So, by little more than sheer brass neck and face fuzz happening to be appropriate to the role, I seem to have landed myself a lead role in a music video. It’s due to shoot next month, and is for a track by Oxford three-piece Little Red. I’m excited about it!

They’re funny things, music videos, aren’t they? I mean, here is a form that exists to showcase the music it’s set to, yet does so by working entirely silently itself. It’s kind of like soundtracking a silent film in reverse. The shoots for music videos generally involve no sound at all being recorded for final use – even the frequent segments of videos with the act ‘performing’ are usually either mimed or the original sound stripped off and the video synced to the studio release of the track which is the guideline for the whole artefact. Since a music video has to make sense without any sound of its own (except possibly brief intro/outro sections of semi-drama), it often is the only genre now widely produced which is comprehensible (well, as comprehensible as it was to start with) with the sound turned off. Ironically for something that is an adjunct, a supporting element, to the sound it is built around and for.

All the odder, then, for a career musician to act in a music video. It should be almost inconceivable. Yet in fact I suspect when, a few Sundays from now, I’m doing the acting for this, the only impact of all of the above on me will be the relief that I don’t have to try and sound like a Civil War-era American (ooh, spoilers … ). Thankfully, practitioners (especially at a performance rather than composition level) rarely allow philosophical aesthetics to stop them working.

So here’s to not sensing together. And no, of course it’s not a ‘real’ word. But did you really expect me to care?