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George Michael's Freeek! Video...
Did you miss George Michael's full(ish) Freeek! video shown last night at 11:15 on Channel Four? C4 censored a bit of it. Well here's the first 20 seconds for you lucky people.

You can also listen to a bit more of Freeek! here or watch the first 20 seconds of the video in different formats and streams
Windows Media Player
freeek_trailer_w_34.wmv freeek_trailer_w_100.wmv
Real Player
freeek_trailer_r_34.rm freeek_trailer_w_100.wmv

Previously I had only seen the shortened version without the opening "Blade Runner" sequence. Well my first reaction was: WOW! My second reaction was: What a load of self-indulgent twaddle! Sure it looks good but if you gave me $1m and I threw it at the screen I could make it look good too. Apart from Blade Runner there are elements of hundreds of recent sci-fi films, robots, Tron, Madonna, Leigh Bowery and Japanese Anime peppered throughout the video. Reminiscent of a Puff Daddy video everything is over the top. The high tech video effects are dazzling but ultimately unfulfilling. If there's a story to be told or point to be made (about cyber-sex? porn? alienation?) it was lost in the flashiness of it all.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge, huge George Michael fan. But he just looks so silly clad in various rubber suits (red, brown and black) and cod-pieces and stomping about the set. Sometimes with four scantily clad girls on a leash, sometimes by himself. Mostly he's dressed up like a dog's dinner. At one point he's dressed as an alien wearing a huge all-in-one red rubber suit with massive impacted red rubber boots and he lumbers about like the creature at the end of Altered States. In a strange way it reminded me of Elton John in his Pinball Wizard boots.

Are we perhaps seeing George Michael enter his Glam Rock phase as EJ did?