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Lone Pairs Social Realism with Rave's Rebellious Legacy on Latest Video

"Backtail Was Heavy" is off the producer's forthcoming seventh LP.

UK producer Matt Cutler, aka Lone, who splits his time between Nottingham and London, just shared a crime drama-themed video for his recent single "Backtail Was Heavy." If you'll remember, the galloping, triumphantly boisterous rave track was first brought into the world via a mysterious phone line, recalling the golden days of yore when ravers could only find out where events would be by calling numbers on flyers.

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Instead of ditching the historical impulse and taking the video in a random direction, director Hugo Jenkins builds on it by evoking a bygone, circa-midcentury era of British culture, shooting it in the borough of Newham in East London.

"Filming in Silvertown in Newham was integral to the dreamlike feel of the piece," explained Jenkins to Dazed. "There's loads of graphic-looking architecture that doesn't look at all like London. You have these old pubs that haven't changed since the 60s. It all feels really ambiguous, like we could easily be somewhere else in the country. In my mind this landscape works with the nostalgic rave stabs and breaks of the track, too. The place itself feels in-between two eras."

As far as the dramatic content of the video goes, it depicts a working class teenager rejecting school and conventional employment to pursue crime, spending his time in pubs and strip clubs. There's an interesting thread of rebellion, then, drawing together his story with the illicit rave culture tropes employed in the track's promotion—it seems like Cutler is trying to tell us something?

R&S will release Lone's seventh album, Levitate, on May 27.

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