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[Photo by: Josh Halling]

DON BROCO go behind the scenes of "Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan"—watch

DON BROCO have released a behind-the-scenes video to accompany the visual for “Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan.” The new feature takes fans on set, revealing the design choices that led to the final product.

The original video for “Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan” shows DON BROCO clad in Star Trek-style flight suits aboard a spaceship. As the feature begins, the group are hard at work attempting to clone international soccer sensation David Beckham.

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As the visual progresses, the team’s cloning system appears to malfunction. The device begins to produce clones that have an increasingly faint resemblance to the iconic player. They also appear to possess dangerous powers, and the band are forced to fight back against the horde. The video concludes as a giant Beckham head appears in space and engages the group in battle.

In the new behind-the-scenes video, frontman Rob Damiani gives viewers a tour of the set. Viewers are treated to a scene of the group filming in the midst of their high-tech setup, as well as some of the props used to produce the visual.

DON BROCO’s video also introduces the Beckham look-alike who appears in the feature, shows off some of the outtake scenes from the shoot and introduces viewers to the army of Beckham clones.

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“Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan” was directed by Sticker Studios’ team Do Not Entry. In an interview with Little Black Book, Oli Carr and Frank Higson, the duo who make up Do Not Entry, spoke to their approach to the video.

“We built a narrative around a few set pieces in the video we knew had to be filmed. If we didn’t do it, then who would?” Carr and Higson said to Little Black Book. “A David Beckham bursting out of a cloning chamber and screaming, a Beckham clone holding the decapitated head of another Beckham, a Beckham doing some sweet cosmic space kick-ups. It was great working with the band who were a super enthusiastic and creative bunch. They encouraged us to get real weird with the idea. And so, this chaotic music vid was born.”

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The visual was originally released to kick off DON BROCO’s next era. The group recently announced their upcoming studio album, Amazing Things, slated for a Sept. 17 release via SharpTone Records. The group’s previous record, 2018’s Technology, also saw the band dabbling with the final frontier. In the visual for “Technology,” the group bear witness to an extraterrestrial invasion.

You can watch the behind-the-scenes video for DON BROCO’s “Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan” and read our exclusive Q&A with the group below.

Can you talk about “Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan” as a song? What were you going for musically and lyrically with the track?

We really wanted to try and write a rock song that started one way then totally shifts gears in a jarring yet satisfying way. I always loved how in Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” it lulls you into this false sense of what the song is, then a minute [into] the real meat of the song starts. That always gets me super hype. So for “MSR,” we wanted to keep the first part super aggressive and constantly building before dropping into the shift. Then for the verse, we wanted this full-sounding electronic/guitar-hybrid vibe. We’d been listening to a lot of Gesaffelstein and are big fans of the way he keeps the techno elements super heavy.

Lyrically I wanted to write a song about how cruel some fans could be to their supposed favorite artists. I’d really noticed it a lot more in the last year on social media and in some videos I’d seen from people in real-life situations at shows. Whether it was a band not releasing music the fan liked, going on tour with an act that the fan didn’t deem appropriate [or] pure bullying of certain band members putting on weight or not looking how the fan wanted them to—I couldn’t believe some of the stuff I was seeing. It’s like it hadn’t even dawned on them that these musicians were real people with feelings, potentially dealing with the worries and anxieties that life can throw at us. The words they were saying could have serious consequences.

Could you tell us about the video for the track? What was your thinking for the concept, the setting, costuming and the like?

Initially, our only agenda was to make a video that melded football with Sci-Fi. We’d never seen that combination done before, and it felt like an opportunity to make something really fun and original. Then when the idea of cloning David Beckham got added to the mix, suddenly the whole thing really came to life. In terms of costume and setting, we’re all big fans of the slightly camp retro sci-fi looks of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Movies like Flash Gordon and specifically Star Trek: The Original Series were big influences.

Your video and song obviously reference David Beckham and one of the clubs his career is closely linked to. What about him interests you, and why are you so desperate to clone him?

Beckham is our country’s biggest football legend. Especially for our generation, no one even comes close. When we were confronted by the question of “who do we clone?” Beckham was the obvious choice. The fact that he spent a long portion of his career playing for a Manchester club made the decision even easier as it linked to the song title so neatly.  Cloning him in a music video was a nice way for us to make an ode to our favorite football player!

Your videos range in style, from more abstract conceptual settings to more thematic ones like “Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan.” Can you speak to your general approach to videos and why you’ve made such a diverse array of content?

The first thing we think about when making a music video is making something that WE would want to watch. We also want to make videos that the viewer hasn’t seen 100 times before, and to make videos that you want to watch again and again. The videos give us a canvas to explore some of the things outside of music [that] interest us. For instance, we all love Sci-Fi, B-movie horror, comedy, etc.. Being able to combine these with the songs we’ve written is super fun for us.

I guess the content is diverse because we are always open to pretty much any idea. Finding people who share our creative vision and humor is always important to our process because it means we have other people’s brains to push ideas into crazier places than we could on our own. On our last record, we worked with a production company called Dominar Films and our friend Ben Roberds, whose creative brain exists on a whole other level. On this album we’ve been working with a British company called Do Not Entry who are awesome and really get our thirst for weird.

What was it like shooting a behind-the-scenes video? What made you interested in taking fans onto the set of the video?

It’s always interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes and [we] personally love getting to see the curtain lifted on the creative process. Whether it’s studio documentaries or BTS clips, it’s cool to see how the final result actually gets there and the work put into making it. Doing the same thing for our fans is something we always want to do, and we hope people enjoy seeing how we do things! How good is Some Kind Of Monster? Really good.

What do you think of DON BROCO’s behind the scenes video? Let us know in the comments below.