A few weeks ago, cosmic-punks Waco released a new video for ‘A New Future’ which helps visualise its galaxy-hopping narrative using puppets. We caught up with vocalist Jak Hutchcraft to find out how they brought that tale to life and what they want people to take away from the track.
Did you always have this video in mind for the song when it was being written?
It was a very unusual process. Our drummer Welshy wanted to write a sci-fi storyline where there was a person on the Earth who wanted to go to another planet to find the answer to social ills. Immediately after the album came out, Welshy and his girlfriend made all these props, which was a very long process. I think he always had the idea of making this like a short film, but when we wrote it it wasn’t in our mind. We are always trying to do something new and using puppets was something we’d never done before.
Where did you get those puppets from, did you make them yourselves or commission them?
We just bought some that looked like us and customised them ourselves. The marionette puppets and vintage-looking ones Welshie got them from Puppet Planet in London. We had to buy patches and stuff for babies and just get creative with them using pens for beards, making little peace symbols; we just cobbled it all together. The props and Sarah Sheridan’s art direction really made it though and without them it wouldn’t have been anything.
What was the one thing you wanted people to take away from the song?
The takeaway we want people to have is that the Earth has been given to us. The lyrics at the end say that: ‘The world’s not ours you know, but for now, it is our home’. I don’t think the world actually belongs to us, we belong to it. It was here a long time before us and it’ll be here a long time afterwards. And also power to women and non-binary people, to hear them and support them in whatever way we can. It’s a charity single for ‘Beyond Equality’ tackling gender-based violence and misogyny but working with men to address the issues. It kinda links in with the message of the song as it’s all about living more harmoniously with the world.