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Following on from our dissection of Tool’s Stinkfist, here’s our next instalment of our Seriously Fucked-Up Videos series…
Band: Aphex Twin
Track: Come To Daddy
Released: 1997
Director: Chris Cunningham
Come To Daddy is one giant, personified ASBO just waiting to be tagged and sent home at 7pm - perhaps the then-new Labour Government even got their prized anti-lout idea after watching the video's depiction of a child gang running amok in this twisted wormhole into Richard D. James' (aka Aphex Twin) fertile imagination? It's deeply odd, slightly disturbing and filmed on the same council estate that Stanley Kubrick used for some of the most graphic scenes in A Clockwork Orange; the great film maker would've been proud of director Chris Cunningham.
The near-six-minute-long video accompaniment to the furious drum and bass electro of Come To Daddy starts with brooding shots of the aforementioned infamous sink estate, where an old lady is innocently walking her dog amongst piles of junk and intimidating grey towers. But the daft mare makes a mistake by carelessly letting her mutt piss on an old TV, don't you get fined for that sort of thing nowadays? Maybe awakening the spirit of hell itself was a better deterrent than a £50 on-the-spot penalty in the 90s. Anyway, by taking a leak on the apparently-lifeless goggle box, the dog does indeed awaken some sort of devil who tells the old lady "I want your soul" in a scary voice, overlooking the fact that by doing so he's probably just knocked ten years off the lady's life, meaning she should have died two years ago. To add to the her problems, she's then brushed aside by a dozen or so children who appear from nowhere and head straight for the pissed-on TV to receive instructions from the grey head that now inhabits the screen. The children all have Richard D. James' hairy face cut and pasted onto their body, albeit in a rather crude way that might have looked OK 11 years ago but isn't very convincing in 2008.
The head, rather predictably, then starts saying "come to daddy" as the children near and one delinquent, resplendent in a Little House On The Prairie-style dress, remembers what it's out the house for and legs it with the TV, probably covering the dress in fresh dog piss in the process. After some more rowdy behaviour (rattling iron railings and so on) the gang finds a man with a pony tail to harass. "Some wanker with the same hair cut as us...how dare he" is probably what's running through the minds of the gang as they stone the long-haired man until he takes shelter in a his F-reg VW Golf. They lose interest and move on, probably because it's not a GTi and it's brown, whilst the man is probably more scared of getting stale dog piss on his vintage Vee-Dub.
Following a brief interlude, consisting of a nursery rhyme sample and two hairy-headed kids skipping along (presumably added to weird the viewer out some more, although it just looks like a trailer for a Victoria circus attraction) and some more anti-social behaviour, the TV monster climbs out of the box, like a strange undead contortionist, and starts bellowing sweet nothings at the old lady, who's just re-appeared after trying to find her dog or taking some of her heart pills. Her fate is uncertain but she looks pretty scared and it's safe to say that if there was a sequel to Come To Daddy, then she wouldn't be in it, same goes for her dog. An actor called Al Stokes plays the creature, a sort of gobby anorexic zombie (he later went on to play a member of the living dead in 28 Days Later), but he swiftly morphs into Richard D. James who starts stroking the heads of the child gang who've gathered around him. We're left with a hotch potch of grey heads, dancing zombies and visual confusion for the last 50 seconds which is somewhat disappointing, given the strong narrative of the first five minutes.
It's said that children watch too much TV and that old ladies with yappy dogs that wee everywhere are annoying, but combining the two to awaken the spirit of a soul-sucking undead being is just bad luck.
