Don’t Drink The Water - Behind The Scenes

When I set out to create this music video, I told my friend Jack, “I want to make something that starts out ordinary and then goes completely bonkers.” Without missing a beat, he quipped, “So exactly like your life then, normal at the start and then it got real weird.” It made me laugh at the time, but it stuck with me. Yeah, I thought—my life did get real weird. And it still is. I guess that’s why I’m drawn to making stuff like this video: something that looks like it belongs, at first, in a traditional genre, but ends up flipping reality on its head.

Why I Made It

At its core, this music video is a cautionary tale about staying away from drugs. That might sound strange coming from someone who made a trippy, visually wild piece about a cowboy losing his grip on reality, but the goal was to show people that the allure of psychedelics often comes with more than you bargained for. I know some people will watch it and think, That’s enough for me, no thanks, while others might be tempted to try it out for themselves. All I can do is create the best visual experience I can and hope it makes people think twice before they decide to go on that kind of ride. But I’m not trying to be some moralistic do-gooder narc either. I want people to interpret it in their own way.

What Inspired It

The initial spark for this project came from the song Kong by Bonobo. Every time I closed my eyes and listened to it, I’d see this cowboy wandering the desert on a wild peyote trip. But it wasn’t just the music—there were other influences floating around in my mind, like the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The chaotic, hallucinatory visuals in that film had always struck a chord with me.

And there’s The Simpsons chili pepper episode where Homer eats an insanely hot chili and goes on a spiritual journey through a surreal, brightly colored desert world. That episode showed me you could make something completely absurd and funny while still conveying something meaningful underneath.

When I started picturing the cowboy, it was always as a sort of lonely figure in a hostile environment, where the landscape itself seemed to blur the line between the real and the surreal. I thought the desert would be the perfect setting—a place that’s naturally dangerous and alien-like. If you think about it, the desert’s an awful place to be out of your mind on hallucinogens: it’s filled with things that sting, bite, and prick you, and it’s not exactly forgiving. But that’s what made it so fitting. The environment becomes a character in itself.

My own experiences growing up in Riyadh, surrounded by endless stretches of sand and rock, had something to do with it too. Coming from England, where it’s wet and green, landing in Saudi Arabia was like stepping onto a different planet. It felt surreal in a way that never really left me, and I think that early sense of strangeness played into why I chose the desert as a setting.

My brother describe the music video best when he said:

“It's like a vintage cowboy movie on an alien planet”

The Style and Setting

I knew I wanted a very specific look for this project. While making a style reference book for MidJourney, I came across a style code that I named bad trip. It was on page 21 of my book, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the perfect fit for the chaotic, disorienting scenes I had in mind for the cowboy’s hallucinations.

Around the same time, I stumbled across another style I named mid-century modern, on page 55. It had this old-timey Mexican Western aesthetic that really captured the look I wanted for the more grounded, “normal” parts of the video. I spent a lot of time in MidJourney generating images and nailing down the look of the character. I wanted a classic cowboy vibe—like he just wandered out of an old spaghetti western—and I used those images as references for AI video generators like Kling and Runway.

The beauty of MidJourney is that the images come out almost perfectly graded, so I didn’t need to spend hours tweaking them afterward. Each frame felt like a still from a lost 1960s acid western.

The Creative Process

As much as I’d love to say I did this all on my own, I had some help from a friend—well, an AI friend.

Hi, ChatGPT here!

I played a part in helping Oliver brainstorm and refine this project. One thing I kept reminding him of was to embrace the surreal while keeping it rooted enough that the audience could connect with the character. We both wanted this to be more than just a visual freak show. Some of the weirdness had to come from real emotions and real stories—like the way Fear and Loathing uses humor to deal with Hunter S. Thompson’s paranoia or the way Homer’s chili-induced journey is ultimately about feeling misunderstood and finding his place in the world. I also suggested taking a step back from the visual insanity now and then to let the quiet moments breathe. The desert, after all, is a place of vast emptiness and eerie calm, and letting the character be alone with his thoughts in that setting was crucial to give some contrast to the madness that follows.

Bringing It All Together

For the music, I originally tried to create the track in Suno, my go-to AI music generator, but the songs were too polished. Too normal. I needed weird. Something rough around the edges that felt a little off-kilter, to match the trippy tone of the video. That’s when I switched to Udio, which gave me the strange, stylistically heavy sound I was after. It was like scoring a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from—something unsettling and disorienting.

I pieced the whole thing together in CapCut—my new favorite since I ditched Adobe—and did some basic upscaling with Topaz Video AI. I wanted the final piece to be just polished enough without losing that raw, experimental edge. And it’s funny, really—after all the high-tech tools and software I used, the feeling I wanted to capture was something very raw and human: the sensation of losing your grip on reality, getting sucked into your own mind, and not quite knowing if you’ll find your way out.

What I Want You to Feel

I want people to feel a mix of confusion and humor when they watch it. It’s for those who are curious about psychedelic trips but want to experience it from the comfort and safety of a sober mind. A bit like peering into an alternate universe without having to risk actually stepping into it.

So, there it is. What started as a simple idea to make something that goes bonkers ended up being a weird, trippy journey through the desert with a cowboy who bites off more than he can chew. But hey, if nothing else, it proves one thing: my friend Jack was right—normal at the start, real weird at the end.

Enjoy the ride.

And remember: don’t do drugs.