The Taxloss video came out of the band's reaction to the label choosing that as a single instead of Disgusting. They didn't want to appear in the video and just wanted to throw the budget away.
I'd always heard that they were on tour in Japan at the time and had little to do with the video, hence it starring the production crew. Fun Fact #2: Roman Coppolla introduced the crew to his 'Uncle George' - i.e. George Lucas. My sister's friend said he'd have been much less awestruck had it happened a few months later, after the Star Wars Special Editions.
I wonder if any of the fivers with the Taxloss sticker on are still extant. They may not be legal tender any more, but I imagine they'd be worth a few bob to collectors.
I wouldn't say the rest of their videos were cack - Closed for Business, Legacy, Negative and Being A Girl were all pretty decent. The 'vampire' version of Wide Open Space (not the US version, which was just them performing) was alright too. The video for Six was a bit plain, apart from the homage to Bowie's Heroes video (Draper is, unsurprisingly, a massive Bowie fan) for the 'Life Is A Compromise' section.
I suppose that was a hasty summation. The Six one was at the front of my mind when I said that. I didn't pick up on the Bowie homage at the time, so it was just the epitome of boring band performance videos.
Stripper Vicar is pretty much the same thing, but at a church. The Grange Hill vampire one feels like film student trying to emulate the style of a Jonathan Glazer vid. I realise now that I've never even seen the
Closed for Business one, even though I had heard a (probably apocryphal) story about one of their video shoots inspiring alien invasion panic.
The [legacy] video (Mike Mills ripping off Adam & Joe's Toy Stories, which he did previously for Les Rythmes Digitales's Sometimes) is very 'meta', and accurately predicts the rise and fall of the band themselves. I think even at that point the single was released (it was the lead single released a month ahead of the album), after the reaction from the label when they were presented with Six the band probably had a bit of a fatalistic view of where they were headed.
The song itself seems to hint at that as well, with lyrics like "I wouldn't care if I was washed up tomorrow" and "Nobody cares when you're gone". I don't know if I'm just inferring stuff, or if there was some behind the scenes hoo hah while it was being written. Despite singing "The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much", Draper is clearly not shy about airing stuff via his songs. The opening track on
Little Kix seems to reference the label interference, "Make it rhyme, make it bland, make it sell."
