Brighton singer-songwriter Fable today unleashes the powerful video for her latest single ‘Orbiting’, out today via Naim Records. The hauntingly stark, yet hopeful new track has seen support from the likes of Chris Hawkins and Radcliffe & Maconie at BBC 6 Music, Radio X’s John Kennedy and Amazing Radio, amongst others.
The video, directed and animated by Matt Hutchings, is a social commentary that touches upon many of the issues that have come to the fore during lockdown: mental health, civil unrest, domestic abuse and rising poverty. It follows Fable’s avatar through a succession of rooms to the streets of a dystopian city, each new setting revealing more about the society we live in.
Speaking on the video Fable explains: “I wanted the video to capture a sense of the past year of lock down, with the audience strapped to the camera rails being led through a series of rooms and corridors, transitioning to the next space through a screen and given a feeling of captivity and apathy, but with a connection. Each room is a social/political commentary on some of the inadvertent suffering the lockdown has caused, such as domestic violence and the isolation of the elderly. I also wanted to comment on the world being viewed through the lens of social media, and the echo chamber of algorithmic opinion, by having the side characters in helmets with screen visors. Matt and I worked together closely on the look and feel of the animated world; we wanted to subvert the preconceptions of a 3D animation and clash it with dystopian themes that you wouldn’t expect to be explored in that medium.
Director Matt Hutchings adds:“Holly was very clear with her vision for the video, wanting to drift past different apartments and characters filled with metaphors exploring themes of disconnection & apathy. We decided to adopt an animated CG art style for the video, introducing a high contrast, neon-lit aesthetic to help sell the gritty theme of the song. A challenge we had to overcome was animating the faces of all of the side characters, so the solution was to place helmets on all of them, removing their identity, and thus bolstering that sense of alienation whilst overcoming a technical hurdle. I felt it would be a nice idea to bookend the video by having the Fable character end up detained back in the ‘asylum’ from the start of the video, almost promoting the idea that this is an endless cycle – ‘orbiting’, so to speak.”
Having built up a reputation as one of the UK’s most promising new artists, being lauded by the likes of The Guardian, Mixmag, Q and Rolling Stone, collaborating with Orbital and playing at Glastonbury, the tragic loss of a close friend and resultant burnout and depression led to Fable taking time out from her music career in 2016 to protect her mental health. Four years later, and now an ambassador for mental health charity My Black Dog, Fable is relaunching her sound to the world, with previous single ‘Thirsty’ unveiled in October. Newly-signed to Naim Records, the label wing of the award-winning premium audio brand, she has recorded a debut album of genre-fluid, searingly honest and darkly beautiful music that spans from urgent post punk to introspective electronica, whilst posing questions that are both timely and personal, yet timeless.
