Daddy - Love In The Old Days (Ted James 1999 Remix)

James Franco and Tim O’Keefe present:

Daddy “Love in the Old Days (Ted James 1999 Remix)” Video

Clip Features Artist Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler (Technicolor Skull)

Premieres on Interview Today

Actor-director-writer-artist James Franco and musician-artist Tim O’Keefe have released a new video for their musical collaboration, called Daddy. The clip for “Love in the Old Days (Ted James 1999 Remix)” premiered on Interview today.

Franco directed the black magic-themed video, which features artists Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler (Technicolor Skull). Franco is a longtime fan of Anger and has collaborated with him on performance pieces in the past. In the clip, Anger officiates an occult wedding ceremony at a strip club while playing a theremin. Butler also appears in the video and was the creative director for the shoot.

“Kenneth Anger has been an influence on me since I was first exposed to ‘Kustom Kar Kommandoes’ and ‘Scorpio Rising,’ but especially ‘Scorpio Rising,’” explains Franco. “When I went to NYU for film, I was always looking for ways to Anger up my films. My first one in particular, ‘The Feast of Stephen’ owes a lot to Anger, the way his camera transformed a gang of real 1960 bikers into homoerotic gods. In other films and projects I loved the way he took celebrity and the occult and fused them in [Sergei] Eisensteinian juxtapositions to achieve a greater, spiritual/aesthetic significance.”

“I was asked to do project about a marriage,” Franco continues, describing the footage used in the video. “I wanted to do two marriages and call it ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell after Blake.’ I could think of no one better to preside over the marriage of Hell than Anger. He is a force. A fusion of art, pop-culture, magik and sex. He is the voyeur-king.”

O’Keefe edited the video along with Irene Su. Though O’Keefe has edited several other projects for Franco, this marks his first direct involvement in the video content for Daddy. 

“James is constantly filming and building an archive of raw visual material,” said O’Keefe. “This collection of clips provides Daddy with a plethora of footage to use in the creation of our videos. It allows us to develop interesting narratives around our songs, and offers us the opportunity to further investigate the relationship between sound and image.”

For his remix, producer Ted James honed in on the vocals in the original version. He captured a few syllables of Franco’s voice at an 8-bit resolution and slowed down the playback, transforming Franco’s clean vocals into the main bass line for the track. 

“It was the key element in my finding the tempo and format for the remix,” James said. Plus, it was fucking creepy. It seemed to juxtapose the original version in a way that makes its sincere sentiment seem a little less innocent.”

“Love in the Old Days (Ted James 1999 Remix)” appears on Daddy’s PVD Remixes EP, which came out earlier this year and is available as a free download via Daddy’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/wearedaddy. The original version of “Love in the Old Days” is on the duo’s debut recording, MotorCity, which came out last fall.

Like many bands before them, Franco and O’Keefe met as students in art school. They both graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in May 2012. While in school, they collaborated on many projects, including Franco’s 2011 “Endless Idaho” installation at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, before forming Daddy in late 2011. They are currently working on their full-length debut.