A wise electro-pop band once remarked that “They only want you when you’re 17; when you’re 21, you’re no fun.” What they didn’t tell us is that when you’re 20, you get celebrated and appreciated, and that’s just what’s going on with Ladytron next month when their influential sophomore album Light & Magic — yes, the one with “Seventeen” on it — hits that lovely milestone.
As part of the celebration, the Liverpool quartet are digging into the vaults and rolling out some fun stuff, like unseen archive material, teaser reels, a short film of the LP’s recording in Los Angeles, and and unreleased slide-film music video for the title track, which has not been completed until now. It has just surfaced this week.
“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,” the band says. “But we were on tour 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.”
More goodies are promised between now and September 17, when Light & Magic officially hits that 20-year mark. Raise a glass below and stay tuned for more, because next year the fun concludes.