It’s no surprise to John Bowker to suggest the new video from his band Born Lion might make some people feel sick.
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“Yeah, we got a bit of that feedback,” laughs the singer and guitarist.
The video is for Old Days, the third single from the band’s Celebrate the Lie album.
The reason it makes some people feel ill? That’s due to what Bowker calls the “glitchy camera effect”, which he says had no effect on him.
The video was filmed using a row of five GoPro cameras mounted on a hand-held board and held in place with gaffer tape.
The result is each scene is shot from five slightly different angles which, when edited together, make for a stuttering but somewhat disorientating video.
“We just wanted something really simple and easy to put together for hardly any money,” Bowker says.
He came up with the idea for the video’s storyline, which sees him walk from the pub to the band rehearsal room.
As for the jerky footage, the inspiration for that came from Bowker “mucking around” with a stop-motion app on his phone.
“I showed that to [label] FourFour,” he says.
“They had a young guy there who was really quite good at a range of different video options. He was right into stop motion and he thought of that whole GoPro situation. So we hired the GoPros and he used a bunch of gaffer tape and rigged it all up.”
The Celebrate the Lie album comes three years after the release of the ARIA-nominated debut Final Words.
Bowker says there were a few reason for the three-year wait between albums.
“It could have been a lot quicker,” he admits.
“The gap between finishing the recording and having it released was considerable.
“There was some massive hold-ups in terms of mixing and stuff.
“We had it mixed completely, which took a long time and when we got it back we weren’t happy with how it sounded so we had to remix it.
“That took another few months. Then we were going to release it last year but the label decided it would be better to do it at the start of the new year.”
READ MORE: Limo ride is ARIA prize for Born Lion
Having been nominated for that ARIA in 2015, there was a chance to really gain some momentum. Bowker says the lag time may have made it hard for them to capitalise on that recognition.
“I think the band was frustrated about the process of this whole album,” he says.
“We were really happy with the music but that delay is really quite stifling for any artist. To have that big a gap … by the time it’s been released we’re already thinking about new music and other songs and other directions. So it feels like what you’ve done is slightly redundant by the time it’s out there.
“I think it’s important to do stuff and get it out there really quickly. That’s something we’ve learned, we just need to do that.”
For an album that took longer than expected, it kind of makes sense that the album launches happens a few months later too.
Celebrate the Lie was released in February this year, but the band is playing a Wollongong launch this Saturday.
“The theory behind waiting a little while was to give people a chance to listen to the album,” he says.
“It’s so it gets out there and circulates a little bit before we did a proper tour for it so there’d be some greater recognition of the new stuff when we played.”
Bowker says the lyrics for the new single Old Days came out of a dark time in his life.
“Lyrically it's a personal reflection about where I was at that point in my life,” he says.
“I'd been through some pretty heavy events, like a divorce and was starting to come out the other side of all that. It's a reminder to myself that even though things may seem all doom and gloom, it can change for the better if I keep working at it.”
Pulling those dark moments out of his head and getting them down on paper is cathartic for Bowker, especially when he can turn them into a “high-energy pop-rock song”.
“It’s good to turn something that’s a bit depressing into some art, or a piece of music that you put out there,” he says.
“It’s twisting it, turning it around from something that’s quite solitary and that you’re processing on your own into something else.
“I like that about it, it’s sort of repackaging it.”
Born Lion play the Servo Food Truck Bar at Port Kembla on Saturday night.