Elbow Recreate Godley & Creme’s Face-Morphing ‘Cry’ Video – With Help From Kevin Godley and Benedict Cumberbatch

Thirty-two years after Godley & Creme released the breakthrough “Cry” video — a pioneering clip that utilized analog cross-fading (face-morphing) years before Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video — Kevin Godley has revisited that technology for Manchester band Elbow’s “Gentle Storm” video.

Elbow’s remake (directed by Godley, who co-directed “Cry” with Creme) is a faithful shot-by-dissolving-shot homage to the original, with one major exception: Benedict Cumberbatch is one of the familiar morphing faces.

It was Elbow frontman Guy Garvey’s idea to remake Godley & Creme’s MTV classic. ‘‘‘Gentle Storm’ reminded me of something, but I couldn’t work it out for a bit, the yearning and the sparsity of the sound. When I worked out it was ‘Cry,’ I asked the rest of the band if they remembered the video, ’cause it was such a seismic event as a kid. [Bassist] Pete Turner and [guitarist] Mark [Potter] did, but [keyboardist] Craig Potter didn’t, and I realized that a lot of people wouldn’t know the track or the video, even though they were both so important to me.”

When Garvey got in touch with Godley — who hails from Prestwich, the same Manchester suburb as Elbow — Godley was “a bit puzzled” at first. “Why would he want something that was already out there?” Godley thought. “Then I realized ‘out there’ really meant out there since 1985, and a whole generation or three wouldn’t have seen the original, or have a clue who Godley & Creme were, so to a world of millennials it would probably be, ‘Who the f***?’”

Godley says the video shoot for “Gentle Storm,” which features Elbow’s friends and family, along with Cumberbatch, wasn’t much different from the original “Cry” shoot in 1985. “I didn’t really have to direct anyone … everything felt real, nothing felt forced, and there were no f***ups, no tantrums … In fact, the only difference between this shoot and ‘Cry’ was the major technological advance of steadying people’s heads with a sink plunger instead of a saucepan,” he quips.

If you’re unfamiliar with the original — which was up for Video of the Year, Best Concept Video, and Viewer’s Choice at the 1986 VMAs, but lost out to equally groundbreaking videos by Dire Straits and a-Ha — check it out above, along with Elbow’s version, which is just as powerful three decades after the debut of “Cry.” Elbow’s seventh album, Little Fictions, is out Feb. 3.