June, 2008

They say revenge is a dish best served cold – whoever ‘they’ are, they clearly never told Sweeney Todd, who serves up revenge in the form of a humble meat pie; literally. Yet another winning result of the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp configuration, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s stage musical version of the old Victorian penny dreadful about a killer hairdresser who slices up his victims whilst they sit in his chair.

The story concerns one Benjamin Barker, a successful barber who falls afoul of the corrupt Judge Turpin who takes a shine to Barker’s pretty wife Lucy, and so trumps up some charges and has Benjamin kangaroo courted over to a certain overseas penal colony. Fifteen years later, the mysterious ‘Sweeney Todd’ arrives in London, having escaped from prison. He coincidentally moves into the flat once rented by a certain Benjamin Barker, and whilst there just so happens to come across  a collection of polished silver razors… and begins plotting revenge.

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This DVD, which contains all of the band’s promo videos to date, has been rushed out as an accompaniment piece to the Best Of CD released by EMI, as a sort of counter to Radiohead’s now infamous going solo gesture, effectively releasing their ‘In Rainbows’ album for free on the internet, inviting fans to pay as little as £0.00 for the album if they so wished.

This is worth checking out, not just for the famous videos such as ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Just’ – you can have fun freeze-framing the video and trying to work out what the guy on the street is saying – but for the less well-known latter-day Amnesiac/Hail to the Thief stuff such as ‘There There’ and the strange wireframe glitchscape of the ‘Pull Pulk/Like Spinning Plates’ video(s), which looked to us like a cross between a car advert and the movie Tron (also worth renting by the way, especially if you’ve got an HD set).

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