The 1975 - It's Not Living If (It's Not With You) - Warren Fu's Latest Music Video Masterpiece

The 1975 are devotees to the art of surreal music videos and their new hit It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) is certainly no exception. The track’s lyrics illustrate lead singer Matt Healy’s struggle with heroin addiction from the point of view of a separate character named “Danny”. In an interview with NME, the singer stated that he was “trying to consciously hide it behind somebody else”, indicating his reluctance to disclose his addiction.

The extraordinary music video comes to you from the mind of Warren Fu, director of a huge host of classic videos including Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Miss Atomic Bomb by The Killers as well as a few more recent hits such as Rose-Coloured Boy by Paramore and A Tribe Called Quest’s latest single The Space Program.

The video is inspired by the bizarre 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense featuring a live performance by twentieth century musical legends Talking Heads, created by Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs). Warren Fu’s surreal creation features a few not-so-subtle references to the Talking Heads movie. Matt Healy enters the stage wearing an oversized suit identical to David Byrne. A pair of identical backing singers can be seen to the left of the stage, filmed from the centre crowd position in the same style as the 1984 concert film.

The video begins with singer Matt Healy waking up from a dream within a dream in a pre-music sequence intended to introduce the concept, a classic technique common to the style of the director. Healy is trapped in some kind of surreal nightmare, playing to an empty crowd, hallucinating, presumably due to the influence of heroin. Healy attempts to escape after seeing a second version of himself on stage taking his place, finding himself behind the set of Sincerity Is Scary, 2018’s previous video by The 1975, created by the same director, watching himself in disbelief.

It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You) features a few interesting filming and editing techniques from wide camera shots, low lit close-ups and harsh lighting amongst intense darkness to thirty-second breaks from the music to enhance the almost disturbingly bizarre plot of the video. The hypnagogic music video is another classic example of Warren Fu’s unconstrained genius. He is not currently set to direct any new projects but with The 1975’s propensity towards making surreal videos, a tendency shared by the gifted director, it’s safe to assume that we can expect a few more collaborations in the future.

See the video here!