Grant Gee is reluctant to talk about his video for Radiohead’s No Surprises. He says, “Going into the nuts and bolts of the shoot just undermines it. It was the situation that was interesting, and it’s exactly how you see it.”
The video really does speak for itself. It's fixed solidly for the duration on the face of singer Thom Yorke, who is slowly revealed by the reflection of a slowly-lighted room to be inside a helmet which is filling with water. After a minute we see Yorke forced to take the plunge into a potentially dangerous, indeed fatal, situation. And for what seems like an agonisingly long time, his head is submerged.
In fact, he’s underwater for exactly one very long minute. And it naturally provides the primary magnetism of a clip which has at least one other simple yet striking idea: the upward crawl of the song’s lyrics (in the same form as printed on the sleeve of album OK Computer), through the video, but in reverse, reflecting on the glass helmet.
With absolutely no diversion from the single locked-off shot. the lyrics are one element that holds the attention of the viewer. Then Yorke submerges himself, and apart from the natural drama this evokes, it creates possibly the ultimate iconic image of Yorke, his sleepy eye emphasising a sort of existence between life and death.
Heavy, kind of troubling stuff which, of course, is what Radiohead's music is supposed to be all about. “It was a very intense thing to do,” admits Gee. “The process, how we achieved what we did, was entirely mechanical. But the situation was...odd.”
The idea came to him very quickly, he says, and he sent it off to the band straight away. The idea of scrolling the lyrics came out of the lack of scope for the performance. “I didn’t think about it much until the week before the shoot. Although we did do plenty of safety stuff to make sure it was going to work.”
Whatever Gee's reasoning for the idea, Thom Yorke presumably felt it was suitable for the song and was prepared to go through the potential fraughtness of the shoot.
But Parlophone commissioner Dilly Gent says, “I don’t think Thom considered the possible dangers, he knew he could hold his breath for a minute or so.” And she plays down whatever significance you might want to read into it. “There was no deep message about it,” she says, “I just thought it was an excellent script.”
But Yorke did also have the confidence in Gee developed from months of working together. As well as directing the video, Gee is also in the midst of his ongoing documentary on Radiohead's world tour. “Being with them for so long has given them as much trust as they have in me, to go with things above and beyond the treatment.”
For months he has been capturing the band on the road on a panoply of visual media - including 16mm, DVC, stills, even surveillance cameras - and is about halfway through shooting it. “The idea is to make something which isn’t a typical ‘rockumentary’,” he says. “However, the fact is they are on tour so the bulk of material will be them on buses, in dressing rooms, and playing gigs. But essentially it's about the album and the idea is to use the feel of the album so that it looks like how the album sounds.”
It seems Gee prefers working on longterm projects. “With a documentary you can experiment with more certainty, and here we are experimenting with the documentary form,” he says. He’s working closely with his regular collaborator, editor Jerry Chater, on the project, and adds: “If nothing else, No Surprises gave me fantastic documentary material.”
Maybe that will reveal more than Gee is prepared to tell right now, although we do know the shoot comprised of three full-length takes and a few partial ones. Normal and low-contrast prints were made of the select take, and the lyric scroll was added in post.
Gee may be more excited about making the documentary, but he has every right to be pleased with the end result of his intense and compelling promo.

PRODUCTION: Kudos; director: Grant Gee; producer: Phil Barnes; prod. manager: Steve Elgar; 1st AD: Barry Wasserman; 2nd AD: Chris Myers; 3rd AD: Richard Francis; DP: Dan Landin; focus puller: Federico Alphonso; loader: Tony Haynes; gaffer: Mathew Moffatt; desk op: Chris Caton; rigger: Vince Shaw; sfx: John Pennicott, Brian Tutty, Graham Brooker, Andy Simm; playback: Steve Barnacle; makeup: Kate Strong
POST: graphics: Simon Webb at Mad Editing; offline (graphics): Jerry Chater at Red Square; telecine: Tareq at VIR; bleach by-pass print: Soho Images; on-line: Sean Broughton at Smoke & Mirrors
COMMISSIONER: Dilly Gent at Parlophone