Kula Shaker’s Crispian Mills and co-director Laurie Peters blew minds with the band’s game changing, ground-breaking ‘Good Money’ music video last year. So when the duo directed their creative sights at the expansive mantra-metal of Kula’s new cinematic showstopper ‘Wormslayer’, they aimed to raise the bar once more.
Today, they share the track’s mind boggling short film, further amplifying anticipation for the release of ‘Wormslayer’ the album, this Friday.
The ‘Wormslayer’ short film celebrates fantasy table-top gaming and pop-culture aesthetics within a cinematic universe perfectly attuned to Kula Shaker’s own spiritually adventurous lore. The film stars Mills’s teenage kids and their friends as a gang of table-toppers who get an inter-dimensional shock when their Dungeon Master (played by — who else? — Kula Shaker’s Hammond organist Jay Darlington) sends them inside a game of Wormslayer to ‘Release the Goddess’ and slay the mythical worm.
Crispian Mills says, “Whether it was reading the Mahabharata or enjoying ‘Excalibur’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’, this band has always been about the ‘quest’. When we recorded the 9-minute title track for ‘Wormslayer’ we felt it deserved an epic cinematic quest to do it justice. So I hired my kids, and their mates, who are all in bands, and went berserk with Laurie, creating an epic video featuring live action and role play games, in an homage to Japanese anime-style action.
“Like many, I grew up with Dungeons & Dragons. There’s even a D&D sequence in ‘Slaughterhouse Rulez’ (Mills’ 2018 feature film, starring Asa Butterfield, Michael Sheen and Simon Pegg), so I think it must have scarred my imagination.”
“What we ended up with is ‘Goonies’, ‘Scooby Doo’, ‘Stranger Things’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘He-Man’, and ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, rolled into one — all our fave pop-culture quests. And the conceit that this mythic ‘slaying of the worm’ is actually taking place in some Warhammer shop on a High Street in Devon made us all laugh.”
This video is the latest product of Mills’ boundary-expanding visual creativity after previously directing the feature films ‘A Fantastic Fear of Everything’ (starring Simon Pegg) and ‘Slaughterhouse Rulez’ (also featuring Nick Frost and Margot Robbie). He has used those skills for all of the campaign’s videos: ‘Good Money’, ‘Broke As Folk’, ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and ‘Lucky Number’.
The technicolour energy and psychedelic retro-freakery of these songs will be joined by a host of essential new material when the ‘Wormslayer’ album breaks out of its lair on Friday. The album shows a band who are continuing to evolve into the 21st Century, while maintaining their unique identity, which set them apart in the heady days of Britpop.
Kula Shaker recently celebrated the release of the album by completing the ‘Wormslayer’ Busking Sessions, an acoustic and signing record store tour. Their UK and European headline tour starts this Saturday, and each performance will be illuminated by the mind-bending vision of The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show. Remaining tickets for the tour are available HERE. The band’s summer festival quest is also taking shape, with a headline set at Kernowfornia and dates at Belladrum and Guilfest already confirmed.
FEBRUARY – HEADLINE TOUR
7th – Brighton, Concorde 2 (SOLD OUT)
8th – Cambridge, Junction (SOLD OUT)
9th – Holmfirth, Picturedrome (SOLD OUT)
11th – Glasgow, Old Fruitmarket
12th – Manchester, O2 Ritz
13th – London, Islington Assembly Hall (SOLD OUT)
22nd – Nijmegen, Doornroosje
23rd – Den Haag, Paard van Troje (LOW TICKETS)
25th – Cologne, Bürgerhaus Stollwerck
26th – Paris, Cafe Dé La Danse (LOW TICKETS)
28th – Hamburg, Gruenspan
MARCH – HEADLINE TOUR
2nd – Berlin, Heimathafen Neukölln
3rd – Munich, Technikum
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