Radiohead go hunting

From Street Spirit and The Pyramid Song, to Just and Karma Police, Radiohead has a rich history of brilliant if unusual music videos.

Into that pantheon steps the latest addition for new release If You Say the Word, directed by Object & Animal's Kasper Haggstrom.

The video follows three bored-looking men who, we soon learn, are on the hunt for a particular quarry. That this quarry is free-roaming businessmen and women is both very strange but brilliantly captivating. Dressed in sharp suits but acting like startled animals, seemingly oblivious to who and what they are, the hunted men and women are rounded up, loaded into a truck and transported back to their natural environment. 

"I tried to find a concept that didn’t feel too obvious, so I spent the first couple of days listening to the song back to back until it just became a soup of sounds running through my head, making it easier to detach the concept from the music," explains Haggstrom. "I ended up writing a lot of different ideas before presenting my three favourite concepts, which we whittled down to this one idea. We did a one page treatment, sent it to Thom [Yorke, lead singer] and the band, who fortunately seemed to really be into it. So, that was it really. And the next thing we are straight into prep."

I wasn’t 100% sure what they liked about the idea, other than that they found it funny. 

Asked whether the band had any more input into the video than that, Haggstrom says not. "I only got the song. I didn’t really hear from the band until after they approved the concept. I actually had pretty much free-reign throughout the process, which was both liberating and scary as I wasn’t 100% sure what they liked about the idea, other than that they found it funny. But we kept them up to speed with things as they fell into place. It was nice to have that trust in what we were doing."

When asked whether adding to an archive of such lauded promos was nerve-wracking, Haggstrom "Yes, absolutely," he says. "I grew up loving both their music and music videos, so it felt absurd to actually be making one myself. While it was all very exciting there was also a fear of screwing it up. I chose to work with the Norwegian cinematographer, Daniel Voldheim, as I knew he would share some of the same concerns, making us both work harder. Also he’s a great cinematographer (and human). 

As for the biggest challenge in taking on the project, the director says that time was always the issue: "I think [we had] maybe three weeks from award to delivery," he says. "So the biggest challenge was finding available crew and cast. Doing most of the pre-production from my office in Oslo was also quite challenging but the team at Object & Animal did an amazing job and went above and beyond to make this happen."