Taken from their latest EP, Bonefires (reviewed here), LUNATRAKTORS have revealed a new video for 16,000 Miles, one of my favourite songs off the EP which just highlights their originality and vision. I have to hand it to everyone behind this video, it’s incredibly creative and hard to believe this was shot in Pegwell Bay, Ramsgate and not in the Australian outback and as for the special cast of hammers…Everything they seem to do sets them apart from the crowd…this is no exception.
LUNATRAKTORS on 16,000 Miles:
“Based on ‘Sixteen Thousand Miles from Home’, an Irish-Australian emigration ballad, the song tells the story of somebody who goes to seek their fortune in Australia. Instead of a land of opportunity, they can only find work breaking rocks on a road crew. It reads like a traditional 1800s ballad, but either was collected very late, or is a 20th-century invention – it’s not listed in any of the broadsheet ballad archives / Roud index, etc. and we’ve not found any reference in published collections earlier than the 1950s.
Clair learned the song in a folk club in Prague. It seems to resonate with this current period of migration and economic uncertainty, and especially with the “Unviable” position of the arts, according to this Brexit-pandemic government.
There’s a strange sense of humour in the narrative – a kind of dark, absurdist nihilism – that really appeals to us. Jack (we call him Jack Hammer) is your archetypal outsider, the black sheep, drifting from scene to scene, and we love that. We’ve both always loved puppetry – whether Jim Henson’s work, Captain Scarlet or Czech maestros like Jiri Třnka – and we’re really into animism or panpsychism: the belief that all things have spirits. Clair has a collection of hammers their grandfather owned, so we came up with the image of Jack as ‘the wrong kind of hammer for the job.’
We did the storyboards and puppetry and it was shot all in a single day near Ramsgate, produced by Screaming Alley Cabaret with support from the Arts Council.”
Order their Bonefires EP via Bandcamp: https://lunatraktors.bandcamp.com/album/bonefires-ep
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Photo Credit: Emma Falconer