History of the Indie Music Video

The original Indie Music videos were made notable by many very influential bands in the early 90's. Bands such as Oasis and Blur kicked it all off with their working class gritty image. This gave the band a certain authenticity and wide appeal to the working class as they felt that they could connect with them, they made their image as the same as their audience.

Oasis

The typical mise on scene of an Oasis music video is the working class streets of the north of England. Many of their films have been changed to black and white in colour such as 'Wonderwall' and 'Importance of being Idle'. They dressed very ordinary like much of their targeted audience and performed in a very realistic, carefree two fingered to society manner. In many of their music videos the cinematography is based heavily on the band performing, most of the time the camera shows close ups of the two brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher. The lighting is generally very low key with lots of scenes being in black and white, their is lots of side lighing used to show that the band has two different sides to it.

Blur

There image is very similar to the image of Oasis however they have a different approach to their music videos. The colour thats used are very in your face especially in videos such as 'Park Life', 'Girls and Boys' and 'Country House'. Whilst Oasis give a very dark and mysterious aura off in their videos Blur's video show a lot of humour (Matt Lucas having a cameo role in their music video 'Country House'), however from then on all the conventions are very similar. There are lots of close up shots of the lead singer to give a connection between him and the audience. He looks very ordinary like 'One of the Lads' and his perfomance is very entertaining for the audience as there is generally lots of dancing about and playing pranks giving the band a
very down to earth authenticity.

Callan Wheatcroft