Premiere: Edward Scissortongue feat. Contact Play - COMA

High Focus have just released the new video for Edward Scissortongue’s old school flavoured, MC-heavy COMA. We caught up with the man himself and director Johannes Schaff to discuss the genesis of the video.

Edward Scissortongue: “Shooting a video for the posse cut on my album was a no-brainer. As insane as it is, COMA is the first time ever that every single member of my crew Contact Play has featured on the same track. In the past it has always been just two of us or three of us, four at best. Our disorganised nature coupled with geographical limitations played a significant part in this awful fact. You’d be surprised how tricky it is to get five MCs in the same place at the same time. As a result, the video was made more as a celebration of the fact that we had eventually all jumped on one track more than anything else.

My previous videos have always been very narrative driven and seeing as there were five different verses on the track I wanted to tackle the staple ‘bars to camera’ concept with COMA. I felt the verses were all varied enough to be entertaining; every MC in my rap gang has a very different style, but I was still very keen to make it as anti-bars-to-camera as possible. No underpasses or graffiti covered walls as a backdrop. This is why I recruited the services of filmmaker and friend Johannes Schaff to shoot the video as I have always been a fan of his filmaking aesthetic.

Truth be told, I had no real idea of exactly what to shoot, I just wanted it to be insane, so I left it to Schaff to create a vision for each MC featuring on the track. The pseudo love story at the beginning was very much his brainchild and I think it works excellently. The process was very lucid; we just went with the flow and picked ideas out of the sky as they flew past. Some worked, some didn’t. I wish there was some deep overarching meaning to the short but there really isn’t. Picking up on the strongest metaphors and punchlines in the bars and attempting to visualise them within the video is just about as complex as it got, but this doesn’t take away from the hours of graft put in by the director to ensure that it stayed fresh and in my humble opinion pretty groundbreaking for a UKHH video. A weekend of green screens, manual running machines, strobe machines, smoke machines and a fuck load of liquor and drugs later we had captured enough footage to take it to edit.”

Schaff: “We really had to roll with the punches. We only had one day to shoot. I really enjoyed trying to keep it miminal and letting the rappers do their own thing. By seeing how they performed really put colour between the lines.”

Edward Scissortongue: “The weekend of the shoot was probably the best weekend of the year for me. We shot on the same weekend as the High Focus Records 2nd birthday party in Brixton which meant everyone was in town. We shot in my kitchen and the result was a truly hilarious shoot married with a party unlike anything I have ever experienced. Put it this way, if a club is so rammed that the people making up the crowd cannot physically move when you pull a spectacular stage dive on their heads, then you know you’re onto a winner.

All in all, the video feels like the jewel in the crown for my debut solo album, ‘BETTER.LUCK.NEXT.LIFE’. The record as a whole took three years to create and I could never have dreamt up the sort of love it has received. I grew so disillusioned with the music over the three years that I lost all creative scope as to whether it was a worthy album or not, but we seem to have put together something pretty classic.”