It wasn’t until the two North England sweethearts, who met in Nottingham at the tender age of 16 through a shared love of performance and theatrics, moved to Berlin that the proverbial Music Video ball started rolling. “We were offered an Artists Residency in Berlin,” confirms Alex Large, and then Liane Sommers, duly one and then the other, taking their turn, repeating each other’s sentiments, as often they do. “We had been a few times before and were smitten with the city. When the residency ran out, we simply stayed,” they say. Duly one. And then the other. The move wasn’t, as some might assume, a “deal” from a record company. Yes, Berlin is where the real life husband-wife tag team did their first professional music video – a haunting Little Red Riding Hood gothic feature for Hanayo’s Joe Le Taxi with a tiny budget and partially-clad heroin - but Geist Records had not put any money on the table for a move. It was simply more feasible to live off the waning, slim line wages of self-starting music auteur in Germany than in East London, where the ever-increasing rent would not allow them to pursue the projects they were passionate about. “When we look back, we were totally over ambitious and unrealistic,” the couple reminisce about their first video, about the move. But they did pull it off. And it wasn’t long before the call from Björk commissioner Paul McKee came, and the media duo graduated to videos for Armand Van Helden, Bloc Party and Mika, peaking with The Ting Tings’ Shut Up and Let Me Go video, the turning point in the couples career, for which they were awarded Best Video at the US MTV Video Music Awards in 2008.

 

These days steeped in commissions from everyone including Tiga, Sam Sparro and lady-of-the-moment La Roux, Ponystep chat to the partnership about ventures old and new, with both Alex and Liane requesting, like their professional Alex&Liane moniker suggests, that all answers to be credited together as one, a singular unit. Well, that’s what they’ve been since the age of 16… 

 

Hynam Kendall: You seem transfixed by colour, especially neon. Have you always had this aesthetic?

 

Alex&Liane: We like artificial images and we like artificial light. And we love playing with light and dark, so starting with an idea based around a lighting concept automatically makes us consider colour more. 

 

HK: You’re most famous video Shut Up and Let Me Go, which got you a Best Video nod at MTV’s US Video Music Awards, is a testament to this aesthetic 

 

A&L: The Ting Tings video idea was originally intended for something much darker and more sinister. We had pitched early versions to other bands, but they never picked up on it. We were keen to get the finger-transition idea out there - if we sit on ideas too long, someone always beats us to it. So we adapted the idea to the Ting Tings world, and they wanted us to include some Kung Fu. We have a tendency to tailor the "look" of a video to the artist to get the job, which means we have to keep working with different people to get something of ourselves across. We were happy, it was just different to what we first intended. The tests just sometimes feel like they have potential to evolve, given time.

 

HK: One of your other Ting Tings videos, That’s Not My Name, was again very bright and colourful. You made everything realllllly shiny

A&L: Oh no, we might need to change our style. We have a fear of repeating ourselves!

HK: How do you describe your style? 

A&L: Erm… "Not subtle" 

HK: How do you achieve the effect of big budget video, as you're famous for your budgeting? Is it really all reflective Scotchlite?

A&L: Yeah, the material consists of lots of tiny glass beads which bounce any light source directly back into the camera. It was used on the planet Krypton in the original Superman movie.

HK: In the US version of That's Not My Name almost every part of set and wardrobe was covered in it, wasn’t it?

A&L: Yeah. We have a ton of the stuff and we've not finished working with it yet, but we are giving it a rest for a bit.

HK: So what do the artists come to you for? What are they asking for when they plan an Alex&Liane video?

A&L: To make them look smart, hot and witty. And humour is probably the first contact point with us. It's a shortcut to understanding someone's taste.

HK: What do you think Tiga expected when he came to you for Shoes? What exactly was the concept behind this video?

A&L: The concept was Public Access TV meets performance-art-fashion. The song is a conversation, so we decided to keep it that simple. The idea took the length of the song to come up with. We had one phone conversation with Tiga, never met him.

HK: I love it. I love the oddity of it. I went to a comedy night in London in which Adam and Joe’s Adam Buxton played music videos and dissected them. Shoes went down very well, you’ll be happy to know

A&L: That's hilarious! The truth is that when we heard the song, we loved its deliberate pretentiousness. We both started to lip synch the words like a conversation, both of us sat in our office chairs. It felt immediately that we should keep the idea that simple. The female character is supposed to be so above everything, she doesn't need to do anything apart from exist as a living art piece. We put most of our small budget into getting a really great model

HK: Janine Henkes?

A&L: Yeah, Janine Henkes who is a bit of a catwalk star. Once we had contact with Tiga, we knew that he was on our side and that enabled us to ignore label concerns about it being to "weird". We worked with two old tube cameras and a live vision mixer which created some beautifully random images for us to play with in the edit.

HK: Evidently, you’re very stylistic, has your background as artists aided you?

A&L: Yes, definitely. As performance artists, we have performed, produced, written and art directed our own work. We're not shy in front of a crowd or a camera. Coming from the art scene into a context where it's totally ok to not take things too seriously, it's very liberating and has meant we can work fairly instinctively.

HK: How do you think your work stands next to traditional pop videos?

A&L: Coming from a site-specific performance background, we started out in music videos thinking of MTV as a context. It would be great to intellectualize about this and say we were "playing with the genre" but the truth is that there are a lot of compromises when you start working with record labels and budgets. There are a lot of boxes to tick for airplay and it's not unusual for an idea to be pushed aside during the edit in favour of a pretty lip synch. Now the internet is more important than MTV and ideas seem to take more precedence (which is good).

HK: Is it hard to remain conceptual creatives when you’re making mainstream pop videos? 

A&L: No, not really. Trying to persuade people to execute them, that’s the hard bit.

HK: Is there a concept to the videos, or do you just work out something that’s aesthetically pleasing? With a lot of videos the storylines seem quite vague. For example, I have no idea in what’s going on in La Roux’s new video

A&L: We're not entirely sure ourselves. Our "Narratives" tend to evolve around the visuals we are constructing. The images come first. If we see a seed of sense, we may water it a bit, but don't like to tie up all the loose ends, it's too finite. It's a tradition in music videos to be bugged by obscure ideas (and we like reading the multiple interpretations on the YouTube comments). In this instance, the La Roux video, the brief was "Tropical". It was rainy season in the tropics and we wanted a controlled lighting environment, so we offered up a hot indoor pool party. Looking for an indoor pool within the M25, you get 80s nouveau riche. We didn't want it to be too 80s, so we added some 90s futuristic gadgets, an eccentric cast, and a Second Life attitude. We were given the glasses, so we decided to hint at a virtual experience. The dance style involves writing words with one's bum.

HK: What were your points of reference?

A&L: A Chic album cover. Scarface. Wild Palms. Dynasty. The Great Gatsby. Ferrero Rocher. Fellini. Kenny Everett. German sex tourism. Neosim. Lilt commercials. Footballer’s Wives. Battlestar Gallactica. Boney M. Roxy Music. Japan. The importance of Being Ernest. Elton John.

HK: And the Melon Man? 

A&L: That's Alex. We kept the melon faces after the video, but they are mouldy now.

HK: You also don’t get many “stops” in videos these days – not since Britney’s Crazy 

A&L: We found the amazing brass "stop" thing, so we had to stop the video at some point.

HK: It’s funny because it’s a song where the lyrics could lend themselves to a traditional music video.

A&L: Really? We just knew that Elly's strength was performing, and we thought it made sense to have that at its core. We also really wanted to get her humour across. She's a very funny person.

HK: You seem to get on with all the artists you work with. Have you ever not got on with them, or turned any musicians down? 

A&L: Yes. Lots. But we shouldn't really say who!

HK: Has your personal taste ever come into it? Have you turned down an artist because you don’t like their music? Is it hard to make a video for a song you hate?

A&L: We can't work with bad music. It makes us miserable - especially when you have to hear it 250 times. We can do "OK" music if we have an interesting performer, idea or budget. We've passed on about 30 this year so far. Sometimes we really like the music, but we don't want the artist to be in the video and ruin our idea.

HK: What’s next for you?

A&L: In the long term we are cautiously moving towards making our first film. And we’ve been dipping into the fashion word recently, having made the first of a series of backstage fashion films for PPQ. It might be a pretty step towards filming the "real world" again.