Point of View launches first video
‘3rd Eye’, now streaming on YouTube, comes four years after the band released their debut album, ‘Revolutionise the Revolutionary’
Followers of the Dubai rock scene are no strangers to Point of View and their brand of ’80s rock, inspired by the likes of Police, U2, Pink Floyd, Toto, Whitesnake, Dream Theatre and more. The five-piece band, who released their debut album, Revolutionise the Revolutionary, in 2012 and are currently working on their second album, have just dropped their first music video for 3rd Eye, a track from their first album. Here are excerpts from an email conversation with frontman Nikhil Raj Uzgare, where he talks about “jinxed” music videos, the artist-fan relationship and future plans.
You launched your debut album Revolutionise the Revolutionary in October 2012. The first video’s coming after almost four years. Why the long wait?
Let’s just say this was a video that took up blood, sweat, tears, persistence, luck and some amount of money.
After our album release, we got tied down with touring and we always had the video shoot at the back of our minds. Come late 2013, we had a wellknown Dubai-based global ad agency offering to shoot the video... Sadly the whole team left the agency and the project got stalled.
In 2015, we had a good friend, George Durzi, who came up to us and said that he would love to shoot a video with us. So yet again, we embarked on shooting a video for the second time for the same song. The Fridge, at AlSerkal Avenue, was nice enough to support us with a venue to shoot at. We shot it and when it came to the editing stage, it got stalled again, as our current video editor had some personal commitments.
At this point it was mid-2015 and we had pretty much come to the conclusion that this video was jinxed and it was not going to happen. We continued our search for a good video editor and in late 2015, we met a fantastic Bollywood film editor in Mumbai called Amit Kumar. He offered to edit the footage we had.
Why did you pick the song 3rd Eye for your first music video?
3rd Eye has always been a song that we have loved to play onstage. It’s got this tremendous energy and an opening riff that I believe will go down in history. It’s a song that a lot of people love to watch us perform live for the sheer energy and raw power it transmits to the audiences.
Did you know what kind of a music video you wanted from the beginning? What were your inspirations for the video?
We had a lot of interesting ideas but funds being limited, we decided to just go ahead with a straightforward band video shoot, where people can see who the band is... As far as inspiration goes, I guess it was as simple as, we had a song and we needed a video. There was nothing specific.
How relevant is a music video in today’s time when everyone’s streaming music on their mobile phones?
I personally believe that today’s generation listens less and watches more. A lot of channels such as MTV, Channel V etc, have had to resort to reality shows to keep their game alive. YouTube is where the action is. Hence, a video is still very much relevant.
I have come to believe that today the connection that an artist makes with the listener is very impersonal. And the fact is that I do know that there is a huge audience which hates listening to music on low format and hates the fact that they don’t get band CDs anymore. I personally also believe that the industry will come [full circle] and streaming will die out.