Aphex Twin - Come To Daddy (Director´s Cut)

Artist	Aphex Twin
Artist	Aphex Twin
Artist	Aphex Twin
Song	Come To Daddy (Director´s Cut)
Album	Come To Daddy EP
Director	Chris Cunningham
Music	Richard D. James
Producer	Masks (at Creature Effects)
Genre	Electronica (Techno, Ambient, Jungle,...)
Genre	Dance & Electronica
Intro	No
Outro	No
Production Company	Creature Effects
Label	Warp
Set Location	Thamesmead Housing Estate, Wollwich, East London, Great Britain
Sound Mix	Stereo
Talent	Richard D. James - Alan Stokes
Technical Specifications	colour - format unknown
Release date

Wiki

Plot Summary

In a bleak Thamesmead housing estate, an elderly woman’s dog urinates on a discarded television, accidentally awakening a distorted, disembodied image of Aphex Twin. The broadcast then erupts into a nightmare of shrieking children wearing Richard D. James masks, a towering humanoid creature, and an escalating assault on the surrounding estate. The children swarm through the concrete landscape, terrorizing anyone in their path, while Cunningham’s frantic cutting turns the video into something between a horror short, a punk cartoon, and an urban nightmare.

Factoids & Trivia

The Director’s Cut includes an extended opening passage before the main song fully arrives. It also retains a strange, prolonged screaming section that was removed from the broadcast version to make the clip more suitable for music television.

Chris Cunningham on R.D. James: "We're both total squares. He is someone who likes just sitting in his bedroom and so do I."

Shooting Location: Thamesmead Housing Estate, Wollwich, East London, Great Britain

Chris Cunningham directed the video in 1997, creating one of the defining visual statements of the late-1990s electronic music scene. The production was associated with Creature Effects, reflecting Cunningham’s background in prosthetics and special-effects work.

The video was filmed around the Tavy Bridge area of Thamesmead in southeast London. The same brutalist housing estate had previously been used by Stanley Kubrick for A Clockwork Orange, giving Cunningham’s location an unsettling cinematic afterlife. Much of the shopping-center area seen in the video was demolished in 2007.

The music accompanying the opening minute or so does not appear on the standard Come to Daddy release. It has often been treated as video-specific or unreleased Aphex Twin material rather than simply an edit of the EP track.

The old woman was played by Coral Lorne. Cunningham later recalled that she had been asked to look frightened during casting, but apparently was not expecting the full force of a wind machine during filming. Her reaction became one of the shoot’s unexpectedly comic moments.

The small figures’ fixed Richard D. James faces transform the artist’s familiar grin into a kind of multiplying brand identity: part mascot, part virus, and part demonic family resemblance. Cunningham’s approach turns James’s graphic likeness into the video’s main special effect.

The video won the Golden Nica in the Digital Music category at Prix Ars Electronica in 1999, helping establish it as more than a promotional clip and as a major work of contemporary video art.