Sydney band Charge Group are finally on the cusp of pushing their second album from its berth. The four-piece are following on their expansive 2008 debut Escaping Mankind with a newly minted self-titled effort, due out early 2012. In the lead up however, they'll tour the nation behind a first taste from the album — a "double-A side EP" out this September, that will also feature remixes from the likes of Kim Presets, MYLeS and Seaworthy, as well as two non-album tracks. Package alert!

The lead track from the EP is the labyrinthian, chugging track 'Run', and its arresting video came about after the band first approached actor Brendan Cowell with the idea of working together. With the seed planted, the resulting effort bloomed into the storied actor/playwright/author making his debut as a music video director, as well as finding himself facing off with a formidable eleven piece, all-female Indonesian dance troupe in the industrial basement of the huge warehouse where Charge Group frontman Matt Blackman lives in Sydney.

We met up with Cowell and Blackman in a quiet cafe in Sydney, to discuss the unique pairing, the band's original intentions, the shoot's location and Cowell's having to learn how to dance in a skirt.

The video makes its debut here on TheVine. Watch:

CHARGE GROUP 'Run' (Official music video) from Microphone & Loudspeaker on Vimeo.


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TheVine: How did you guys start working together?

Matt Blackman (Charge Group): We've known one another for a few years and Brendan had been a fan of the first Charge Group record. So this seemed like a pretty good opportunity to work together on some level.

Did you have the idea for the clip prior?

MB: There were a couple of really loose ideas about some kind of psychedelic dance — some dream state dance thing. And that was it. That was what the song suggested [to us].

So you asked Brendan with that idea in mind?

MB: Yeah I emailed Brendan with the idea of directing a music video for us. In whatever capacity he wanted that to be, with really loose ideas to start with.

Brendan Cowell: He was talking about me being in it, but it was very kind of unformed. And as I'm starting to direct more — and hopefully direct a film next year — I thought 'If I like the song, hopefully I'll come up with something'. Luckily — you know, 'cause you have that fear of, 'If the song's really bad, what am I going to say to my friend?'— I listened to the song and it's a cracking track. And not what I expected from these guys, because usually what they do is very ethereal. Which this is as well, but it's really charging forward and fast paced and vigorous.

So I said, 'I'll be in it but could I direct it? I think I can do something cool.' And then Matt started talking about [the 1992 movie] Baraka and arms and something tribal. And I thought, 'Well how do I put myself in something about a man entering a tribal world to unlock something in himself'? 'Cause I come from a story-telling background. And film clips can be so oblique that you don't necessarily need a narrative. but I guess that's the only way I can really approach something. So I was really concerned with getting some kind of story [from it]. And then we started talking about who this character was. Does he wake up in a very tidy house or does he wake up in this kind of mindless office job? And then we thought, 'Well let's use this whole house [Blackman lives in a large warehouse space in Sydney - Ed], the rooftop and the basement.' And I thought, 'Righto, I'm going to find some tribal dancers'.

So I rang up Sydney Dance Company and...they were pretty mean and useless [laughs]. And then I rang up Dance Central who were across the road from the warehouse space, and they were like 'We've got an Indonesian dance troupe that just went on Australia's Got Talent, who do this traditional Indonesian dance but it's got eleven women.' And I thought 'Well that's not a problem with me.' And I went and met them and watched them. And the dance was not feminine at all, it's a really masculine dance. And I thought, this is so crazy it just might work. And when we put their dance with the music, even just on the laptop, Matt and I were like 'Holy shit.'

MB: They sent us a video of them rehearsing the dance in their studio. And we turned the audio down on them and the audio up on the song and most of it just fit.

BC: And it fit in terms of the power and the passion of the song, with what they were doing. It was like, this is a really peculiar match. Bringing an actor in with this rock band, in with this traditional eleven-piece female dance troupe.

MB: Doing a really heroic male dance.

BC: And I love that. Bringing all these different art forms and worlds together, and it's gonna work.

MB: Everyone in a sense was out of their own comfort zone.

How did Brendan's reading of the song scan with you Matt, in terms of your narrative?

MB: I was completely into it. The song for me is an opportunity to strip back a whole bunch of layers and just get into a very raw energy transferal. Using music for that [process]. 'Cause my instinct with songwriting is to always add more and more layers to things. So for this one we stripped it right back to a more simple musical idea and didn't base it heavily around lyrics at all.

Amongst the other tracks on the record it seems like an exorcism.

MB: Yeah, very much so.

BC: And that was it, the idea in the [video for the] song was...running the opposite way. There's this guy on top of the building and he's going one way, and then he hears this song and goes into the bowels and finds this strange world — whether it's real or not. And it's something about; whether you dance — you know Herman Hesse talked about it Steppenwolf which is where I thought about it — if a man just gets up and dances, and connects with people, especially women and his inner warrior, he might just find a will to live. So in a way he does run the opposite way. Because he's running towards imminent self-destruction and then he ends up connected to something. So it does kind of work literally but that was never the intention. But it's in there as well.

Brendan, have you done a music video before? How did you find directing yourself?

B: No I never have. I didn't know how it would go. But we had a really good Director of Photography. And our friend Trent, who directs quite a lot of stuff, I had a lot of conversations with him. So I had the general idea [of it], I'd mapped out the song. I knew maybe where that idea would work with that part of the music. 'The violin comes in there, maybe we could have that girls hands come in there.' So I had a loose ideas. But then of course when you get on set it's all completely out the window.

We started at 7pm at night and I was worried we were going to get shut down at 11 or 12. So I was panicked about getting as much as I could. But it's funny, I've been on fifty or so film sets since I was ten years old. And it's funny just what you know, without knowing that you know it. I just had to go in and get all that and then get all that, and we can do it like that and do it that way...by the end I was like, 'Well, I think I got it all!'. You know where the camera needs to be and you know what you'll need in the edit room. It all just went pretty smoothly.

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