The Queens of the Stone Age music video Josh Homme hated: “This is terrifyingly awful”
As the old saying goes, actors spend most of their time wanting to be rock stars, and rock stars spend their time wanting to be actors. Even though they may have talent honing their craft in one specific medium, there comes a point when all the admiration comes from something else, with plenty of actors trying their hand at acting in bit parts throughout their time in the spotlight. Although Josh Homme may be an inherently funny person off the stage, he had no time for messing around when shooting music videos.
Then again, music videos have often been considered the bane of many artist’s existence. Even though the best blends of visual and musical mediums benefit from having a continuing story, there are many occasions where artists won’t know what they will be filming until the day they turn up for the shoot.
For all of their musical ideas, though, Queens of the Stone Age have benefited from having iconic imagery in most of their music videos. Going through their back catalogue, it’s easy to see the tone they were going for on every single piece they put out, whether it was the pastiche of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on ‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’ or the subversive colour palette on ‘Go With the Flow’.
Coming after Songs for the Deaf, Homme had exhausted himself on the classic lineup of the band. Following Nick Oliveri’s domestic dispute problems and Dave Grohl’s return to Foo Fighters, Homme was left to make an album on his with a round-robin cast of musicians on Lullabies to Paralyze.
While most of the album contains the same murky tone as Songs for the Deaf, ‘In My Head’ was the band flirting with a mainstream rock feel. Throughout the song, Homme finds a way to fit his traditionally odd chord progressions into a reasonably enjoyable pop hit, as he sings about this person playing their favourite songs as loud as possible.
Since the song concept was pretty straightforward, it was only natural to have a straightforward video. Rather than the traditional artsy camera work, most of the song revolves around action shots of the band performing, with Homme looking lazy and going through the motions of the song. Then again, there wasn’t a lot of acting required out of Homme that day.
Stretching out over multiple hours, Homme quickly became sick of working on the set, with Troy Van Leeuwen recalling, “It just happened to be the only time we listened to the record label, and it was such a fuck up on our part. The video we ended up with for that song is so lame! It was three of us against a green screen with effects added later. It was like a fucking Gap commercial”.
While most of the band persevered through the shoot, Homme decided he had had enough about halfway through, explaining, “We were making this video, and I looked at the thing back, and I was like, ‘This is terrifyingly awful.’ And then I just split. Just split, and it’s like, ‘Where did Josh go?’ And I was like, ‘He went home’”.
Despite the lack of attention paid to the video, ‘In My Head’ would become one of the band’s most celebrated tunes, turning up throughout the band’s setlist and gaining a following amongst the fanbase as one of their best radio-friendly songs. Though the video may have been a hit mess, Homme proved with ‘In My Head’ that he was more than capable of steering the QOTSA ship on his own.
