The bewitching video for Saint Leonard’s Horses single ‘Little Girl Scientist’ features Sophie Kennedy Clark (Nymphomaniac, The Danish Girl) as a tortured soul who uses witchcraft to conjure up her lover. It is book-ended with a voiceover by acclaimed author and journalist Jonathan Meades, who presents the video with the line: “She knew he would listen. She wanted to be in control. He wondered how could she be so cold?” It is directed by Markus Schroder and is out now.
On making the video, Sophie says, “The collaboration betwix myself, Leonard and Markus was a collision of minds, artistry and music. There was an immediate synergy between us all that made it an interesting and irresistible creative endeavour. We worked through the wee small whiskey fuelled hours of the night to fashion visuals that would do justice to Leonard’s little girl scientist and with a little hard graft and magic it’s our gift to you.”
According to Leonard, ‘Little Girl Scientist’ is an autobiographical tale about, “the end of a remarkably tempestuous relationship with one of the most remarkable people I had ever met.” The setting was Father John Misty’s wedding in Big Sur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47fNCUrbWlg
Leonard explains, “We were invited separately and I had delicately ghosted her all evening. As an inverse wedding gift we were all invited to select a book to take away from the Henry Miller Library. As I knelt down in the V section and reached for Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’, I glanced to my left and saw her stilettos and curated calves. The showdown commenced.
“Some rows and tequilas later we were smiling and wincing as we returned to the hotel. I handed her a deck of Marseille tarot cards as a gibbous moon gilded the bay, she extended her quixotic alabaster wrist and said, ‘Baby the ordinary man looking at a mountain is like an illiterate person confronted with a Greek manuscript. Get over yourself.’ – So I did.”
The single is taken from the album ‘Good Luck Everybody’, which was mostly recorded at Stanley Kubrick’s Estate in England. The only track that was not is this single; which was recorded at Melrose Studios in Hollywood.
The recording of the album became somewhat of a transatlantic Odyssey, starting out in a gothic church on the moors of Yorkshire, then to the Hollywood Hills with a detour through the Mojave Desert, a log cabin in Nashville, not to mention a mind twisting stint in a NYC hotel. It ended with the recording at Childwickbury Manor in St Albans, the former home of legendary film director Stanley Kubrick. The album was engineered by Kubrick’s grandson in a studio adjacent to the great man’s study, recording in the house where parts of famed movies like The Shining, Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut were filmed.
In the past few years Leonard has toured the UK and USA supporting and playing shows with Ryan Adams, Father John Misty, Bob Dylan, The Strokes, Beck, The Libertines, Billy Bragg and Wolfmother. The live band then further honed their skills through extensive touring and festival appearances including Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, The Great Escape, Port Elliot festival, SXSW and British Summer Time in Hyde Park.
‘Good Luck Everybody’ is an ungodly collision of big country sound and misty isle musings – as thrilling a listen as is the story of its conception.
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