Posted by Lockdown impacted on people in different ways.
Unable to tour, Josie Proto focussed her efforts on songwriting, using her lyric pad to reflect her emotions.
Driven dotty by “overly and excessively positive people” she decided to express her frustrations in music.
New single ‘Kids TV’ takes aim at these shiny happy people, and the fake lives they build for themselves.
“I wrote this with Ben Matravers, the cowriter of ‘Burner’ from my first EP,” she says. “It came about in a similar way to ‘Burner’ where we were ranting about our current situations, specifically about scrolling through Facebook and seeing people making out as if the pandemic was not something to worry about.”
“We were frustrated with the fact that people seem to think that eradicating all sense of fear, unhappiness and unrest is healthy. It’s the age-old idea that without the storm clouds, you wouldn’t appreciate the sun. We wanted to capture that in this song but in a far more cynical and aggressive way! We want to normalise being unhappy and having bad days. We felt it was damaging living in a society that is pristine like a kid’s TV show, when what people really need to see is reality and the bad bits. The sounds that we used tried to replicate jingles and opening credits for kid’s TV shows.”
The video builds on this theme, a colour-saturated feast that references classic children’s TV shows. Josie was involved at every step, commenting:
“I had so much fun making the ‘Kids TV’ video. I employed my best friends (and cousin) to act as characters on over the top kid’s TV shows, and worked with Adam Fox and Edwin Brawn to build and film the project in three days!”
“We were lucky enough to be lent a space in The Rec Rooms, a music venue in Horsham (my home town) that is very close to my heart. It was a real team effort and I am lucky enough to have some amazingly creative people in my friendship groups! My cousin was so excited to star in another video after being the lead character in the ‘I Bet You Fall Apart’ video. We managed to capture her true response to crawling through the ‘magical TV tunnel’ that we made with fairy lights and a million trips to Homebase!”
Tune in now.