Mount Maunganui folk-rock duo Pig Island is a collaboration between songwriters and producers, Antony Jeffares and Luke Thompson.
Pig Island grew out of Antony Jeffares (pronounced ‘Jeff-ears’) and Luke Thompson’s winter songwriting sessions, which ended up turning into a full-length album (out later this year).
The duo is named after poet James K Baxter’s affably caustic term for New Zealand.
Both Anthony and Luke are musicians in their own right – Anthony as both a solo artist and one half of PleasePlease, and Luke as a solo artist with three albums under his belt.
The video for ‘Ordinary Lies’ was directed by Olive Jeffares and shot on super 8 film. It features Tauranga-based ceramic artist Jaime Jenkins playing a young woman who lives alone on an island.
Olive says she “wanted to explore someone who’s rejected the western world’s conventional standards”.
“The video is simply a fantasy of living in isolation, until one day, restless, [the young woman] decides to head into the village, only to find she is still restless and isolated. Almost as though there is no cure to these issues - whether living away from civilisation or in it we will still be faced with it.
“It was inspired by the scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert where Giuliana tells her son a story of a girl who lives on an island, in order to escape her own suffering in the ever-changing industrial landscape. I felt these themes aligned well with the themes of the song.”
