Natalie Imbruglia - Torn Upscale (VideoClip)

JUL 01 1997 · 12:00

Natalie Imbruglia - Torn Upscale (VideoClip) (1997) Director: Alison Maclean Era: Post-Britpop / Late-90s Confessional Pop (1997) - An era defined by emotionally raw female singer-songwriters and the UK's crossover of art-house sensibility into mainstream pop video production. Exceptionally high. One of the most formally distinctive and culturally enduring music videos of the 1990s, representing the rare intersection of art-house directorial ambition (Maclean's deconstructive single-shot concept) and mainstream commercial success. The 4K remaster preserves a work that has sustained continuous cultural relevance across three decades, making it a priority archive acquisition for any study of late-analogue music video aesthetics, confessional pop, or the post-Britpop era. Context: Released 27 October 1997 on RCA Records as the debut single from Natalie Imbruglia's Left of the Middle, 'Torn' arrived at the height of the post-Britpop female artist boom, when labels sought emotionally direct female voices in the vein of Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crow. The song, itself a cover of Ednaswap's 1995 recording, became a defining artifact of late-90s confessional pop, peaking at #2 in the UK (held off only by Aqua's 'Barbie Girl') and spending eleven consecutive weeks atop the US Billboard Radio Songs chart in 1998. It has since been recognised as one of the most-played songs on Australian radio since 1990 and was named the only 1990s track in Forbes' list of the UK's 40 most-played songs of the 2010s. The video's meta-cinematic strategy, using the visible mechanics of production to mirror the song's theme of illusion unravelling, made it an outlier in an era dominated by performance-clip and narrative formats. Director notes: Filmed 25 October 1997. Maclean's concept centred on a single locked-off shot of an apartment set, with the camera angle never changing throughout the video. The conceit, inspired in part by keeping cameras rolling during outtakes, presents Imbruglia and co-star Jeremy Sheffield as 'rehearsing' a romantic scene, with B-roll fumbles, missed lines, and the director physically stepping into frame to redirect them. During the final chorus, the apartment set walls are physically dismantled on-camera, literalising the song's emotional collapse. Imbruglia has cited Maclean's treatment as the reason she chose this concept, describing wanting something 'film-y'; she recalled leaving the shoot feeling it had captured 'a bit of magic' and that it wrapped ahead of schedule. The video's meta-cinematic self-awareness, exposing the apparatus of production, became one of the most iconic visual conceits in 1990s pop video.