Daphne Lee Martin breaks the video mold with “Belly”

It’s probably easy for a director to come up with a video for a song like Daphne Lee Martin’s “Belly.” Put the band in, I don’t know, some period clothing? Have them walk slow motion through, what, a saloon? Maybe cut in some shots of them in a field of wildflowers, Daphne picking one and slow-motion throwing it to the wind? (I’ll keep my day job.)

Director Jimi Patterson clearly doesn’t work like that. For “Belly,” he takes a simplistic approach: Shots of a lone woman dancing, obscured in the negative, laid over a morphing symphony of color. Martin’s beautifully haunting song echoes over the scene, giving us this sense of isolation, on one hand, but also this unbridled freedom. It’s sad, it’s serene, but it’s liberating.

The video isn’t high-budget or high-concept, but for an artist like Martin (who, I have previously pointed out, doesn’t like to play by the rules), it’s perfect. In her words, “I am drunk in an instant.”

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“Belly” is off Daphne Lee Martin’s latest album, Moxie, on Telegraph records.

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