It's time for the orgy!

On the set of an early 2000s music video.

One of my best friends is a big house music guy. Sometimes, after he’s been out for a few drinks, he likes to post old tracks on our WhatsApp group, usually via YouTube links. One of these splurges took place a week or so ago, and this time he posted official videos for some of the biggest house songs of the early noughties. Many of them were noticeably explicit – shockingly so by the more pronounced ethical standards of today.

One, Michael Gray’s ‘The Weekend,’ features a series of women stripping off their office clothing to dance on top of a photocopier. ‘This is a good reminder of what life was like under the last Labour government,’ my friend said. He’s an economist and statistician (he attended LSE, which breeds these types) and has a bone-dry sense of humour.

Our group often devolves into politics. Annoyingly, my friend is far better informed than I am, and has reams of facts, figures and data to hand, so he usually wins any debates. Plus, he actually reads all the policy papers and studies before they’re diced up into provocative newspaper headlines.

Under Joey Negro’s ‘Make a Move on Me,’ he commented: ‘I don’t think you are allowed to make videos like that any more.’ On a roll, he posted highly sexualised videos from 3 of a Kind¹ and Mason vs Princess Superstar.

‘All of these videos are from 2000-2005 guys,’ he wrote. ‘Our era.’

I should be clear that his intention wasn’t to tantalise – if anything, he’s a bit of a prude. It had simply struck him how much things had changed.

Seeing these sexually charged videos abruptly reminded me of something I’d almost forgotten. I was once in one.

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In 2003, while in New York on my third internship at Definitive Jux, I saw a man staring at me on the subway one day. Bristling with what I imagined to be hip hop attitude, I stared back at him. He was compact, good looking and fashionably dressed, so didn’t seem like a creep. He also didn’t appear abashed, and if anything stared back harder – but neutrally, as though appraising me.

‘Do you have an agent?’ he said after a moment.

‘An agent for what?’ I asked him.

‘Modelling,’ he said.

‘…No.’

‘Here’s my card,’ he said, handing me one. ‘Call me.’

Out of vanity - and the need for money - I did so. A day or so later I was standing in a big open plan office with floor-to-ceiling windows, as three women stared critically at my face.

‘Yeah, totally – I can see it,’ one of them said.

I remember that Jeffrey – the agency boss and former model who’d scouted me – told me to open my mouth as widely as possible then let it close again. It did something to the lips, apparently. Then he told me to smile and took a Polaroid. As it cleared, he smiled too, evidently satisfied. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘That’s it.’

The photo was indeed a rare good one. I was standing in the light wearing a baggy blue Sonic Sum t-shirt, smiling with a mixture of mischief and shyness.

More pictures were taken, and I was sent off to various other photographers for test shoots. At one of these, a German expat took some photos of me topless and showed me how he could endow me with muscles using Photoshop.

‘You are very thin,’ he said, disapprovingly.

How could I be otherwise? My nightly dinner was a $1.50 slice of pizza in the North Bronx.

As well as interning at a hip-hop label and living with Mike Ladd, I was abruptly running around the city for auditions. At one of these, a photographer visibly recoiled when she told me to smile and was confronted by my toothy grin.

I didn’t get many jobs. The first I did obtain was an editorial shoot for BPM Magazine. It was supposed to have some kind of globalised, futuristic, dystopia/ utopia vibe, and involved standing in Grand Central station, bare-chested, in a sari and a gasmask. The photographer was a woman in her early thirties, and she’d chosen jeans that were ill suited to having to continually crouch down to her equipment. They exposed her bum, and she had to keep asking her assistant to stand behind her as she changed lenses.

Eventually I won a job doing ‘showroom’ for Y3. This mainly involved hanging around a beautiful, vast loft in the West Village, gaping at the river views, playing video games and occasionally being summoned to try on clothes for a buyer from Barneys or Saks. With me was a female model, whom I seem to remember was seventeen and from Prague. She certainly looked more like a real model than I did. Looking back, I think the Y3 guy had simply taken a liking to me, rather than recognised any talent. At the end of the week, I persuaded him to let me have a plain back baseball cap that I thought looked like Jay-Z’s on the cover of The Black Album.

Back in London, I decided this modelling stuff might be worth pursuing. Perhaps it would be a way to make some money while I dedicated myself to underground hip hop. A few years earlier, while interning at Ninja Tune, I’d been approached by scouts at Notting Hill Carnival, and had ended up in a short MTV ident featuring ‘UK garage.’

‘OK,’ the excitable director had kept saying, at the start of each take. ‘Let’s restart the UK garage!’

Subsequently, Roots Manuva, whenever he visited the Ninja Tune office, would chuckle happily and say ‘Ah, it’s MTV boy! I saw you on MTV!’

This was embarrassing, but it also seemed to lend me a certain something.

Sadly, back in London, I was not a success. The elite agencies turned me down, and I ended up with a more mid-market one who sent me out to Kickers shoots and TV ad try-outs. I can only remember getting a couple of jobs, and one of them was for a music video for Junior Jack.

I probably had vague reservations about doing this. Cheesy house music was my least favourite genre, and I wouldn’t have wanted to ruin my imagined credentials in hip-hop. But then, this was 2003. I was 23, and nothing seemed permanent. The idea that anything that went online was forever had not dawned on us. Probably no one would see me, I decided. And besides, I needed the money.

I remember being given an address and turning up in a car park in Tottenham on a cold day in winter. There were coaches - stuffed with other models - and two locations. The first was a run-down flat in a scruffy block – almost a squat. There, an afterparty was supposed to be taking place. The models were a mixed bag: I remember girls with shaven heads and piercings, friendly laddish types; a lot of grinning, up-for-it people with outer London or perhaps Essex accents. Everyone seemed more comfortable in the environment and with the process than I was.

We were crammed into the flat until there was no room to move, then told to dance. I considered myself confident, even cocky, back then, but I was clearly less able to switch this on than my up-for-it new colleagues. Everyone bopped around and waved their arms, and a few of us made knowing jokes about flashbacks from real-life sun-up afterparties.

Next, we were taken to a very large, elegantly run-down house. The camera was supposed to swoop around this, taking in the party people as they canoodled and writhed, danced and almost kissed. I was told to lie on a chaise longue while one of the shaven headed girls straddled me, and we were both supposed to somehow be moving to the music while keeping our lips an inch or so away from each other’s. Once again, she was much better at this than I was. I jerked around awkwardly, moving my shoulders in time to the music, the realisation coldly settling over me that I wasn’t much good at this, that a mistake had very possibly been made that day on the subway – and not, unfortunately, by me.

The shooting of the chaise longue scene seemed to take a very long time, and I began to get the sense it might be my fault.

‘Ok,’ the director said eventually. ‘It’s time for the orgy!’

‘Oh God,’ a few people said, rolling their eyes.

‘This is mental,’ someone said, grinning.

‘Clothes off!’ the director shouted. ‘Let’s get the baby oil on.’

I remember being suddenly stood in my pants (I think they were mine – perhaps I was given sexier ones) and liberally squirted and rubbed with baby oil by a tough dresser lady and her assistant. Then, suddenly, about thirty of us were making a large pile of oil-slick near-naked bodies on the floor.

‘That’s it!’ the director yelled. ‘Writhe around a bit. You’re loving it!’

I tried to keep my face away from other men’s feet, but generally it wasn’t too bad.

‘Rub each other!’ the director yelled. We did so, stroking arms and legs and ensuring that we somehow remained respectful. I seem to remember one girl and boy – who’d been flirting – putting on a bit more of a show.

‘YES!’ the director shouted.

And then it was over. I vaguely remember having some of the oil wiped off, re-dressing and a bit more joking around. Then it was home to the flat I shared with my bemused girlfriend. ‘Why do you smell of baby oil?’ she said, frowning.

The video came out, because I remember idly seeking it out a few years later. Thankfully, there was only the briefest glimpse of me, jerking around on the chaise longue, and I wasn’t visible in the quick-cut shots of the orgy. Weirdly though – and perhaps very luckily for me – it now seems to have disappeared.

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‘This is what life was like under the last Labour government.’

Were the two things connected? I suppose the swagger and optimism of early ’00s Britain might have distilled into these sexualised videos. If so, might they someday come back? Might a Trumpian vibe shift result in a re-sexualisation of the music video? If that’s the case, was the one for the Rolling Stones Angry a cultural premonition? It’s an unpleasant thought, I know. That video seemed to me to be an exhilarating blast of good, clean fun. (And, like any good music video, it probably made the song seem more exciting than it is.)

Perhaps the real contemporary counterpart to those videos is the jiggling, wibbling Instagram model, often satirised by ‘High Society Meme Artist’ supersnake. For some reason, I’m constantly shown little video loops of these women when Instagram wants to tempt me into Reels – despite me never having indicated to the platform that this is an interest of mine. Very nice, I’m sure, but just not real. These videos seem to me to be bloodless, all surface – the promise that will never deliver and the mirage that isn’t really there.

‘Our era.’

Coincidentally, The Times recently published its latest survey into the social attitudes of twenty-somethings. The last one took place in 2004, around the same time these videos peaked. Unsurprisingly, the survey revealed a very different, and far less puritanical attitude to sex than the latest one does. In 2004, 78% of the people surveyed thought one-night stands were common practice. Now, it’s just 23%. I wouldn’t be the first to wonder whether the virtual reality of those Instagram models might, for many people, have replaced the real thing. Perhaps, like almost everything else, explicitness has simply been monetised, and instead of getting kicks from music videos, people demand more bespoke fantasies via Only Fans.

The other thing that struck me watching those videos – not for the first time – was how much popular culture has slowed down. More time has elapsed between those videos – and my own oily experience – and now, as had between the breakup of the Beatles and the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. In the early ’90s, footage from the end of the ’60s seemed to come from an entirely different age. But those explicit dance videos don’t look or feel very old at all.

It was difficult to be too judgemental of them, watching in the cold light of daytime sobriety as my tipsy friend posted them. I suppose they had a purpose, some humour, a sense of fun and sometimes a story to tell.

Still, I’m glad that orgy has disappeared.

In the Y3 showroom. One of these models was a total failure

1. Technically a garage track