New video: Marina and the Diamonds

Q: What do the lyrics of Marina and the Diamonds' singles teach us?

A: Obsessions tells us "we've got obsessions" which "make us weak". I Am Not A Robot assures the listener that it's okay to have insecurities. Hollywood trashes the American dream as a "golden lie", and Mowgli's Road is something to do with spoons.

All of these are meaningful'n'important life lessons, I am sure you will agree. Especially the one about spoons.

But, as Tori Amos once said, "what's so amazing about really deep thoughts"? We're here for the tunes, and Marina has them in spades. Day-glo flourescent spades with sparkly handles, which dig up gems from melody beach, and tip them onto a pop conveyor belt where they are crushed and remolded into pop diamonds*.

Her new single is "Oh No", which was a last-minute addition to the Family Jewels album. So last minute, in fact, it was absent from a lot of review copies. It was recorded with Greg Kurstin (Kylie, Lily Allen, Britney) and it's a foot-stomping, melodramatic corker.

Like a distillation of Marina's previous songs, Oh No is about self-image, rejecting fame, fear of failure, acting like a machine and wanting to "make a change" (the nature of the change is unspecified, but this endearingly barmy blog post might help).

The video is superb - from the daffy dance routine to the scene where Marina eats an actual money sandwich. See if you can spot all the vintage fashion magazines pastiched by the props department. I noticed The Face and (I think) Sky. Plus, the single cover - like all of Marina's current artwork - is a tribute to Andy Warhol's Interview magazine.

Marina and the Diamonds - Oh No!


* Do you see what I did there?

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