Klaxons - Golden Skans

This song is called 'Golden Skans' by the band 'Klaxons' and it was released on 22 January 2007. The music video is directed by Saam Faramand and is heavily influenced by "Can You Feel It" by The Jacksons. It features a message at the beginning very similar to the words spoken by the narrator in the "Can You Feel It" video. It also features other elements from the Jacksons' video including an inventive and contemporary use of light and dark with all three band members wearing different coloured ribbons, and moving dramatically to the music. 

The music belongs to the Indie genre, a similar genre to our song choice, and the colour scheme and abstract happenings in the video reflect this music type. The video is in a dark setting and the singers seem to be getting wrapped in brightly coloured ribbons, not something we see in your typical music video. 

The lyrics don't seem to correspond with the visuals in this video because the meaning to the lyrics is unclear. The only thing you could say matches the lyrics is that they seem to be throwing gold around in one stage of the video perhaps linking to the song title and chorus words 'golden skans'.


Although the lyrics don't correspond with the video a great deal, there are similarities between the music and the video. The pace of the song is reflected by the pace of the cutting in the video. During the slow verses the cuts are very slow and less exciting but when the chorus drops the visuals become more dramatic and the tempo increases. Also throughout the song we can hear sounds of explosions and these are shown in the video, they are perfectly placed at the beginning of choruses and at drops in the beat for emphasis.


This was the Klaxons first song and so they had to make a big impression. That they did. They illustrated themselves in a very dramatic and extravagant way connecting to their Indie target audience. There are plenty of close up shots of the band so they audience know who they are listening to. The record company are going to want to sell this track by it being recognised by its weird and different video. When people hear the song played on the radio the image of the singers getting wrapped in ribbons will come to their minds. This video represents their image as a band because it is their first step into the music scene.

The video can be perceived as a bit sexual because the artists aren't wearing any clothes however I think that they are just trying to look natural. Plus as I mentioned above the video is quite abstract and so the naked effect adds to it. The artists are very animated in the video, they are smashing and throwing things. The actions are emphasised with the use of over-cranking, this slows them down so we can see the impact of what they are doing.

There are no clear intertextual references other than the obvious 'Can You Feel It' by the Jacksons.At the opening of the video we see a message across the scene, and this is also featured in the 'Can You Feel It' video. Other elements from the Jacksons' video include an inventive and contemporary use of light and dark with all three band members wearing different coloured ribbons, and moving dramatically to the music.

This music video definitely isn't performance-based, it is narrative-based with maybe a hint of concept. The artists aren't singing on stage but are singing along in their video, at the same time their video doesn't have a story to it either. Again making it quite abstract. I'm beginning to think the video is concept-based because it seems to revolve around ideas rather than have any sort of storyline to it.

Copyright Permission Letter

In this day and age you can't just use people's work for your own use without any permission. Therefore we decided to compose a short email to the record label company of our band 'Fenech Soler' to ask via their website. The record label companies are usually fine with this efficient use of copyright so we are expecting a response of acceptance or just no response at all showing they do not object. The record label name is 'Moda Music'.

Target Audience

In order to try and distinguish our target audience we used the UK Tribes website. The UK Tribes website categorises different types of people into different social groups like 'chavs', 'emos', 'geeks' etc. It is important to try and identify a group of people who we are going to target because this is who our music video is going to be most popular with. After reading through different categories of people we decided that the target audience which best matches our type of music is 'ravers'. 

These tend to be young people who love clubbing, this set of people used to be a large community but has seemed to have dwindled (but not as much as the media illustrate). This tribe no longer consider themselves as outsiders because of their musical tastes or addiction to clubbing but actually look at other tribes as the 'weird ones'. They like the biggest and best clubs such as Fabric (London), Club So (Liverpool), Mission (Leeds) and Pacha. Music festivals like Wireless and the V festival also appeal to them in the summer time. These people like to party and suggest that people should live their life to the fullest because you can sleep when your dead!

Click to enlarge

As you can see above I have drawn up a character of what I believe a member of our target audience may dress like. As you can see each item of clothing he's associated with in the picture is quite bold because these nd of people kike to stand out. Even the haircut is quite bold as it is completely shaved around the back and sides but fairly lengthy on top. Also a lot of the clothing is tight fitting which I think reflects their 'all eyes on me' personalities. Footwear is also never forgotten with these types of people, they've got to be fresh out the box because with the extravagant footwear they tend to wear they can't be missed by the public.



Likings and Interests

The brands above have helped us to get a clearer picture of what our target audience may look like and also what sort of people they are. I looked at the River Island, Topman and All Saints websites to gain an understanding as to how they may dress. 'Ravers' don't like to dress too smart, they prefer a more casual approach wearing t-shirts and jeans. Spending most of their time clubbing they don't have much time to dress up but nevertheless they still take great care in their appearance.   

Choice Made

After brainstorming ideas from each song we ended up with two spider diagrams to compare. This helped us to come to our final choice which is 'Demons - Fenech Soler'.

Looking at both sets of ideas we decided that this was the best option because the ideas which sprung to mind were more unique opposed to our 'I Found You' ideas. With 'I Found You' a typical boy meets girl story came to mind but this is so common and so we wanted to do something different, like we always wanted to. Also we wouldn't have been able to film a club scene very well because it would be so hard to control.

'Demons' falls into the genre of Indie-pop and so now to fill in the gaps of our plan and research we need to do some research on our target audience.