Five... music videos filmed at the Barbican across six decades
A little Brutalism appreciation post
Hi and welcome to your weekend newsletter…
This edition’s a handful of music videos filmed at the Barbican, spanning 60 years.
And these are just a few drops from the ocean of Barbican music videos: the brutalist concrete’s backdropped a lot of big names over the years. Kylie marches through Beech Street tunnel in 2005’s Giving You Up; Metronomy fish-eye-lens their way through curving stairways and concrete columns in 2014’s Month of Sundays. There was a regrettable Coldplay incident in the early 2000s, and some nice pedway-homaging in 2016’s Out Here by Tanika featuring Stormzy. Tl;dr: it’s contained multitudes.
A few more links for the Barbican obsessives
Aside from its music video cameos, the Barbican’s been on my mind recently,1 thanks to their announcement this week that there are big renovations in the works, with plans to upgrade its foyer, lakeside area and conservatory in a £191 million project starting in 2027, and seeking input before 17th February from anyone who uses the centre
Build Your Own Barbican — or hey, build yourself an entire Brutalist skyline for your windowsill, from Zupagrafika’s brutalist DIY model range
Barbican Centre At 40: Vintage Images Of Brutalist Heaven — a few snapshots from Nicholas Kenyon’s 2022 book Building Utopia: The Barbican Centre, showing the arc of the — often divisive — Barbican’s place in the public consciousness in the years during and after its construction
This article from A London Inheritance explores the surrounding area pre-Blitz
And of course, this excellent article from
, from the Time Machine’s recent past, tours some of the historic artefacts scattered around the estate: Reflections on the Barbican
Unit 4 + 2 — Concrete and Clay
Sure, it’s easy to see how the Barbican-as-it-is — with its swooping concrete and labyrinthine walkways — became beloved by location scouts and directors. But a moment of appreciation for the extremely early adopters that made it their backdrop back when all the interplay of light and shadow and general JG Ballard novel-ness of it were still just a brutalist twinkle in the eyes of its future architects, Chamberlain, Powell and Bon.
When Unit 4 + 2 filmed the video — sort of a proto-music-video, filmed for British Pathé — for Concrete and Clay in 1965, the land was still a building site, being prepared for the Barbican project, and with the memory still fresh of the 20 years it spent post-second world war as a Blitz-destroyed wasteland.