Happy Birthday, Disintegrate!

Today is Disintegrate’s first birthday. To celebrate that, Anna Walsh made this lovely video, inspired by the song’s lyrics and its dark celebration of mortality. Watch here

‘I started by really diving into the lyrics and into what Brett had said about the song’, says Anna. ‘He once described it as a ‘dark celebration of mortality’, and that stayed with me.’

‘Suede’s lyrics and sound inspire me deeply. When I hear a song, I always have these very clear images in my head, so I taught myself how to make a video, with some help from my son. My husband filmed the scenes in which I ‘disintegrate’.’

Where did you film it?

‘Almost everything was filmed around my own village in Sweden. The forest, the lake, paths within walking distance from my house. I was mostly walking my dog while filming.’

‘Near the forest where I live there has been deforestation, and it leaves a huge scar. The landscape will never be the same again. For me, that destruction, combined with damage from wind and raw nature also taking down trees, became a metaphor for mortality.

You squeezing the heart is a very powerful image.

‘It represents the lyric: ‘You hold your love like a weapon in your hand’. I can squeeze it hard, so hard that it starts to bleed. I’m in control. The stick in my hand is more of a tribal weapon. Taken from the forest. The forest has no voice but its branch can be used as a weapon.’

‘I want to protect the forest with this stick to make sure no more harm will be done to it.’

I spot all seasons in the video. How long did it take you to make it?

‘About a year, really. I started in May. I filmed poppies in July and August, the leaves in autumn, and the snow in January. Years seem to go faster and faster and I wanted to reflect that. We are all getting older, and you don’t know how long you have. One day, we will all die. That awareness is always there for me.’

The contrast between black-and-white and colour is striking.

‘At first, I wanted the entire video to be in black and white. But when I filmed the poppies, they were just too beautiful. I thought: let’s change this. So decay became black and white, while life and positivity are shown in colour.’

Interview with Anna Walsh by Veerle Van Den Broeck

Disintegrate photo courtesy of Suede

All other photos by Anna Walsh