Good Things Come In Threes: No 1 Brendan Canty

Iconic music videos become synonymous with the songs that soundtrack them - can you hear the Beastie Boys Intergalactic without a 20 foot robot smashing around your mind's eye, or hum Sledgehammer without wanting to binge on Wallace and Gromit? In 2014 Hozier's world-beating Take Me To Church joined that canon, thanks to the provocative, graceful video from Feel Good Lost, a Cork-based collective headed up by Brendan Canty.

Before the entire world and its mum posted Take Me To Church to its Facebook walls, Feel Good Lost had been building up a reputation for gorgeous, abstract music videos thanks to their emotive visual accompaniments to tracks by Jape, MMOTHS and AlunaGeorge. Aside from these works of visual poetry, Feel Good Lost functions as a music label, a platform for art and a live projection collective; now, just like Jameson, Canty's company stands as a powerful force for bringing the best of Irish to international attention.

When we talk, Brendan is in a buoyant mood - he's just finished work on a narrative video for Gavin James, a video he says is Feel Good Lost's best yet. It's been something of a pet project. "The second I heard the track I knew it was the song I'd been waiting for to make a video for," he tells us. "It's cinematic, it's emotive… It ticked all the boxes I look for."

Canty stays true these criteria when it comes to taking on a new project: just before we speak, he's turned down an Olly Murs video. "It's not that we only we work with alternative artists. I think some of the best directors have worked on pop songs," he says, citing Martin Thurah, a progressive videographer who's worked with Will Young. "It wasn't even the worst Olly Murs song or anything… but I need something with lyrical subtlety, so we can read between the lines a little bit."

Turning down a pop star of the Murs magnitude as a company that began, just a few years ago, as a bedroom project, is an astounding position to be in. What attracted Brendan to music videos was the fact that there are ‘no limitations' when it comes to the format; he shares the Jameson passion for exploring new and exciting paths. "Even though budgets were falling (when I started out), it was becoming much cheaper to make videos and to just put something up on YouTube and get some real attention."

Rather than post videos as a lone wolf director, he decided to create Feel Good Lost ‘like a band comes up with a name' to define the work. The project has mutated over time, building close relationships with acts like Young Wonder, a band as remarkable for their visual sheen as the their polished electro-pop.

Like the perfect marriage of Jameson, Ginger and Lime, Canty recognises the importance of combining the ideal ingredients to achieve something special: his visuals are elegant, earthy and awash with emotional allure. It draws much of its power from the Irish landscape. "Our secret weapon was staying in Cork," the director chuckles. "Everybody says you have to move to London to make it work. I can't imagine not being a 20 minute drive from the beach, or the countryside - even in our towns, we're rich with all these potential settings."

After the global success of Hozier, Canty says that "everybody is looking to Ireland". Feel Good Lost is an able ambassador: Canty is distilling the beauty of the songs of our most talented musicians and the grace of our extraordinary landscapes into a refined, heartfelt document of the contemporary moment.

See how you can combine the ideal ingredients of the perfect night out and experience something different with Jameson, Ginger & Lime.

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To enter just visit jamesoncultfilmclub.ie/jameson-ginger-and-lime

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