Video Of The Week #11: Saint Leonard’s Horses – 1969 Revisited [Premiere]

We’re delighted to bring you the video premiere of ‘1969 Revisited’ by Saint Leonard’s Horses.  Visually speaking, it appears to fit the title – a parade of colour and a brief portrait of the man himself – opening and closing on nothing but black, offering perhaps a snapshot or an idea of what 1969 might have been like – if you can believe all that you read and hear about it.  Here’s what he had to say about the track:

“The song 1969 Revisited is an exercise in ‘acquired nostalgia’ for a time I never actually experienced.  During the recording of the demos for my new album I was living in the Hollywood hills and experimenting with increasing doses of Yage and the Viridis leaf. The upshot of micro-dosing on these brews is the phenomena of huge time dilations and the apparent ability to re-structure chronologies according to emotional and psychological topography – rather than the more regular experience of simple cause and effect that we have in our daily lives.

This lead to some very interesting tangents in my songwriting.  I don’t drive so I was often stranded up there for days on end, playing the same records on repeat and trying desperately to piece all these sensations and impulses together into a ‘coherent contemporary musical statement’, and trying very hard not to freak out.

What this manifested as was the unsettling late-night sensation of  Living in two timelines simultaneously. Certain values extracted from 60’s and 70’s pop rock culture have taken on for me an almost ritualistic quality: art, music and historic moments experienced through the twisted lens of endless internet fed nostalgic modern mass-culture has irrevocably warped my inner mechanism, and it’s this weird pathology I see in lots of people living in this current golden age of STREAMING. The Past is no longer the past, the whole visual history of the 20th century is accessible in one youtube search.

The song operates as a time machine, an incantation to open a portal. Also it turned out to be remarkably accurate verbatim diary of a sequence of strangely awry romantic encounters in my life. Combining these elements with a rising sense of paranoia and insecurity around often spiralling and inalterable global events, throw that in with the strong hunch that it’s possible through Dionysian rock & roll to communicate along many potential future and past dimensional time-spaces at once and you come up with something that sounds remarkably like ‘1969 Revisited’.”