Keane - Bedshaped Video Analysis

I absolutely love Keane, if you read through my blog posts you will find out that the majority of the music I listen to is pretty similar, I like bands like OneRepublic, The Fray, Keane, Travis etc. 

(I like other music genres too so if theses bands aren't your cup of tea don't fret, I might end up analysing something you really like at some point.)

The video for Bedshaped is pretty sad and the song  is emotional too.
The single was released in 2004,the video was directed by Corin Hardy.






Tim Rice-Oxley explained the meaning of the song on their message board at: http://bb01.sov.uk.vvhp.net/keane/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=35 and on their Musical Documentary DVD Strangers.

• "bedshaped is about feeling that you've been 'left behind' by an old friend or lover. and about hoping that you'll be reunited one day so that you can live out the end of your lives together the way you started them. i guess there's some anger at a friend who wants to move on in search of new, exciting, more sophisticated things, leaving behind the simple things you used to share....and a hope that they'll eventually want to get away from the bright lights and come back home. it's a sad and angry song, but also full of hope. i hope that makes sense.
• I think i'm right in saying that in hospital when someone is ill or infirm and has to spend a lot of time in bed they can become 'bedshaped'. it sounds a bit depressing...well i guess it is a bit depressing in reality, but in the context of the song i wanted to suggest old age and frailty, along the lines that i mentioned before about two old friends coming back together in the twilight of their lives. it's great that you guys like bedshaped...it's a song that means a lot to us." - Tim - messageboard - Source
• "I remember the words for Bedshaped; lying in bed one night and they just suddenly all emerged and I wrote them all down, and then it was finished which was really good - I like it when that happens! The word 'bedshaped' - I don't know if it's a made up word, but my mum's always talking about people being bedshaped, just from spending too much time being bed-ridden basically. It's quite a sad image of someone stuck there, stuck in a bed, until they become completely useless and start to lose their humanity. But just that idea of crumbling and being really frail and decrepid is something that eventually happens to everyone. That, I guess was the basis for the song in a way. So whatever happens when you're younger, even if you go off in search of glamour and ambitious and exciting things; once you get to your really old age, you've got all that side of life that just disappears.- Tim - Strangers DVD

The video is made using stop motion animation and starts off with the silhouette of a black cat walking along the fence of a grave yard at night.

The graveyard looks very neglected, there are some rubbish bins and some of the rubbish littering the floor, the fence is made out of iron. The fence is warped and bent out of shape.

The condition of the fence would imply that the graveyard is both old and unloved, if it was visited regularly it would be in better condition. This relates back to what Tim had said about the song's meaning, regardless of what you did and how successful you were when you were young, age will catch up with you in the end and eventually as you die, everyone else who loved you also die then there is nobody left to remember you.

The graveyard is probably in this state because so much time has passed since these people have died there is no longer anyone to tend their graves.

The video is set at night and uses dark colours to illustrate the theme and mood of the video, night time is when people are at their most vulnerable because there are less people about and people feel tired late at night.

 The cat jumps off the fence and onto a cardboard box, the box starts to tremble this spooked the cat and the cat runs away.

As the drums and keyboard kick in a naked man holding a bottle emerges from the box, he takes a swig of what I presume to be alcohol. (Sleeping on the streets naked clearly isn't the kind of situation a person would like to be in, it would seems highly likely he was drinking alcohol, he also looks disheveled.)

The man is very underweight and his hair is messy so that would mean he hasn't be looking after him self properly for a long period of time, the heavy bags under his eyes, the colouration of the white's of his eyes and red over sized nose could be symptoms caused or made worse by heavy drinking.

The man wears a necklace which looks like a star.

The band appear through out the video painted in the background, a friend of the director named David Lupton hand drew 500 pictures of the band to be animated into the background.

We are shown an establishing shot of a deserted street at night.

Everything in this video has a slightly twisted dark look it, there is no one around.

The man is very lonely, like Tim explained and how the lyrics describe; the man is probably missing someone or regretting losing contact with someone who meant a lot to him.

The lyrics at this point in the video are:

"Many's the time I ran with you down

The rainy roads of our old town
Many the lives we lived in each day
And buried altogether 
Don't laugh at me
Don't look away"

He feels nostalgic about the past but accepts that those days are gone, the emptiness of the street empathize how lonely he is.

As he walks down the street he looks up into a window where the band can be seen performing watching curiously but as lights on the ground floor of the buildings light up he panics and runs, I think he is envious of the people in the houses but is scared of how they would react to a stranger staring through their window, it seems like he feels depressed about his situation.

As the man approaches a shop window he can see the image of a woman smiling under the text "On Your Own?"

At this point of the video the lyrics read as:

"Don't laugh at me
Don't look away 

You'll follow me back
With the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bedshaped
And legs of stone"

On the line "don't look away" the woman looks away.

The lyrics are pleading the woman not to look away but she looks away regardless, because she is a figment of his imagination it means he is expecting her to look away and reject him so she does so.

The "On Your Own?" text features in the lyrics but it also acts as a way for the woman in the window to communicate, it can be seen as if she is looking out of him and seeing if he's okay or it could look like she is mocking him, because he has lost trust with people having not had anything to do with them for a while and he has confused concern with being ridiculed.

The hallucination and the way he reacts to it shows his mental state.

As he makes his way down the street he leans against the window but he can see scary faces in the windows of the shops which spooks him even more.

He is seeing things that aren't there and because he feels vulnerable everything seems scary, he sees a lit sign for the men's public toilet and crawls toward it, he's possibly drawn to he sign because it produces light which makes him feel safer than being in the dark.

on the lines:

"You'll knock on my door and up we'll go
In white light
I don't think so"

The man can still see the faces in the window behind him this scares him and he falls down the stairs into the public toilets.

The lyrics alone suggest seeing someone when you die and joining them in heaven but they doubt that they will be united and the video suggest that the man thinks it's safer in light when really he still feels just as venerable.

Both lyrics and video suggest that while they hope to find happiness by either finding light in the dark or being reunited in death they still can't guarantee they will will find happiness.

The man makes his way into a toilet cubicle and cries, he writes the lyrics on the wall as the images of the band play on the wall behind him.

 When ever the line "You'll follow me back with the sun in your eyes" from the chorus plays the background will light up, the line is usually played when the band is shown and the background simply turns from cold colours like blue, green and purple to warm colours like yellow, orange and red but when line in played while the man is in the toilet the whole set is lit with yellow lighting (up and till that point the toilet was light with dim blue lighting.)

If you compare similar shots in different lighting there is a completely different mood, things look much less scary and depressing with warmer lighting , the man looks so much more alert and happy even the graffiti is more lighthearted in the warmer shots.

As the man continues to write the lyrics on the wall. The cat from earlier crawls under the door of the mans cubicle with a bag of clothing the the phrase "there for you." written on the bag.

 The cat is showing the man a kind gesture by giving him clothes, because he was naked before he was more vulnerable by wearing clothes he feels safer and less like an outcast.

He leaves he cubicle and goes up the stairs to the street and he looks much more healthier, younger and fresher.

 It's morning now and people are sitting in a cafe eating breakfast and drinking tea when he looks at them their faces transform into the faces of monsters and he runs back into the public toilets.

While his back is turned as he runs away the people in the cafe look normal and are minding their own business this is because he distrusts people even though he feels like a better person and is more presentable (i.e clothed and healthy looking) he still can't face other people, he still feels like they hate him or judge him although in reality they haven't even acknowledged him.

Even with help he couldn't face people and get back into the real world, I suspect the cat was a hallucination as it seems very unlikely that a cat could give you a full outfit.

I suspect that the cat giving him clothes was a metaphor of him getting over a problem, because the cat introduced us to the man it's like the cat is the start of his problems, the cat coming back to give him clothes is kind of like him accepting his problems and getting better.

In the end just sorting himself out wasn't enough to help him feel better about himself or other.

When he goes back to the toilet it's more grey than blue or orange like it had been before, the lighting could demonstrate how before he was seeing the toilets as something scarier or nicer than it really was and now he sees them as how they really are or it shows how he's is no longer scared of happy about anything in particular so the lighting is neutral.

Bricks begin to fall away from the wall to reveal bright white lights, there is a flash of light before showing  a close up of the mans face being focused on, text is scrawling across his face and the lighting is clear and bright.

The focusing of the camera could represent him waking up in heaven having died.

Because the background is white and "cloudy" looking it would indicate that he died and he is now in the afterlife, the lyrics for the song float across in lines above the mans head.

The style of animation for the band is different now.

Before the band looked more like silhouettes only defined by shadows and highlights, they were also more solid and rigid looking but now they look more like out lines, their lines are broken and uneven.

The colour has changed as before they were placed on colorful backgrounds but now they are on and off-white background.

I would say the band look more "real" and rough in black and white, I suppose it's because in the colourful animation there is less detail, the lines are clearer and the images were most likely created with some form of stencil where as the black and white animation is much more detailed and looks like it was painted free hand.

As the band begins to fade away the man smiles and the video ends when the band completely fade out.

I presume the man did die, and if  he did he looked so much happier in death.

The message of the song which was pretty much explained by Tim Rice-Oxley was that when a person is ill and dying ( or just feeling sad in general) they think about people they want to see, people they became estranged to or people who died in the past who the miss and hoping to see them again in death.

The message of the music video is probably more tragic, the message is that when a person comes to the end of their lives or when their lives take a turn for the worse things can get better but some times it maybe better to die because at least you will be at peace and hopefully (if you believe in the afterlife) you will get to see all the people you miss.

I think because nobody actually knows what happens to you when you die and there are so many different theory's that lots of people like to think that when you die you get to go to heaven even though they can't grantee it they still have hope it exists.

I guess the man was happy because this meant he can now go and see the people he was missing.

I really enjoyed analysing the video for bedshaped, if you have a different theory, want to add something or noticed something I missed please let me know in the comments.