CRY, MOLKO, CRY

Video director Chris Cunningham made Richard James a woman, made Brian Molko cry and left Stanley Kubrick to make Autechre videos.

Aphex Twin‘s controversial new [url=]‘Windowlicker’ video is now available uncut as a CD-Rom through Warp Records.

The ‘130,000 video has never been shown in full on TV due to its bad language and sexual content.

The uncut version is more than ten minutes long and is available on CD2 of the ‘Windowlicker’ single.

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It was directed by video enfant terrible Chris Cunningham, a man who has breathed new life into the ailing promo video form. Cunningham, who has worked in film (he made the Mean Machine robot in the otherwise ill fated Judge Dredd) advertising as well as doing videos for other Warp artists such as [url=]Squarepusher about to start work on a video for Bjork, is much in demand for a man whose films do not exactly flatter the artists that he works for.

In the video for ‘Windowlicker’, Richard D James plays a high-roller pursued by a gaggle of nubile young ladies, also played by James. It is grotesque!

“It’s nothing to do with Richard,” admits Chris, “it’s totally me. Richard‘s involvement consisted of sitting on the beach opposite the filming and playing chess. But then he’s devised the best corporate logo in the world: his face. He doesn’t have to work, he can just hand out masks. People thought ‘Come To Daddy’ (his award-winning and terrifying video for the previous Aphex Twin single) was scary, well, this is sexually offensive at the same level. Sorry. I spent too long as a teenager locked away with Razzle.”

Here are some more reasons why Chris is one of the coolest video makers in the world.

Madonna told him he’d ruined her career.

“The most surreal point in my life was when I sent out an edit of the video for ‘Frozen’ unfinished with a two-minute black hole in it and she thought it was never going to get finished! She called me up in tears at five in the morning and said I’d wrecked her career. I remember thinking, ‘it doesn’t get any better/worse than this.’ If I never do anything else in my life, at least I’m responsible for wrecking Madonna‘s career!”

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He’s made Brian Molko cry

“I had him up to his neck in a pond (in the ’36 Degrees’ vid). I love that bit when you’ve been working for hours and artists are at their most tired. You get really good stuff then. Like, Brian Molko was so cold, I think his nuts were the size of raisins! It’s great, I’ve got him on tape sobbing for future blackmail purposes.”

He almost drowned Portishead’s Beth Gibbon

“It was during the [url=]‘Only You’ video. She was in this tank full of water and she couldn’t breathe! I thought, ‘uh-oh, I’m done for here!’ But then, it’s only one musician, isn’t it!? Not really, Beth was very sweet about me nearly killing her.”

He’s worked with the Stanley Kubrick

“I was into engineering and industrial robotics when I was a teenager, and so I ended up working with him on AI (abandoned Kubrick science fiction film), the film he never made. I was basically designing robots on my own and he’d pop in and we’d work together and then he’d go again. He was a really lovely, really normal bloke. He was totally relaxed and he had a brilliant sense of humour. The press got totally the wrong idea, but if you don’t do interviews people have to blow what already exists out of proportion.

“The weird thing was, I realised I was working with Stanley Kubrick and not enjoying it. What I was into was music, and at the time it was really electronic music so I did a video for

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