How I made a music video while struggling with Long Covid

I made a music video while battling Long Covid and while I don’t recommend it, I’m very, very pleased with the results.

Like a lot of us, I managed to get Covid a few months ago. I was boarding a plane home from a few days visiting London, thinking “will I wear a mask? I should probably wear a mask, right?”. And like all smart people, I came up with the wonderful alternative of “no, I won’t wear a mask”, reasoning that I’d be grand.

And 48 hours later, this new bastard of a Covid strain started wrapping its ugly fingers around my throat.

It wasn’t the worst. After a few days, the (very manageable) symptoms had subsided and I was just left very tired and needing to remain horizontal for most of the day. But I had a single to release about 6 weeks time so after a week or so, I got caught up on my activities, planning live shows and arranging promotion. Getting myself ready for when my energy returned.

But my energy didn’t return. I simply wasn’t getting any better. And the clock was ticking.

After a few weeks, I had to make the difficult decision to replan the single release. I had to streamline and minimise everything. Gone were the live shows, an ambitious live session I wanted to record and most of the social media videos I was planning to shoot. But one cornerstone remained: I could just about release this single, as long as I had a music video. The question was, how could I make a music video if I didn’t have the energy to make one?

I might just be a lazy genius

There are 2 big parts to producing a music video (at least, the way I do it): the set-up and the performance. My energy levels were coming back a bit. I was able to work and do a few lower energy things for a few hours but if I over-exerted myself, I’d pay for it for the next few days. So I knew that I’d be able to be active for a few hours, enough to do some of the shoot. But certainly not a whole day.

The problem was that when you make music videos alone, you need to do both the set-up and the performance. You can’t just swan in at your call time and ask “where’s my mark?” and then start your work. You need to be there from the start, putting every light into position, readying the camera, ensuring the memory cards are in order. And there’s arguably much more work in the set-up.

From past experience, I knew that I could do either the set-up or the performance. I couldn’t do both.

So that’s when it hit me: what if the performance was the set-up?

When I was filming this video, we were closing in on 2 years of the insane war on Gaza so I needed to mark that too. Free Palestine.

I threw out my old video concept and started to storyboard a simple idea: You Had Your Chance is about being vulnerable and raw but building your defences so you can be strong enough to tell somebody they’re not allowed in your life any more. It’s about putting on armour, erecting a facade so you can get through that initial, painful moment. Pretending to be brave so you can get past the worst part. The video could be a visual metaphor for building those defences. Putting on a costume and slowly turning a normal room into a Hollywood sound-stage (yes, I do think like this).

The video would have me singing the song as I turned my rehearsal room into a video set - erecting the backdrop, setting up the lights, getting into costume - and then for the last verse, I would do my usual shtick of dancing around in a lilac suit in front of a purple backdrop.

This meant that I could basically start filming as soon as I arrived at the studio. Then once I worked out the timing for each shot, I could just do the setup, sing the song and then move on to the next take.

I packed the car the day before (conserving energy for the shoot day), picked up my lilac suit from the dry cleaners and got my sleep.

Saying goodbye to an era

The shoot mostly went to plan. I definitely underestimated how long it took me to sing every verse. And I had a few false starts in figuring out the blocking - I couldn’t just set things up the way I usually do, sweating and swearing and listening to Star Trek podcasts. Instead, I needed to perform while I set things up. And that meant ensuring that I was in frame, that I was hitting certain marks during the verse and that I was able to get lighting stands out of bags without knocking things over or catching in the zip (I ruined many a take with that). But overall, things went well. And I found myself retaining enough energy to dance a little bit at the end which is always a fun way to finish off an afternoon in front of the camera. It went well and I was happy (if tired) at the end of a shorter-than-usual shoot day.

But something unexpected happened while I was shooting the video. I realised that I was making the final music video for my album. Back in 2023, I released two singles that had interesting music videos. But a friend pointed out to me that the videos didn’t really have anything to do with the aesthetic I had established for Mr Billy Fitzgerald. So for my next single Gimme Love in 2024, I decided to bring that aesthetic to the fore. The result was a less ambitious but far more fun video that really worked for the song. I had learned a good lesson in being consistent with my visual style while also refining the workflow of my video shoots.

A few more videos in similar style followed: Old Loves (a little different), Let Us Be, Work For It and the simpler videos for my Remix EP. Each brought the visual style of the album (and singles) to life and helped me produce professional results that built on the one before.

But now, here I was making the a video for the final single from A Grand Romantic Gesture. So this was likely my final music video in this style. This hit me in a wave of nostalgia - “this is the last time I’m. putting up the backdrop” or “this is the last time I’m dancing in a lilac suit like a fool”. So I decided to pay homage to all the videos I had made over the past 18 months.

The concept for the video naturally referenced the other videos by showing how I make them - giving a peek behind the scenes at how I put these things together. But I wanted to also include little references to the other videos. Matching shots and visually quoting what went before.

For the quiet verse in the middle, I stole one of my favourite shots from Old Loves (above, right) where I play the guitar and sing, backlit while the camera slowly zooms out.

The manual zoom at the end of that quiet verse is a reference to how I shot Gimme Love, secretly controlling the zoom lens with my hand while singing the intro.

For the interplay between the lead and backing vocals towards the end, I used a Brady Bunch-style split-screen grid with 4 images (above, left), just like I had done in Let Us Be (above, right).

The dressing montage included just a touch of nudity, referencing my almost-famous butt shot in Work For It.

And the general framing of the first half of the video was a reference to the videos I made for the Remix EP.

There are subtle nods to All Fucked Up Now and Give Me A Chance that either didn’t make it into the final edit or are too subtle and inside-baseball to bother talking about.

A fitting end

In the end, I was really happy with the video. It felt like a great way to turn a bad situation into a decent one. And a wonderful way to pay homage to work I’m very proud of, and an era I’m both sad and happy is coming to a close. And while nobody watching it will ever realise that the dancing fool on the screen is doing everything he can to remain upright long enough to get the minimum footage needed, or will ever be aware of the visual references to previous music videos, I’m delighted that I got to make something meaningful to celebrate one of my favourite songs.