Gorillaz – DARE
2005 · Directed by Jamie Hewlett & Pete Candeland
2.7M Likes
Best comments
1.“I love the classic 5th Gorillaz member: Giant Fucking Decapitated Head on backing vocals.”
More comments
- 2.“Fun fact: this song was originally meant to be called 'It's There,' but Shaun Ryder's Manc accent made it sound like 'It's Dare' – so they changed the name.”
- 3.“When Gorillaz keep a human head in their house, it's cool. But when I do it, I get arrested. Unfair.”
The story
DARE is Noodle's song, and the video lets her run the show. In Gorillaz lore she reminded Murdoc that she wrote it, and that he'd hogged the spotlight in Feel Good Inc. So he sleeps through the whole shoot in his Winnebago and she gets her bedroom to herself. Almost.
Open her closet and there's the giant severed head of Shaun Ryder, of Happy Mondays and Black Grape, wired into a life-support rig that includes two Atari joysticks and a Speak & Spell. Noodle flips a switch, tubes pump fluid into his skull, and her Frankenstein project starts to sing. They dance an odd little duet while Russel reads the paper on the toilet downstairs and 2-D presses his ear to the floor. Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland borrowed from horror films like The Brain That Wouldn't Die and Ringu. The twist: Ryder wakes up in bed, Murdoc beside him tells him to go back to sleep, and then Murdoc wakes up in his own bed, gasping. A nightmare inside a nightmare.
The title has its own legend. The story went that the song was called It's There until Ryder's Mancunian accent turned it into Dare. Ryder later called that an urban myth and said it never had a title at all. Either way, it became Gorillaz' only UK number one, in September 2005, with Roses Gabor singing as Noodle. Some songs are born weird. This one was grown in a closet.
