Grand Gestures - Playing the Games: Video Premiere
Watch the animated video for Playing the Games by The Grand Gestures, taken from their final album Happy Holidays.
The brainchild of Jan Burnett of Dundee lo-fi outfit Spare Snare, The Grand Gestures are a collaborative supergroup of sorts with the likes of Emma Pollock, RM Hubbert, Idlewild's Andrew Mitchell and Bdy_Prts featuring across their four-album catalogue.
Happy Holidays, the group's final record, takes on the festive season in idiosyncratic style. The band describe the album as "the record you put on at the end of a Christmas night, on your own, drink in hand", while our review found the album to be "the perfect accompaniment, rather than antidote, to the darkness of the winter nights".
Playing The Games, featuring Celie Byrne and Calamity Horse, takes a melancholy look at Christmases past. Describing the video for Playing The Games, Craig McNeil of Calamity Horse writes: “Celie Byrne and I are fans of each other’s songs on previous albums by The Grand Gestures and we often kid each other on about one day appearing together in Chicago at the Whitehall Theatre in Dundee. Those conversations were the catalyst for our duet on Happy Holidays.
"We spoke on the phone in the summer and I told Celie a story about myself aged 11 years old in 1978 in John Menzies in Dundee and then she mentioned the children's games Operation and Buckaroo and our discussion inspired me to write the lyrics to Playing The Games. In August, Celie very kindly met me off the train in Glasgow but we got lost driving to Jan’s house to record our vocals in his toilet so on this longer-than-planned journey we started talking about a video for our song.
"Celie (daughter of artist and writer John Byrne) is an incredibly talented artist and I asked her to create drawings relating to the lyrics and she did a brilliant job especially with the games and the Christmas number ones mentioned in the song. I added festive film footage and other imagery and I asked my editor James Harman to ‘make the drawings move in a 1950’s BBC animation style’ and he did a great job of doing that and more.
"I made the video for Jill O’Sullivan’s There’s No Place Like Home from the first album by The Grand Gestures so it’s really nice to complete the circle and make this video for this, the final album.”
Happy Holidays by The Grand Gestures is out now.