Behind The Scenes: Six Time Champion – Down (Music Video)

“Always writing about my own personal issues is quite a self-involved act, and I just hope that these songs do actually reach out on a personal level to people other than myself,” declares James Dagg, vocalist of Brighton pop punks Six Time Champion, discussing the origin of the title for newly announced EP ‘More Than Me’. The band are gearing up to not only release the five tracker, but also generally get their heads back in the game following a period of respite. Recorded at The Outhouse with John Mitchell (Architects, Lower Than Atlantis), ‘More Than Me’ sees the quintet slickening up, whilst still retaining the somewhat aggressive edge that has become their hallmark. Following the recent release of video single Down, Rich from the band gives you an insight into how it came about…

“Whilst we were at the studio recording the E.P we started thinking about the promotional side of things for the record, deciding on artwork and singles etc. We’d actually already kind of established that Down would probably be the first single when we were recording the initial demos of the songs at my house a couple of months before. There was something about it that just stood out as being a good place to start in terms of people hearing the record. It definitely sounds a little different to all of our previous material and because one of the things we really wanted to do with this E.P is be a little more diverse with the material, this definitely seemed like the song to lead with.

When thinking about who to approach in terms of creating and directing the video itself we didn’t really consider anyone else other than Ian Coulson to be honest. We’d met him a few times at various shows whilst he was working for other bands and got on with him pretty well, we also liked the work that he’d done with As It Is, ROAM etc. so approaching him to work with us on Down was a pretty easy decision. He really took the reins on it as well which was cool. We gave him a rough mix of the song as well as the lyrics, plus I think James ran over the general themes etc and then he came back with the treatment. I think he managed to capture a lot of the underlying themes in the song without being too literal about it, which was awesome. The songs itself is about being in a negative place mentally and the girl drowning captures that side of the song perfectly. We were instantly sold on the idea, if a little unsure of how it was going to happen/work as it sounded like something that would need a massive budget. But Ian worked really hard on keeping the premise of the video intact but within our budget.

Both locations we used for the shoot were awesome. The performance part of the video was shot in the grounds of a huge manor house not too far from Brighton. It was actually the same location that ROAM used to film their video for Deadweight last year, as well as it being the venue for Ian’s wedding. The owners were really accommodating, moving generators about for us so that we had power to shoot. They did also offer to ride their Jet ski’s around the lake in the background whilst we were filming which we definitely would have been keen on had it only fit the vibes we were going for with it!

All the underwater shots were filmed at a school pool pretty late one night, again a location pretty close to Brighton. That all went pretty smoothly with it all being wrapped up in a couple of hours without either Ian or the actress actually drowning. Result.

Overall the video came out great! It’s the first time we’ve shot a “proper video” as our previous videos were made up of live and studio footage. The whole experience was awesome and went pretty much as planned, although we had a few interruptions on the set of the performance parts from the land owners dogs… They were pretty interested in what we were doing and one tried to make a run for it with some sandwiches that Hus had bought, which was a definite highlight of the day. Apart from that, being as close to lake as we could physically get left me pretty worried that if I leant too far back whilst playing I’d end up disappearing into the lake with the drum kit. Luckily nothing disastrous happened and we were left with a final product that we were all really happy with!