Today, George Michael confirmed long-gestating rumors that his new single — his first since 2004 — would feature a music video starring none other than Kate Moss. He had previously teased the surprise on his Twitter account.
“Oh and by the way, in the video, a certain supermodel (our Kate) saves my life. We shot two endings, one with the heimlich [sic] menouvre [sic]... and one where she gives me full on CPR. Mouth to mouth. Not really:}”
A spokesperson confirmed that the dramatic-sounding video for the single, called “White Light,” will be released August 12.
There’s literally no one else we’d rather see lip-syncing someone else’s song, so here’s an extremely detailed recap of Kate Moss’s history in music videos.
In 1994, acclaimed director Anton Corbijn shot Moss with Johnny Cash in “Delia’s Gone,” the first single from the country legend’s comeback album, “American Recordings.” The model plays the slain Delia, killed by the song’s narrator, and thus is mostly lying in a graveyard plot six feet deep while Cash buries her. It was a dark start to her music video career.
Then, Moss and fellow model Devon Aoki played stone-cold bandits in a 1997 video for Primal Scream’s “Kowalski.” The two of them steal a cherry red Dodge Challenger, shove a guy’s face into a bowl of Fruit Loops, and eventually beat up the members of Primal Scream. There’s also a wonderful scene when Moss, who’s driving the Challenger, has Aoki apply lipstick to her lips across the front seat of the car. It’s not easy to remember who Primal Scream is these days, but they certainly knew the strengths of a young Kate Moss.
Next up is Elton John, who featured Moss in his not-quite-classic 1997 ballad “Something About the Way You Look Tonight.” The fact that most of this video is Elton John playing piano in an empty auditorium, the camera swooping in overhead, is disconcerting. Given that he had Kate Moss on set, it strikes us as a bit of a mistake. Her biggest scene is at the beginning, when she opens a letter — how ’90s! — that’s something of an invitation to an Elton John show. She goes, and for the rest of the video she dances around in a big crowd. At once point, she sits in a metal chair that’s a lot bigger than her. Verdict: not Kate’s best work.
Marianne Faithful focuses the attention back on Moss with her 2002 video for “Sex With Strangers,” directed by Roman Coppola. It’s a perplexing clip. What begins as a close interpretation of the song’s title — Moss wakes up, changes from a nightgown, picks up her brick-sized cell phone seeking a stranger to do the obvious thing with — gets a little confusing when Kate Moss ends up finding the person waiting for her is actually… Kate Moss. Then her palm turns into a pair of lips and there’s a TV with Marianne Faithful talking on a cell phone. We’re confused.
Thankfully, a year later Moss made a video with a very simple concept. Here’s director Sofia Coppola’s pitch to the White Stripes: “I don’t know — how about Kate Moss doing a pole dance?” New York Times Magazine reporter Lynn Hirschberg was on the set of that video, for the band’s scorching cover of Burt Bacharach’s “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself,” and she captured all the action of Moss grinding in her underwear on the stripper pole, as Jack and Meg White looked on. Zoe Cassavetes was also present, for some reason.
“Moss, who turned down a short white robe offered by an assistant, was remarkably comfortable in her underwear and sat with her feet up in front of a fan,” Hirschberg wrote.
We’re not sure “White Light” will have a video as striking and elegant as the one Coppola directed, but a new video with Kate Moss is always welcome.