song and video went down in rock history. Since Scott’s death in 1980, lead singer Brian Johnson has refused to play ‘Long Way’ out of respect, and in 2004 a laneway near Swanston Street was renamed ACDC Lane in their honour. The next time someone raves about how great that hideous Coldplay clip was, point them in the direction of Acca Dacca’s 40th anniversary tour so they can get some real bloody music up in ’em.