Semi-professional comedian Lewis Capaldi’s bulletproof weepie Someone You Loved – a No 1 hit in the UK – finally crept into the US Top 10 this month. It is a success story assisted by one of pop’s oldest tricks: the song being boosted by a new, glossier US-focused video. While the original, with its 64m views, paired the song with an actually quite moving Peter Capaldi-starring visual promoting organ donation, it focused too much on the wrong Capaldi. The new version features much more Lewis, and is full of cinematic emotion; all sad glances, lonely walks and constipated looks to camera.
He is not the first artist to have a US video makeover. Dua Lipa’s original video for single Be the One – featuring the singer kneeling on a wooden floor in what looks like a Dalston loft conversion and walking around Soho – was eventually remade as a desert-based, flashy, Lexus-funded video/branded-content exercise co-starring Baby Driver star Ansel Elgort.
“It’s about US marketing teams wanting to get their hands on it,” says Jackson Ducasse, director behind Dua’s UK version of the video. “It makes sense in a way because why would they let a product out into such a lucrative market without having a say in it? It’s like what they do with movie posters in different countries; there’s definitely a sort of cultural translation even between Britain and America.”
So what qualities constitute a US reboot? As well as fixating more on the artist and giving it a movie-like sense of occasion, adding a load of US stereotypes seems to be high on the agenda. Take the second video for X Factor UK alumnus Cher Lloyd’s 2012 hit Want U Back, which took her Americanised sound to its ultimate conclusion and had her sipping milkshakes in a diner (the UK version mainly featured iPads and exposed brickwork, possibly also in Dalston).
Sometimes, as Ducasse points out, the original video is too “DIY, or the content a little bit edgy”. That “edginess” might explain why Lorde’s first, lingering, poetic video for Royals was trimmed by 23 seconds and re-released a month later in a tightly edited “US version”, or why All Saints remade their video for Never Ever in 1998 ahead of an American push. While the original featured a lot of 16mm footage of the band with their exes, the big-budget remake positioned them near slow-mo lorries, helicopters and even a horse. “I think [the label] felt it was more suited to the American market,” Shaznay Lewis told me last year. “I can’t remember it. I’ve wiped it from my mind. It never happened.”
Will this tactic continue? Now that singles can take longer to build globally, a new video is just another way of pumping new life into an old-ish song. Prepare to see more closeups of Lewis Capaldi’s face, basically.
