Cranberries

The image of a burning teddy bear was used as a single by the Cranberries called Promises. and I found myself interested in the promises made by parents to children and by society to children, not by one... read more adult to another, and how they are so often broken. especially the unspoken ones. Rather than represent this notion by a scene of domestic or parental negligence I thought of a teddy bear, the comforting toy that any child might cling to at times of stress and loneliness. However this teddy is no ordinary teddy; it is in fact a robot teddy which is probably Government issue, unbeknownst to even the parents. It becomes an instrument of social control, not only monitoring the baby’s development and reporting back, but also modifying behaviour, calming the baby when anxious, with either Government indoctrination or right wing lullabies. The teddy is itself the broken promise; one thing masquerading as another, casting a duplicitous shadow from an early age. Due to an accident at home the teddy has caught fire and revealed it’s double nature. All a bit much for a single you might think, but I thought it reflected the sinister side of the Cranberries for a change.

It is customary, but I don’t know why, for the Japanese to take a European album and customise it by adding a bonus track and changing the cover if they can. Fortunately we had done a test shoot... read more on the grass rather than on a beach which became the European version. What you see is what you get. Red gym balls unleashed from the top of a scaffolding tower bouncing in profusion towards the man in bed who needs to wake up pronto. I always imagined the red balls were like coffee granules floating through the air and into his nose saying “WAKE UP”, and they were also like enormous red cranberries.