Have you ever felt pushed in the dirt when you least expected it? This song is for you!
Contrary to my usual way of working, i played all instruments myself, enjoying the sloppy sound. After all, the song is about somebody being dumped and being forced to be lonely, so i thought it was a great idea if i’d play all instruments myself. And i like this punk feel anyway.

What Are The Odds is a song about a girl trying to flee the dynamics of a distant small village with religious, traditional inhabitants. When she is found dead on the road in an attempt to escape to the city, the song posts the question of who killer her.

Music written by Ruud Kleiss and Martin Draax, lyrics by Martin Draax

‘Two Dreams At The Same Time’ is a lovesong dedicated to my partner Laura A Dima, who by the way did the make up and hair for this video.
The video features the musicians who played the actual music:
Lead Vocals: Rosie Stevens
Backing Vocals: Flora Dolores
Bass: Peter Hordijk
Violin: Eva Sofia
Cello: Oene van Geel
Drums: Danielle Pijpers
Keys: Jan Jaap Snellen

Suits tailored by Carola Jense-Wiede
Mixed by Lars Blakenburg
Mastered by Kramer
I played guitar, wrote the music, directed the clip, designed the clothes and did the rest.

This videoclip voor Joop van der Linden is a combination of generated animation by the music itself and added animations, Stills from the clip were used to make the record cover.

When the Spinshots presented ‘Gone Before He Left’ we threw a ‘spy’ party – with prices for the best dressed spies. We also just finished recording the mini soundtrack i wrote for the leader of the Dutch animation festival ‘Klik’ – and performed it live here. Since i did quite some editing I present this as a videoclip rather than a live presentation. The sound was recorded and mixed by Jan Jaap Snellen, video shot by Jelle Mulder and Nicolai van Nunen.

This is truly vintage! I think I made this (with bass player Roelof as a special effects technician) in ehm, 1996…
Notice the Most Unreadable End Credits Of All Time at the end – only somebody educated as a graphic designer can come up with a thing like that. Phooey ‘Form Follows Function’!

Angels Never Stay is a song about the inevitability of seperation from you loved ones.
I used a high speed camera to do this and Laura A Dima danced a choreography on which we practiced for three days: 23 seconds were to be stretched to 5.23 – so you can imagine how precise she had to do the movements! One second late would mean more than 30 seconds late in the end result!

Because the clip has no credits, I put them here:

Written, arranged and produced by Martin Draax
Flora Dolores: Lead Vocals
Daniëlle Pijpers: Drums
Peter Hordijk: Bass
Martin Draax: backing vocals, guitars, noises, one finger organ
Janfie van Strien: Clarinet, Bariton sax
Gijs Levelt: Trumpet
Jan Jaap Snellen: Keys
Wendy van Wilgenburg: Cello
Regina Yap: Percussion
Mixed by Lars Blakenburg, Mastered by Kramer

Special thanks: Jan Jaap Snellen and Lars Blakenburg

This is the videoclip for ‘Multiple Reality Disorder’.
Laura A Dima and I develop an ongoing photo soap opera on Instagram in which our main character suffers from ‘multiple Reality Disorder’. We follow the avatars that in real life could never meet because they live in different realities. Yet they formed a girlband and this is the video of their first hit.

Please watch until the credits as many talented people helped me with this.

I am proud of the clip and the music: i love the composition and the sound of the production, i love it that you can stop the video at any moment and you’ll have a key image with a lot of expressiveness.

This is a videoclip we made for my band Paxy Dragon in, eh, 1998. With Maggie Boogaard dancing and Paul Lomans coaching the dance. And lots of other people as mentioned in the credits.

This film was shot in two takes on 16 millimeter. Everything in the background is animated frame by frame and Maggie dances on half speed to sort of match the feel of the animation. Later, I blended the two films so that it looks as if the dancer is in that surrounding destroying everything. I’d do such a better job nowadays, hahaha! But it has it’s own ;vintage’ charm I guess. And the music never got out other then on this video. De drums are made in a computer program I had: you could tick boxes on a timeline and then you’d hear a specific drum sound on that place. Rooney of thee Wreckers, who plays bass here, had a hard time playing exactly the guitar line but then one fourth later. But he did a great job – this is al pre -quantise, guys! And I asked Wendy to play violin as if it was played backwards – not a bad job either!

Some 60 people were involved in making this clip in 1996. Check the end credits!

The idea behind it is based on Jung’s notion of ‘Animus and Anima’. I thought it would be great to translate that to a live chess game with a black king and crew symbolising the ‘unconscious’, making all decisions (for all we do comes from unconscious impulses). The white king and crew copy the black king and everything works as nature demands. Then a white and black pawn start kissing and turn into a purple queen. Things get messy from there.

So yeah, this was done on video in 1996 – I’d do a better job now. There was still much to learn, as there will be always.
But I like to be as complete as i can on this site, and de clip does have a certain naive charm.

I am sure it’s not easy to be a friend of mine. You always run the risk that I might ask you to be in one of my videos. Here you see a very old one, called ‘Fake Away Spray’ – stay until the end credits – I think they are the most unreadable ever made!

Well, maybe the end credits of my other Paxy Dragon Clip ‘Dance Of Djapozzit’ comes close. Well that’s what you do when you study Graphic Design at art school.

Désirs Mutuèls was the first clip we made for the Spinshots.

I had they idea finding out that the first recordings we made without microphones. A needle was sunk into turning wax and the band would be playing around it. So if somebody had a feature in the music, they had to com closer to the registering needle. In my head, this transformed to a videoclip in which the Spinshots would live in an elevator and we had to come close to the camera on a tripod if we had a feature.

My friend Rudy had a key to an empty gigantic office building in the middle of the city. We built up our set in the elevator and shot our clip in one night.
Although the colossal building was empty, the elevators were still working, even by themselves. This made filming the clip quite a challenge as we ran the risk the elevator we were acting from would suddenly take leave. During this one-take shot, it actually did not leave when we wanted it to and kept that in, because it provided a funny, very ‘Spinshots-like’ moment.

‘Sell Your Soul’ was sung by Boyd Small. I wrote the song for my animation short ‘Deep Shit’ and performed it with the Spinshots. Boyd did the voice of ‘Lucifero’ in the film and since he is a great blues singer – I asked him to take the lead on this one.

‘Sell Your Soul’ (and shut your trap) is the key tune from Deep Shit, an animated short I did with quite a team. (check the film here)
We performed the song with the Spinshots, with the Van Dijck Sisters at the backings. It turned out to be a great tune so we made a videoclip for it as well – in Jelle Mulder’s studio around the corner of mine.

If you swipe to the right you’ll see the 10 minute animation movie with more music by the Spinshots and friends!

‘Pigeons & people’ is a song in which I tried to capture the dynamics of Amsterdam, the city I have always loved and learned to hate.

It was hard for me to grand my own long cherished wish to write a good song about the city i am obsessed with – and my great example is Ray Davies who wrote all those fantastic songs about London – so what can poor boy do? For a long time, I loved Amsterdam so much, that I did not really have a problem. And ‘a problem’ is needed for a good story. But over the years I became more unhappy with the results of the widely and warmly embraced politics of free market morality; Amsterdam was not about people’s initiatives any longer. The city was so cool that it was recognised as a huge money maker. In stead of a hodgepodge of real and various people with their initiatives, it became a monocultural place to host mass-tourists, consumers, criminals, real estate owners and brand marketeers. We sold our soul.

The videoclip celebrates the last free minds – the last people to keep Amsterdam ‘the Magic Centre’ it once was so obviously. It’s inspired by Billy Wilder ‘s ‘Menschen Am Sonntag’ from 1930.