The song is the latest release from their album Get Behind Me Satan, and the video the first since Michel Gondry created the White Stripes multiplying in time with the music for The Hardest Button to Button. The video, which was all done in one long continuous shot, shows Jack and Meg White appearing on the Conan O'Brien show in the US, then leaving the studio to go home and watch that same show at home... but with O'Brien, who comes in from the studio, which is transported next door. Self-referential, fiendishly clever and visually intense, it's like nothing you've ever seen, and hence classic Gondry. For all its visual flight of fancy, the video is actually firmly rooted in reality. Following the release of their preceding album, Elephant, back in 2003 the Whites spent every night for a week featuring on chat show host Conan O'Brien's show in the US, playing a different song from the album. Gondry, who is friends with the pair, gave Jack a blocky papier mache Lamphead (as he calls it) to give to the host, after which Jack, Meg and Michel watched the show back at their hotel. And so the idea for the video was born. "It started out as a simple idea of taking a real life experience and twisting or distorting the idea like a magic trick or illusion," Gondry explained, "From there it just got more and more complex. When I told the idea to Jack and Meg they spoke to Conan who was very willing to help out - he was great." Of course the other element that makes the video stand out is the mind-bendingly confusing mix of proportions and perspectives. "All of the sets were built for camera in either an exaggerated stretched or shrunk scale," explains Gondry, "In post, we merely brought the sets into the appropriate scale and thereby created the illusion of Jack and Meg stretching and compressing." Gondry has just finished up his latest video for hip-hop sensation Kanye West, set improbably enough, in New York department store Macey's we hear. [shots.net]