Steve Winwood - "Holding On" (1988)

The Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) is a performing right organization: It collects license fees on behalf of its artists and distributes them as royalties to the complying members.
And: it counts the number of radio airplay performances for each track. While other Steve Winwood songs (such as "Back In The High Life" or "Roll With It") had an even greater airplay, "Holding On" comes in at more than one million performances! And considering that, the David Fincher helmed music video is inappropriately hard to find.


To some extend this video has to do with a photographer, or a guy making memories -- I actually haven't figured that out quite yet -- and is shot in a nice edit of color and black and white film. And of course it has a Santa Claus in it. And since the director behind this is David Fincher that by itself is sort of scary!

A very interesting piece of trivia I find is David collaborating with DOP Dariusz Wolski on the clip, who by that time had established himself as quite a name in the music video world. Wolski had worked with big name artists such as David Bowie, Elton John, Kansas, Van Halen, Bruce Hornsby and Neil Young and would go on to work with Fincher on the videos for Paula Abdul's "Forever Your Girl" and Aerosmith's "Janie's Got A Gun".
In the same year Dariusz Wolski made his break into the world of feature film with the Paul Mayersberg directed Sci-Fi flick "Nightfall". It rated very lousily at IMDB and is commented with "Watching paint dry captures your attention more than this film". Surprisingly in the years to follow and up until now Dariusz Wolski has worked himself up the ranks to become one of Hollywood's top cinematographers. His credits include THE CROW, CRIMSON TIDE, DARK CITY and all three of the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies.

To our great unfortune the video is only available at youtube.
Enjoy anyway:

youtube.com/watch?v=GvKiMFXSt-8

Check out David Fincher's Complete Videography in Music Videos.

Disclaimer: The video may have been posted by a user with no official right to do so.

1 comment:

  1. Awesome video, great song! Thanks again for posting these! I couldn't find a "contact" location to send you a message, I had some questions for you and kind of wanted to shoot the shit about some Finch stuff. How did you find out that Darius Wolski shot this video? I always try and look up the DP, especially on Fincher's work and I can only find it half the time. You can email me direct if you'd like: ethanfox369@gmail.com, sorry if I'm taking too much of your time.
    -Ethan

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