Ok Go: Call it calculated luck

Tue 10th Oct, 2006 in Features

Things are manic in the OK Go world at the moment â€” those treadmill dancin’ fools have, a year after the release of their second album Oh No, become a household name thanks to the viral marketing of single Here it Goes Again on the likes of YouTube.

Of course, it raises an interesting point â€” are OK Go a band who have their music to thank for their success, or just a clever filmclip that has reignited interest in the band? “I think it’s a little bit of everything,” wagers bassist Tim Nordwind. “You could call it calculated luck. We made a record that we’re really proud of, and along with that we’ve made videos that we’re really proud of, and we’ve put them out in a way that we’re really proud of. I think it’s a combination of all of those things.”

With the Here it Goes Again clip, the band have created something of a cultural phenomenon, with the clip becoming probably more recognisable to the general populace than the music it is intended to promote itself. Indeed, when asked to perform at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, OK Go weren’t asked to play their song â€” instead they were asked to ‘perform’ it, recreating the clip live on stage.

“It was a combination of being really scary and really exciting,” Nordwind says. “We were nervous to show up in front of millions in people and be ‘the guys who dance on treadmills’. We’ve been a band for so long that it’s a funny way to get attention from the world, but we figured that the VMAs are a spectacle, and we had the perfect platform to create a spectacle on the show. At some point we decided ‘just go for it’.”

But it’s not like ‘the dancing treadmill’ video is the first OK Go production that has used choreographed moves. A Million Ways featured the Chicago four-piece dancing in their backyard, and was the first clip of OK Go’s to be picked up by internet video bloggers. “That was originally choreographed to by done at the end of live shows â€” it was not intended to be a video,” he extrapolates. “The version of us dancing in the backyard was just a rehearsal tape that we had given out to a couple of friends to show them what we were going to do at the end of our show, and that eventually got onto the blog sites and the MySpace pages and took off and had a life of its own.”

Never intended to be a single, within a few months it had been downloaded over two million times, and all of a sudden it became clear to OK Go that they had the opportunity to really follow it up and deliver something that took that concept to another level.

“We had a viral video that had taken off on the internet by mistake,” he confirms. Frontman Damien Kulash’s sister, who had helped choreograph the moves for A Million Ways, suggested another idea for the group. Enter the treadmills. “We thought maybe it will work, and we might use it for something, and if not then we’ll just never show it to anybody,” he says. “Once we did it we knew we had something that people would want to watch but I would never have imagined it would get the kind of attention it is getting.”

There’s an innocent charm to both viral videos that works for the band â€” it’s the sort of thing that kids dream up and want to create. “Because of the mediums that are now out there, like YouTube, when you make something in your bedroom you can show the world,” he says. “That’s sort of what happened with us, and as soon we you make it you can throw it on the internet, and all of a sudden your backyard becomes the backyard of millions.”

In many ways, the success of the viral videos has given the band’s sophomore album Oh No a second lease on life. “We had our biggest week on week 55, which is virtually unheard of.”

The album was not even on release schedules in Australia before the mega-success of Here it Goes Again spawned renewed interest in the group, who had had an initial wave of hype in the wake of their self-titled debut album several years ago, and when Capitol label boss Andy Slater (the man who signed The Vines to their international deal) had inked the group.

“To have it just ‘pop’ now feels both very lucky and slightly daunting,” he says. It means that OK Go will now be touring Oh No for at least the next year, possibly a couple, and that a certain sense of pressure will be felt for them to rush-record their third album and squeeze it out between touring schedules.

“Before Here it Goes Again popped on the internet we were gearing up to go into the studio this January,” Nordwind confirms. “Now that’ll probably get postponed for quite a while, but we really want to get back to writing music.”

The band are still in the process of penning new material for their third album, gradually piecing it together. When it came to making their Oh No oh so many years ago the band had somewhere between 60 and 90 songs, before whittling it down to 20 or so to record with Franz Ferdinand and The Cardigans producer Tore Johansson. “We’ve got around 15 songs,” he says, “but we’d probably be more comfortable with having 20 to 30.”

OK Go’s Oh No is out now.

Watch the infamous YouTube clip for OK Go’s Here it Goes Again.