Long, Long, Long

‘Long, Long, Long’ come from the Beatles’ White Album, which I first heard when I was about twelve or thirteen, which would have been about twelve or thirteen years after it was first released in November 1968. One week older than me.

I’m still listening to it, and I’m still stumbling across hidden rooms and forgotten corners. The latest Giles Martin mix is superb. It runs its torches through the hypnotic fog, exposing more and more slivers of dark magic.

The track was lost on the tour bus, buried as it was beneath engine noise and cassette hiss. I can think of at least three people who have listened to the album for years who swear they’ve never heard this song before.

John doesn’t really deserve to be in this (unofficial!) film. He didn’t show up for any of George’s songs on the White Album, songs that were light years ahead of anything he’d done up until then.

But it’s not the Beatles without him so meetings were had, deals were brokered and decisions were made. The kid stays in the picture.

I looked through images of the band from 1968, particularly the sessions themselves and tried to create some kind of ‘performance’. George says the song is about God but he didn’t want to use such explicit terms so the meaning is ambiguous. The coloured lights and shapes I created represent the idea of God.

Some of the animation is a little bit patchy. I do most of it in Photoshop which is not the right way to go about things but it’s the software that I know best. I am trying to learn others because doing it this way is rather limiting.

Check out more of my videos (for my own music and for others’) here.