British Electropop band, Ladytron, took to Twitter earlier today to share an unreleased video for the single “Light & Magic” from their 2002 album of the same name, Light & Magic, exclusively premiering the video with Under the Radar Magazine.
Premiere: Ladytron share unreleased video for “Light & Magic”.
https://t.co/eoz4lnO7eQ@Under_Radar_Mag pic.twitter.com/DVxObgaREo
— Ladytron (@LadytronMusic) August 22, 2022
The video lay incomplete for twenty years and is spliced together from close-up stills of the band shot on slide film. The band told Under the Radar the story behind the forgotten video, “When we released Light & Magic it was expected that the title track would be a later single, and would therefore need a video clip of its own. But we were on the road and didn’t know how it would be done. We had all this beautiful slide film shot and envisaged animating it in some way, like a 1970s science fiction title sequence – Sapphire and Steel or something like that. We disappeared on the road, plans changed, and ideas were forgotten. Twenty years later here it is.” You can watch the video below.
September 17th this year marks the 20th anniversary of their landmark 2002 album, Light & Magic, and in celebration of the occasion, the Liverpool band delved into their archives. Along with the unreleased video, the band will release a short film about the recording of the album in Los Angeles and more unheard and unseen material, according to the magazine.
Ladytron were formed in Liverpool in 1999 by Daniel Hunt and Reuben Wu from Merseyside, Mira Aroyo from Sofia, Bulgaria, and Helen Marnie from Glasgow. The band named themselves after the Roxy Music song, “Ladytron”. Roxy Music co-founder Brian Eno spoke glowingly of the band in 2009, “Ladytron are, for me, the best of English pop music. They’re the kind of band that really only appears in England, with this funny mixture of eccentric art-school dicking around and dressing up, with a full awareness of what’s happening everywhere musically, which is kind of knitted together and woven into something quite new.”
In 2001 the band released their debut album 604 to universal acclaim, Pitchfork saying in their review of the album at the time, “They’re like an unabridged Encyclopedia of musical Eurotrash with a sharp pop sensibility. And with 604, they’ve made a fine debut full-length”; the review continued, “The tracks on 604 are sequenced intelligently and keep this slightly overlong album purring along nicely. Latter-day new wave may be old hat, but there’s still room for it when it’s done right.”
In 2019, following a four-year hiatus, the band released their self-titled sixth studio album, Ladytron. The Guardian newspaper gave the album four stars out of five and said, “if any band was going to bounce back from years of acrimonious hiatus with a soundtrack to our troubled times, Ladytron seemed unlikely contenders. Yes, that Ladytron, from Liverpool, whose heavy-lidded, robo-cool vocals defined the electroclash movement of the early 2000s and who haven’t released anything since 2011. And yet their eponymous return is an immersive, invigorating and convincingly brooding stomp of disenfranchisement”.
