This is Video of the Week from Wales Arts Review. We’ll be showcasing some of the best art in Wales with a new video shared every week. From music to drama and everything in between, videos will not be limited by medium. Today’s video is ‘Horticulture’, the new music video from Sweet Baboo.
A song which pays tribute to that most difficult of skills, caring for a house plant, is perhaps not an obvious choice for Video of the Week, but ‘Horticulture’ makes for a worthy exception to that rule. The track is the third release from Sweet Baboo’s forthcoming seventh album, The Wreckage, following on from the release of ‘Hopeless’ and ‘Good Luck’ earlier in the year.
The notion of self-care is at the heart of both the song and the video, which features an array of people tending to plants and engaging in other activities which reinforce the importance of taking time to relax and embrace life, regardless of age.
Video producer, Pete Ingo, created the track’s enigmatic visuals and describes ‘Horticulture’, “as a song about love, tenderness and a perseverance.” Reflecting on the process of creating the video, Ingo was keen to do justice to this depth explaining how he “wanted to make a visual that reflected this. Sweet Baboo’s music has always had that ‘domestique magique’ running through to its core and I wanted the characters in the video to be the embodiment of this…but turned up to 11…slowly… and a cat.”
Established within a mutually-supportive, collaborative community of artists operating in and outside Wales, touring as a member of Gruff Rhysand Cate Le Bon’s bands in recent years, Black brought together Boy Azooga’s Davey Newington on drums, his Group Listening band mate, Paul Joneson synths and BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-nominated singer-songwriter, Georgia Ruth on vocals for the recording of ‘Horticulture’.
Clarifying that not all of the plants in his life failed to survive his oversight, Black says: “’Horticulture’ was a song that had been running around my brain for a good few years. I must have changed the words to the chorus about four or five times. It’s a song about my love of and, sometimes, failure to keep the house plants alive but also a note to self to keep fit and healthy.”
‘Horticulture’ is out now, released by Amazing Tapes From Canton. Sweet Baboo will tour venues across the UK as part of the The Wreckage Tour in 2023, details are available here.
