For 36 Degrees, Chris sent Placebo into a bog. Singer Brian Molko flips between keeping his chin above the water line, and descending to the bottom, where the band can rock out awkwardly.
Given Chris' work, one gets the feeling the parts he enjoys most here are those that don't involve performance footage. The stills in his Directors Label book are mostly of the scene intercut through the video of a man crawling through the mud. While the underwater scenes have some footage of lights coming from above, lightly evoking flex, this scene with the man is a bit of a sculptural examination of the human form, especially as it relates to the rushing water.
You can see the video here at iFilm, here at the Raft, or be nice and buy it on the Placebo DVD 'Once More With Feeling - Singles 1996 to 2004.'
In the DVD's commentary, Brian Molko relates some of the circumstances of the shoot:
"It was done in two days. One of the days entailed us spending about ten hours underwater in this scuba pool. It's a man-made ... lake/pond sort of thing, which they had to do bacterial tests on on the day to make sure that we weren't going to catch any weird diseases."
"They'd feed us air in between takes. It was very hard to communicate with Chris."
"It wasn't 36 degrees that day, it was completely freezing. After this video we swore that we would never make another video underwater. We actually did a couple years later."
