The Chemical Brothers - Believe

MAY 02 2005 · 12:00

The Chemical Brothers - Believe (2005) Director: Dom & Nic (Dominic Hawley & Nick Goffey) Era: Mid-2000s Electronic Crossover Era (2005) - Peak of UK big beat/electronica colliding with post-punk indie; Chemical Brothers' Push the Button campaign bridging rave legacy with mainstream chart culture High curatorial value as a documented intersection of UK electronic and indie crossover, photorealistic mid-2000s VFX craft, and inadvertent industrial heritage documentation (Longbridge plant). The video's MTV EMA win for Best Video (2005) confirms its era-defining status, and its narrative ambition, functioning as a short film rather than mere promotional material, makes it an essential archive entry for both music video studies and British cultural history of the deindustrialisation period. Context: Released in May 2005 as the second single from The Chemical Brothers' fifth album Push the Button, 'Believe' arrived at a moment when UK electronic music was forging unlikely alliances with the ascendant post-punk indie revival. Featuring Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, then one of the most critically lauded British indie acts, the track embodied the era's cross-genre anxieties. The video's setting at the Longbridge MG Rover plant is historically charged: the factory closed permanently in April 2005 with the collapse of MG Rover Group, making the location an inadvertent document of British deindustrialisation. The robot-as-threat narrative taps into early-2000s automation fears predating mainstream AI discourse, while the aerobics spoof anchors it in contemporaneous pop-cultural self-awareness. Director notes: The video for 'Believe' was premiered on MTV on 18 March 2005. It was filmed on location at the MG Rover Longbridge plant (Birmingham), then still operational but soon to close, and across various London locations, lending the video authentic post-industrial atmosphere. The narrative follows a factory worker whose paranoia regarding automated assembly robots escalates into a hallucinatory chase. The video spoofs the aerobics aesthetic of Eric Prydz's 'Call on Me' (2004) in its opening storefront TV sequence. Visual effects and animation supervision were handled by Nicklas Andersson (animation supervisor) and Howard Sly (digital artist), per IMDb credits. The video was produced by John Madsen and edited by Tony Kearns. It won the MTV Europe Music Award for Best Video at the 2005 ceremony.