‘No Surprises’ by Radiohead is an iconic music video. In it we see frontman Thom Yorke submerged under water for a nail-bitingly long length of time, musing on the banality of life. “That looks dangerous” we thought. “Let’s do that…but with Handel.”

When Crispin first proposed the idea of staging a ‘pop video’ to reimagine Handel’s ‘Cara pianta’ from Apollo e Dafne, I remember thinking that sounded like a smart idea; opera has long exploited different cultural traditions to inform production values and there was plenty of scopes to play around with this. We wanted to produce a video that fully respected the music performed, but treat it in such a way that the door is opened to a wider appreciation online, with a particular emphasis on the younger audience that does not attend our concerts but may still very much appreciate our repertoire. Without trivialising or sensationalising any of the music, we wanted to focus on identifying a dramatic visual expression which served the ethos and score of the original.

However, when we discovered that the pop video that Crispin had in mind was the highly dangerous and technically challenging video No Surprises, you could say we were taken aback.

Handel’s ‘Cara pianta’ is the final setting in the story of a narcissist, Apollo, who expresses strong, unrequited love for a woman, Dafne. After being chased by Apollo, Dafne cries for help and is miraculously transformed into a laurel bush to escape Apollo’s advances. Upon seeing this, Apollo breaks down and mourns this change. Similarly, Radiohead’s No Surprises is tinged with grief as the singer contemplates the futility of life. When the water level rises over the singer, there is a visceral sense of claustrophobia, grief and loss; and the moment that the water subsides feels like the release from it is a baptism into a new life of wise manhood.

We recorded the music a few weeks prior to filming, to ensure the sound was of the highest quality, and then we filmed the death-defying video in Crispin’s cramped garden shed over a muggy summer’s weekend. Crispin constructed the ‘set’, complete with lighting fixtures, cameras and of course the astronaut helmet system that you see James wearing in the final video. We tested the draining system using a dummy head until we were sure that the system was safe. Despite our tests, there were still some challenges that we hadn’t anticipated. For instance, the diving helmet started to mist up with James’ breath so we had to have a heater pumping in warm air and when James’ hair started falling over his face, we had to grip it in place with hair gel.