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Videos

(Check out the Ed & Steve headshot timeline!)




BE MY YOKO ONO (SPEAKER'S CORNER)
Made in 1990, and first exposed BNL to the rest of Canada. It's just the five guys cramped in front of a camera singing with Ed playing guitar.

"I don't know if that's how we got famous, but it certainly helped....it was a dollar well spent because it got played certainly enough times..." -Steve Page


LOVERS IN A DANGEROUS TIME
First professionally done BNL video. Made for the song off of the Bruce Cockburn tribute album "Kick at the Darkness." Done mostly in black and white with some shots in color. Throughout the video, the Ladies are riding on the back of a truck playing their instruments and singing. Periodically, the viewer sees two girls running through fields and across streets. At the end of the video, the Ladies end up at a record store to do a signing. They turn around and see a huge mob behind them. Once inside the store, the mob passes them up and goes straight to the rap dance section. But the two girls shown throughout the video come to get the members' autographs.


ENID
Starts out with fuzz and a pseudo Depeche Mode scene. Then shows the guys in a Gordon ball themed set done in red, white, and blue. There are 5 different television screens on which the camera occasionally focuses.

"Smilin', bouncin', guys." - Tyler Stewart

"We watch that video now and go 'No wonder people hated us.'(laughs)" - Ed Robertson



BRIAN WILSON
Steven Page is sitting on a stool playing guitar. Shots of blue/black nightmarish images are interspersed (castles on fire, ravenous dogs) in the video. There are shots of the band playing, everyone is dressed all in black. Towards the end of video, the band appears to be playing in the clouds.


BE MY YOKO ONO
A video of the guys basically dancing and playing around. Lots of actual clips and headlines about Yoko Ono fill the video.


WHAT A GOOD BOY
Begins with Steven Page (wearing a pink frilly shirt) sitting at an empty restaurant table singing. The video seems to chronical the life of a young boy who dreams of flying and often has his head in the clouds. We see the young boy wearing a dunce cap at school, and we also see his friend who keeps him grounded. Butterflies and nets are a big theme in the video. Throughout the video, you see the band membes trapped in boxes with different costumes on (Jim as a surgeon, Ed as a sailer...)


BALLAD OF GORDON
Also known as, "Then There Was Me." This was a Public Service Announcement recorded in 1992 that aired on the Fox Network, mostly during Saturday morning cartoons. The video promoted racial equality, and had Ed dressed up as an alien, which can be seen in the Gordon liner notes.


JANE
directed by Peter Henderson. The video has the band dressed in blue, and playing in a water-type background. The ladies also appear in differnt forest scenes. The video follows a guy trying to get a girl. He takes her to the beach, and visits her at work. In one scene, there's a Tarzan and Jane reference where he's picking bugs off of her. In the end though, while at her work, the guy visits her, and as she turns around we see she's wearing a bee-keeping suit, and for some reason she goes crazy. The guy then tips over a statue, and water spurts out of it, bringing us back to the water theme.

"When I heard the original song, it was clear to me that the song was about a guy who was in love with a girl who was never going to give him an easy time, and ultimately in the end they were never meant to be. It sort of eluded to a limbo that this guy was in, so that's where the idea for the video, which is very water-oriented. When you're in water, you move with the water. So a lot of idea behind the video is suspend limbo, you're never really on solid ground, you're never sure where you stand." - Peter Henderson

"It's about plants, photosynthesis, and things like that. Biology mostly." - Jim Creeggan



ALTERNATIVE GIRLFRIEND
Odd camera angles, blurriness, and subliminal messages characterize this video. The video begins with various shots of each band member in front of a red background. The shots get faster and faster, until we see the whole band playing. The video then goes on into a barrage of clips with Steve and his "alternative girlfriend" romping through fields. There are also numerous clips of Steve's mouth, Tyler behind a cymbol, and Jim eating really dry bread. Towards the end, words like, "fuzzy, warm, oatmeal" and "fluff, pablum, drivel" take over the screen. The ladies then partake in some pumpkin smashing. The person who plays the "alternative girlfriend" in the video is still unknown, although it is rumored to be Billy Braggs or Kevin Hearn. :)


SHOEBOX
The Ladies play in a shoebox complete with oversized novelty items. The video follows a teenage girl who sneaks out of the house and goes to a party/premiere with a much older man. Meanwhile her mother goes into the daughter's room and finds her"shoebox of lies," and figures out what her daughter is doing. The daughter and the older man get caught in a hotel room by the mother, the cops, and a television crew.


OLD APARTMENT
directed by the band's good friend and fellow Canadian Jason Priestley. The Ladies are playing in a room of an apartment. The video shows a couple and their struggles in the place where they used to live (arguments, pillow fights, etc.) At the end of the video, the band plays on the roof.


BRIAN WILSON (ROCK SPECTACLE VERSION)
a compilation of shots from the Pay Per View special done during the Born On A Pirate Ship tour. Some parts of the video can been seen on the multimedia portion of Rock Spectacle.


BRIAN WILSON '98
Captures the essence of Brian Wilson performed live. The video is filled with a stop motion 3-D technique that makes the video look especially interesting.

"It was a difficult task for us to try and figure out how to do a video, an interesting video, to a live track without making it just your standard live video." - Steven Page

ONE WEEK
directed by McG. The inside shots were filmed at LA's Park Plaza Hotel, and the outside shots were filmed at the Warner Brothers' Ranch. Begins with Steve being carried on the shoulders of soldiers. The band performs the song for a king and queen, complete with angles descending from the sky that turn into red leather wearing devils. The band then runs out of the building, and hops into two cars, one from "The Dukes of Hazzard," and the other from "Starsky & Hutch." Eventually they end up in front of a bus, with a girl getting ready to pull off an Evil Kenivel type stunt on her motorcycle. The video ends with the girl stuck up in a tree.

"There are sorta two concepts. The beginning is a kind of crazy 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,' type ballroom scene, and then later we move into the Stunt spectacular."- Ed Robertson

"Ed got to drive the General Lee. The other car, the Starsky & Hutch car, I'm just sitting in it and someone's rocking it. This 50 year old male with a mustache is driving the car, but he's got the same shirt as me. If he didn't have that shirt on, you would've thought it was somebody else." - Steven Page

"What I loved about this video concept was that it had nothing to do with the song lyrically, but visually it matched up with what the song did musically. The sort of more airy sections of the song have the slow motion angels dropping and the cars spinning." - Ed Robertson



IT'S ALL BEEN DONE
directed by Doug Aitken, and filmed at Andrew Dice Clay's old house in Hollywood. Barenaked Ladies are playing at a party, and the video is seen through the eyes of different animals (a cat, fish, dog, and bird) roaming around the house.

"The concept for this, it's kind of a cool party vibe a la 'Shampoo' or 'The Party' or something, but it's shot through the point of view of several house pets, and Doug was really into the bird being shot with paralax vision and he said 'We'll have to cheat the dogs and black and white thing,' but he wanted to stay really true to how an animal would view something, and that was a cool notion to us." - Ed Robertson


CALL & ANSWER
Set in a suburb with identical white houses and VW bugs. Many ladie clones walk up and down the streets in repetitive patterns. Two Steves sing to a woman who stays in or right by her bug and has no direct interaction with any of the ladies. Ed plays the electric guitar inside a garage.

There are two versions of the video. One version shows clips from EDTV on a television (this song was on the EDTV soundtrack), and the other version shows clips "inside" the video on the television.



GET IN LINE
directed by Phil Harder. BNL invades the world of "King of the Hill" (the song was written for the "King for the Hill" soundtrack). They spend most of the video terrorizing Dale Gribble by giving him exploding cigarettes and putting radioactive pills in his beer. The ladies perform in various cartoon places.

Ed has numerous "issues" throughout the video. At one point, he knocks into his microphone that almost knocks it over, and later almost falls flat on his face after an attempted jump spin. (Remarkably, his guitar is still "playing" even though he stopped strumming to catch himself.)



PINCH ME
directed by Phil Harder. Ed works at a fast food restaurant, and Ed is not happy. All of the customers wear matching "Blue's Clues" type shirts. Customers dance around the band while they perform as fast food flies. The video ends with a big dance number. Steve also appears as the fast food character mascot. Eric McCormick makes a small cameo as a customer (VH1 set it up as part of their show "Rock and Roll Fantasy").

MuchMusic's version of the video does not blur Ed's "flipping the bird."



TOO LITTLE TOO LATE
directed by Phil Harder. The concept is like a video inside a video inside a video... The inner most video surrounds the band recording the music video for "Too Little Too Late." However, most of the crew members are the ladies themselves. Fake barenaked commercials (barenaked bug spray, shampoo etc) are featured as well.

There is a long and short version of this video. The short version simply takes out the "rewind" gag.



FALLING FOR THE FIRST TIME
directed by Tim Godsall. A security guard changes the channel on his video surveillance tv and comes across the ladies performing. He tries to change the channel again, but he can't. He unplugs the tv and even tries to smash it. However, the ladies are still there. He then takes the television to the dumpster and throws it away. As he is walking back to his post, the ladies are shown stealing money, art, and a computer monitor.

The security guard is Kevin's comedian/actor cousin Harland Williams. He also appears in the Maroon infomercial.



THANKS, THAT WAS FUN
directed by Pierre Tremblay (the band's manager). A montage of all the videos (excluding Get in Line) whose songs appear on Disc One. However, the ladies lip-sync to "Thanks, That Was Fun." Sometimes videos intertwine, for example, "Lovers in a Dangerous Time" Ed appears on the "Call and Answer" television while "C&A;" Steve walks by.

This video was a Canadian only release.



ANOTHER POSTCARD
directed by Phil Harder. The video is presented as a movie titled, CHIMP!. The band plays actors in the "movie", and the names of their characters are the band members' porn star names (first pet and mother's maiden name). In the video, a giant chimp wrecks havoc on Toronto. It destroys the city while the band flees from the beast, and the army tries with no avail to defeat it (insert Canadian military joke here). In the end, the chimp climbs the CN tower where the band is performing inside. The monkey then jumps aganist the phallus tower which causes the phallus tower to shoot off into space.
"Think 70's disaster films, chimpanzees and the CN Tower, and you've got part of the picture."
-- Steve Page