Mansun - Taxloss

JUL 01 1997 · 12:00

Mansun - Taxloss (1997) Director: Roman Coppola Era: Britpop / Post-Britpop Alt-Rock Peak (1997) - Mid-period of UK alternative rock's commercial dominance; Mansun's fifth single from debut album Attack of the Grey Lantern, released April 1997 on Parlophone/EMI, charting at #15 on the UK Singles Chart. Exceptionally high. This video is a documented cultural artefact occupying the intersection of conceptual art, guerrilla filmmaking, and 1990s British alternative rock. Its total rejection of band performance, its use of a real-world public stunt generating authentic news coverage, and its direction by Roman Coppola, a canonised music video auteur, make it irreplaceable as a research object. The video's prescient anticipation of flash-mob and viral media culture, a full decade before those forms emerged, gives it strong cross-disciplinary value in media studies, cultural history, and art practice research. Context: Released April 1997 at the peak of Britpop's commercial saturation, 'Taxloss' and its video stood apart by abandoning the genre's characteristic performance-and-Swinging-London iconography entirely. Instead, Coppola orchestrated a real-world situationist stunt, distributing £25,000 in public, to generate authentic documentary material. The act engaged directly with Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite anxieties about money, greed, and public spectacle at a moment when New Labour's landslide election was weeks away (May 1997). Mansun's art-rock sensibility, noted for mixing progressive rock, psychedelia, and electronic elements within the Britpop era, found a perfect visual counterpart in a video that rejected pop artifice for sociological provocation. The stunt's news coverage integration is a prescient anticipation of guerrilla and viral media strategies that would not become mainstream for another decade. Director notes: Filmed on 17 April 1997 at Liverpool Street Station, London. Coppola deployed hidden cameras to capture production crew members, not the band, throwing £25,000 in £5 notes (each stamped with a red 'Taxlo$$' sticker) from the upper concourse onto commuters below. The band does not appear in the video. The finished edit documents the full arc of the stunt: cash withdrawal, operational preparation, the money drop itself, the crowd scramble, and subsequent UK news media coverage of the event. The concept was designed to literalise the song's themes of greed and financial absurdity. Producer: John Madsen. Editor: Simon Hilton (per IMVDb). The video predates the viral video and flash-mob era by nearly a decade, making it a landmark early example of a pre-planned media stunt designed to generate real-world news coverage as primary video content.