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Bob Gallagher Girl Band, Pillow Queens, Villagers
One of the nation’s premiere creative forces in the visual arts. Bob Gallagher, also known via his website handle Bob Films Things, has worked with a plethora of Irish recordings artists on numerous projects – from Villagers to Girl Band and most of what’s in between too. Gallagher’s career begins in the darkroom. Spending a year studying photography “shooting black and white film and processing” before transferring into four years of film school. He found the college experience “unfulfilling overall” and began working on side projects to keep himself entertained. He jumped into making music videos after graduating, describing that process as “when people get deprogrammed from a cult,” abandoning the rigid formality of college film. His first video was for Elaine Mai’s Live. From that point on, his distinctive, often subversive, film style has made him one of the most in demand directors in the country. Gallagher doesn’t enjoy working with storyboards, describing that sort of approach as “mechanical.” He muses over the word carefully for a moment before continuing. “You have to make room within that process for a bit of chaos, that will offset the stuff you’ve planned. You’ll never, no matter how hard you try, achieve exactly the thing that you’ve planned. There’re lots of reasons why... So, I think it’s good to make space for accidents within what you plan.” That admission seems somewhat in conflict with the work the director has released to date. There’s nothing in the very symbolic, cerebral quality of the videos for Girl Band’s Why they Hide their Bodies Under my Garage or Pillow Queens Favourite that seems accidental – but so it is. Gallagher is warm, insightful and bright – a far cry from the morbid quality some of his most renowned work is known for. “I find when people respond to work I’ve done, or I meet people for the first time, very often they say things like ‘oh, so strange and dark.’ I don’t really see it that way. I think the world is strange and dark – that’s just how I see it.” I toss the label of Surrealism at him, but he deflects from it. “I find it slightly easier to stomach certain topics when they’re just that little bit separate from the laws of reality, which I suppose is Surrealism. But I haven’t read the Wikipedia page.” There is something surely surreal between the tango mortician and cadaver share in the video for Girl Band’s Why They Hide They Bodies Under My Garage? The video is superb, but only one in a long line of projects director and artist have worked on together. “I definitely remember having a bit of a moGirl Band’s Why they Hide their Bodies Under my Garage I find it slightly easier to stomach certain topics when they’re just that little bit separate from the laws of reality, which I suppose is Surrealism. 24 ment when I first heard Lawman, which was the first single I heard. Thinking about how incredible it was, that this music was coming from the place I lived. I think the reason why I connected to it was because on the one hand it seemed to sort of acknowledge that the world is quite strange and quite dark, but the way to transcend that is through humour.” It’s an enlightening statement, so I press him on the subject. “There are moments where the music winks at you a little bit. To reassure you that the music itself is in on the joke. I think that is something that really appeals to me. The sense that if existence is some sort of cosmic joke it’s better to be in on it and acknowledge it with a wink.” Damn good sense. bobfilmsthings.com