Paolo Nutini – Iron Sky: video premiere

Scottish crooner’s rousing soul track, which samples Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator, is backed by a foreboding video depicting a dystopian future


Behind that floppy fringe, Paolo Nutini is trying to tell us something. But what’s he on about?

His new single, Iron Sky, is taken from his platinum selling album Caustic Love, and includes an extract lifted from Charlie Chaplin’s groundbreaking speech from The Great Dictator, the savage, 1940 anti-war satire.

Accompanying the rousing soul-symphony backing is an eight-minute cinematic epic by Daniel Wolfe, the director behind videos from Plan B and The Shoes’ Time To Dance, (which features actor Jake Gyllenhaall as a disturbed serial killer).

Wolfe explains his work, which depicts a dystopian future. “I was sent the track with no explanation from Paolo. As a child I stared at the planet Jupiter and had a vivid hallucinatory experience. A feeling of abject terror. In bondage to an omnipotent machine. When I heard the Chaplin quote I remembered this clearly. So the video became a dystopian vision of the future as imagined by a child in the 80s.”

Take a look at the video below – which comes with a parental advisory warning – and shows a poverty-stricken community who are inflicted with a brain-splitting pain sent by a higher force. What does it all mean? Let us know in the comments below.

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