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director
Keef
producer
Keefco
studio
Ewart TV
source
Sanctify Yourself [Edit] (3:55)
genre
Performance
comments
A vibrant, colourful video, Sanctify Yourself showed off an early
Once Upon A Time performance in
glorious Technicolor, shot from a plethora of cameras, which seemed to be positioned at
every conceivable angle.
And then, for some reason, they decided to pepper the video with a collection of black and white visual vignettes.
The switch from full saturated colour into bleak black and white was startling; the heat of the stage performance
also contrasting with the cold, snowing scenes shot outside. But this was only half the story as the inserts
were quite bizarre.
The idea must’ve been to recreate Anton Corbijn's black and white shots of the band. This lead
to a sequence of scenes where the band adopted odd poses or performed strange choreographed moves. Some of results
were also unexpectedly amusing e.g. Jim popping up from behind a bush with a
dove or wrestling with a newspaper in a gusty town square.
Director Keef was a veteran of the "pop promo" game having worked with Paul McCartney,
Kate Bush and Blondie. I do occasionally wonder if the Sanctify Yourself
video would've been better without the inserts, but it wouldn't have been half as interesting.
availability
collectors' information
Original promo videos are now extremely rare. My copy includes on-screen timer and opening countdown clock. It's also labeled
"Sanctify Yourself" + Inserts which suggests an earlier version didn't include the black and white segments.
trivia
Filmed at the Forest National, Belgium (on either the 11th or 12th December),
concert goers were given a freebie performance of Sanctify Yourself
before the gig proper started.
archive
The first version of the video, called A, was cut on the 20th December 1985. It's assumed this was the
version without the black and white inserts.
The second version, called B, was edited on the 15th January 1986. This version was released as
the offical promo and also turns up on various compilations.
Protection copies of both videos also exist in the archive.
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