“What the fuck was that about?”
Spy thriller? Office training video? Proto livestream? What the hell is going on in the Assassing video?
The early 80s was the Wild West when it came to the emergent art form that was the music video. But even by the maverick standards of the day, the clip for Assassing was something else. Fugazi’s second single, it was accompanied by a promo that yoked brand new, state-of-the-art digital effects to a plot that was somewhere between would-be spy thriller and office training video. The results were both visually striking and utterly incomprehensible.
The video was directed by Simon Milne, who had overseen the eye-catching clips for He Knows You Know and Garden Party. This time, the film-maker was determined to try out the new chroma key technique, aka green screen. The only problem was, no one had quite got a handle on how it worked. “Because they were inexperienced, they didn’t light it properly, so they weren’t able to superimpose the image on the screen,” says Mark Kelly. “That’s why some of the time you just see a plain blue or green screen.”
The ‘plot’ featured Fish joining a group of dark-suited office workers – possibly spies – gathered in a dim room to watch a woman give a presentation, in which footage of the band playing is accompanied by lines of presumably meaningful computergenerated data. “What the fuck they were doing with all the computer-generated graphics and Jimmy Bond spy stuff, I have no idea,” says Kelly. “It was just rubbish.”
In its defence, the video did predate the livestream trend by several decades – at one point, the woman finds herself trapped in the middle of screens showing separate performances by the each bandmember. There was also a moment of high comedy on the set, though. In one blink-and-you’ll miss it sequence, a car drives through one of the giant green screens.
“The stunt driver was, like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do that,’” says Kelly. “So he drives through this screen then bounces through the warehouse and crashes into a wall on the other side of the room.”
“The first time Ian Mosley saw the video for Assassing, he said, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’” says Fish. “I had to agree with him.”