words by TimelandisWacky
About a year ago, I began writing KGLW.net’s song histories. These are complete descriptions of every song the band has written and/or performed, from their earliest unreleased work to their latest albums. These histories go over every bit of available info including the song’s origins, how they’ve evolved live, how they were released and much more. Many songs have info that, before my research, were completely unknown. As I dug into these albums, I ended up finding interviews that were never before documented, as well as little details that got lost in the bigger picture. This often happened with the band’s music videos. For example, I tracked down the exact locations seen in the music video for “Muckraker” using Google Maps (Coogoorah Reserve and Anglesea Power Station). This was hinted at in old interviews but I was able to track down the exact beaches and bridges that were filmed. Part of the fun of writing these histories are those little details that always get overlooked and one of my favorite ways of dissecting a video is looking for the video’s sources. Jason Galea often used VHS tapes and old movie footage in his early Zonkvision-era work. In the case of “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot,” he used footage from the 1967 spaghetti western Death Rides a Horse. Typically I was able to find something but when going over the details of a certain video in November of 2023, I ended up having some difficulties. What resulted was a ten month search that ended up being one of my favorite finds.
The video is question is for the band’s 2013 song “30 Past 7.” It’s the fourth track on Float Along — Fill Your Lungs and one of my favorites. The video is in line with Galea’s other work from the time, incorporating various VHS tapes to create a psychedelic dreamscape. The footage varies in style and substance, going from images of office workers fighting each other with baseball bats to cybernetic soldiers fighting in a dark corridor. Upon the video’s release, he said “I tried to make it feel like it does when you’ve got to wake up at 7:30am and go to a 9 to 5 job… you fall asleep and start dreaming then the snooze goes off. The baseball bats scene is kind of like dreaming about fighting your boss… it ends with the person going crazy from the 9 to 5 crunch”. This is the only information provided by Galea and one of the only bits of info from anyone within the band’s circle. Joey is the only other person to comment on “30 Past 7,” saying that the video was made with VHS tapes in an SYN interview.
Knowing that info gave me a place to start. The search began with multiple in-depth looks at the video itself. I was able to identify the animated footage quite easily based on the characters' shapes and appearance. While the figures were blurry, I was able to make out that they were Care Bears. I first looked through the show and then stumbled into The Care Bears Movie, which ended up being the source. The rest, however, was hard to discern based on unknown actors and Galea’s editing which heavily obscured many details. I was able to separate the footage into three to four groups. I knew that any footage with the curly haired man in headphones had to be one film, while the man with the baseball bat who came out of the elevator was part of one coherent string of events. The shots of the soldiers, explosions and spaceship also seemed to fit well together. The only scene I was a bit confused on was the kid entering the house at the one minute mark. I guessed it could be a part of any of the others, but also knew it could be its own film that I wasn’t aware of. From there I started looking through ‘80s-’90s VHS tapes. I looked through hundreds, ranging from theatrical releases to anthology TV shows. That said, the quality of the footage indicated that they were most likely made for TV films, short films or television shows. There was a rough quality to all of them that didn’t fall in line with theatrical sci-fi films of their time. While I looked through the tapes as best as I could, nothing lined up with anything I was seeing in the video.
As time went on and I continued to come up empty, I decided to ask others if they had any info. I asked over on my Instagram and the only answer I received was that it could be Blade Runner. Funnily enough, another commenter said the same thing. When I asked if anyone had info on r/whatmoviewasthat, a user wrote “First reaction is Blade Runner? The OG one of course.” This became a bit of a joke within the team, though these were answers. When I posted in r/KGATLW, the most upvoted comment said that they didn’t even know that “30 Past 7” had a video. The other two responses were jokes, comparing the people in the video to the band and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. I made a thread on the Lost Media Wiki Forum and while I had high hopes, nobody responded. Asking within KGLW.net, the idea came about that the video may have been shot by Galea and Zonkvision, though this didn’t line up with their work and what was previously said.
This is not to say that there was no progress in that time. Ashley (one of our site’s most dedicated setlist reviewers) was able to find the sci-fi soldiers, explosions and spaceship. Turns out they come from Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, a TV show that worked alongside a Mattel toy line to create an interactive experience. Most of the shots were taken from the show’s thirteenth episode “And Madness Shall Reign” (notably its opening sequence in the subway). The pieces were slowly fitting together and now there were only two or three sources left.
Throughout the search I had been using a wide variety of tactics from Google Images to eBay listings. One of the few ways I searched for tapes was through IMDb. When I started this search, I tried my best looking for the individual shows themselves through their database, filtering by format, genre, country of origin and things like that. This didn’t go well and I wasn’t able to get anything until September 22nd, 2024. That day I gave it another shot. This time I filtered it to pull up Australian direct-to-video sci-fi tapes. Perhaps looking for a collection instead of the individual films would be an easier route to go down. That turned out to be true. After scrolling through hundreds of releases, many of which I had already ruled out, I came across Science Fiction Trilogy. The tape, produced by RocVale Film in 1989, matched the criteria but the cover really pulled me in. It shows images from the three films in an atom-shaped diagram. The first film Teach 109 pictured a woman who looked strikingly similar to the one seen with the curly haired man in the video. Looking up the film’s actors I found Jason Patric, who was an instant match, though I was unable to find the film online. The second film shown on the cover, The Price of Life, didn’t have anything recognizable. That said, the film was available online and I was able to confirm that it had the shot of the kid running into the house. The third film on the cover however was the thing that grabbed my attention. The image for The Ivory Tower lined up with “30 Past 7.” The odd lightning through the slanted windows, the man in the helmet with the baseball bat, it was perfect. Within minutes I was able to confirm The Ivory Tower as the film I was looking for. As mentioned earlier, Teach 109 was not available and it ended up being the hardest to verify. Upon investigation, I found that it had been reissued as part of a DVD series called Perverse Destiny, although they were only produced in Australia. While I was able to confirm the film through a well hidden Vimeo video, I ended up buying a copy of the DVD so that I had a copy to review. A few weeks later it arrived and I was able to see the shots that weren’t available online, thus ending the months long search.
In total, Galea used three sources. Animated shots are taken from The Care Bears Movie, the action-packed sci-fi shots are from Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, and the three other films come from the obscure Science Fiction Trilogy. The shots of the kid at the dilapidated house are from The Price of Life, the curly haired man with the headphones is Teach 109, and the man in the elevator who fights in his boss’s office is The Ivory Tower. Effects such as the 7:30 text were done by Galea.
One of my favorite parts of researching the band for these song histories is that it gives me the opportunity to connect dots that otherwise would have been lost. The full picture of how something was done is always an interesting thing to learn about and a lot of that info is forgotten, if not completely lost to begin with. The song history project was meant to preserve all of that and it was searches like this that really showed how much there still is to learn. Over one hundred thousand people have watched that video since 2013, but to my knowledge, KGLW.net is the only one to figure out how it all came together. It took a while, but it happened.
All that said, I’m still not done identifying clips. Around the same time as “30 Past 7” Galea made a VHS edit for “I’m Not A Man Unless I Have A Woman. ” While I was able to track down one of the tapes (that being Easyriders Video Magazine #1), I’m still digging for the other tapes shown. That’s also not the only song with many questions left unanswered, none of the clips from “Black Tooth” and “Dead-Beat” have been identified. Don’t get me started on the many questions left unanswered about things beyond the scope of music videos. But that’s the cool thing about these histories, they’re always expanding. As we learn more about these songs, the longer the pages get. Who knows what revelations will come next?
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