BIC FLASHBACK #8- 'The Long Goodbye' (Au Revoir) ft. Wayne Hussey

‘The Long Goodbye’ is still one of my favorite songs on ‘finding beauty in chaos’. To me, Wayne’s voice and lyrics meld beautifully with the 12-string guitars. It is also one of the songs that the guitars (emulating mellotrons and strings) fool most as they are NOT synths! Evi Vine’s haunting voice adds to the tracks desperation. Ashton Nyte’s baritone can be clearly heard on the chorus ‘answer’ lines. Tish and Michael Rozon add the rhythm section. Love that this song brings together some of my favorite people in this world!

Upon completing the lyrics Wayne states ‘This is one of those songs where, really, I just strung a bunch of words together that, to my mind, sounded good. Whether it means anything I really don’t know. Sometimes I write in this way and it can take the meaning of a song a year or two to reveal itself to me. If ever. Superficially this song is about the loss of innocence. But I feel there’s something deeper there with this one, I just don’t know what it is yet.”

I always loved the way the Mission did stripped down versions off some of their songs (‘Love Me To Death’ and ‘Kingdom Come’ come to mind’. I approached Wayne about the idea of doing something similar with ‘the Long goodbye’. He seemed keen on the idea and in a few days sent me back a ‘piano rough’ version. He changed around the chords a bit and did the amazingly passionate vocals you hear on the final ‘Au Revoir’ version. We had my friend Tyler Bates daughter, Lola replay the piano … as she and her Dad where going to be in the famed Capital Studios in Hollywood. There must have been 1000s of songs recorded on this piano! We wanted to keep the song ‘stark’ but with some textural elements. Michael Rozon wrote a simply gorgeous string arrangement and convinced me to do my best ‘Gilmour’ solo bits. I LOVE THIS VERSION!

On to the video! We filmed this the day after ‘20th Century Boy’… staying at Tiger Lab. Vicente and I wanted to keep it stark., with hard black and white contrasts. I had the idea of the ‘transformation’ scenes … so we borrowed some mannequins from Prop Heaven. Tish, along with your youngest daughter Sophia and 33.3’s Tim Perry’s daughters Savanah and Scarlett where to be the ‘orchestra’. We dressed the mannequins in their dresses and veils and did some takes with Wayne behind the piano (which was a prop and did not have any strings in it do he did a wonderful job ‘playing’ it as the ivories had no bounce!). The ladies then did their parts wonderfully. It was great to see Sophia take it so serious, as she has never played violin but had Scarlett show her some techniques to be more realistic! Not sure what inspired me to pull my hair back and wear a veil, but I guess its the polar-opposite from the previous day’s shoot. Wanting some additional footage to intercut we then headed to El Matador Beach in Santa Monica. I guess I had the idea the beach would be empty, but little did I know it was a popular place for wedding photo shoots .. which there where several going on! As we walked down the 100 steps to get to the beach (me carrying the mini piano and Wayne with my guitar), we got asked repeated if we where going to ‘do a concert’ :). Though we didn’t get the sunset shot Vicente and I had hoped., we did get some shots of Wayne walking on the beach (and watching him attempt not to get soaked!) and the ending shot of the piano with the tide coming in. Leslie Gladney did a great job doing the ‘transitions sequences’ in the editing … making this one of my personal favorite BIC videos.

See the video and some behind-the-scene photos below!