Motörhead When The Sky Comes Looking For You

The rider’s bike thunders down a dusty desert road, no apparent destination and no apparent expectation.
The young hitchhiker girl waits, guitar and hope all wrapped up in warm, youthful exuberance.
Until she’s dead.
Just like that…
…and the rider continues towards the Excalibur Bar, where headbangers ’n’ drinkers, gambling thieves ’n’ rogues have gathered.
Biker? Devil? Devil biker? Death?
“What are ya gonna do now? roars Lemmy, and in the ensuing minutes, we see some answers to his questions.

“Life deals with you as it needs to. And when death comes looking for you amidst it all, there’s no date, no appointment, often no rhyme and usually no reason.
“When it comes, there’s nothing you can do,” says Pep Bonet, award winning photographer and director, “it’s placeless, timeless and ageless. It doesn’t care about any of those things, and it doesn’t care how young or old you are.”

Director Bonet (who has photographed Motörhead since 2008) made this all-digital short film in only a few October days, deciding to make the piece in his hometown of Majorca where he got 50 extras to meet at his friend Javi’s Excalibur bar, which has certainly hosted a few hundred bashes in its time (for what it’s worth, Javi got a war-pig tattooed in real-time on his arm by the Barcelona-based tattooist Javi Castaño (owner of Barcelona Electric Tattoo) during the shoot. The entire production was a labour of love and friendships for Bonet, whose editor Miguel Angell Font also helped write the script. The biker/death is played by Majorcan biker Santi Oliver.
“Santi’s father was the first Majorcan in a Olimpic Boxing games in London 1948 and wrestling European Champion explains Pep, “Santi himself was an addict for a while before escaping the clutches and becoming a blo-kart World champion since 2008.

Getting people in to shoot was a rapid task, the film being green-lit for production literally a week before the planned shoot-date. This saw Bonet reach out for 50 actors to come and hang at Excalibur drinking, smoking and double-dealing cards with each other via Facebook. This unsurprisingly led to over 500 requests!
“Once people were told the band wasn’t going to be there, that helped thin out the people we needed quite a lot,” explains Bonet, “that and when they realized it was in Majorca!”

It is Bonet’s first music video piece, and from its Sam Peckinpah’ like approach to the calm mystery of Santi Oliver, the style, frame and intriguingly off-kilter atmosphere all encapsulate the best elements of Bonet’s photography, which has won World Press Photography awards in 2002, 2007 and 2009. The feral ingredients of both human instinct and circumstance have long-been hallmarks of Bonet’s work, and have seen him in Sierra Leone, Haiti, Honduras, Brazil, South Africa and many other electrically-charged places and situations. Bonet has become a filmmaker with true verite qualities, and his short piece Into The Shadows (about the inner-city struggles of Johannesburg) saw him win another World Press Multimedia award, receiving first prize in the ‘Online short’ category.

When The Sky Comes Looking For You is the latest in a series of creative endeavors between Bonet, Motörhead and their label UDR GmbH, which have included Roadkill – Motörhead softback book, We The People Of Wacken which documented the fans of the festival and his instangram online photo-journalism from last year’s Wacken Festival.