Howard Greenhalgh

Howard Douglas Greenhalgh (born 19 February 1963 in Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire) is a British director of music videos and advertising.[1]

Greenhalgh studied at the Royal College of Art, setting up the firm Why Not after graduating.[2] He came to prominence in the early 1990s with his direction of the music video for the Snap! song "Rhythm is a Dancer".[3] Greenhalgh then was hired by the Pet Shop Boys to direct videos for their successful album Very and later its follow-up Bilingual. His work has also included the video for George Michael's song 'Jesus To A Child', several videos for Muse, Placebo, Soundgarden and others.[4][5][6]

His videos for Very make extensive and early use of computer animation and blue screen to create environments of geometric shapes and patterns in which the group members Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are inserted.[7][8] Lowe said in retrospect that he felt that computer games had a strong appeal to a young audience and that copying their design styles could be successful: "The big game was Sonic The Hedgehog and I liked this game where the audience, when a goal was scored, all started dancing. I was playing computer games a lot, thinking, 'This is what the kids are into…wouldn’t it be great if we became this thing removed from reality and existing in a non-real world?'"[3] Spin magazine described these videos as "routinely rejected" by MTV, a reference to their rock-oriented programming at the time.[9][10] His clip for the song "Liberation" was later reused in the 2000 animation anthology CyberWorld.[11] He later directed the video of Soundgarden's song 'Black Hole Sun', attracting attention in the United States; in 1995, Spin magazine awarded him a reader's choice award for best video for this.[12][9][13]

Describing his approach to music video direction, Greenhalgh said in a 2010 interview that "With anything, it’s the lyrics that are everything. You pray that there are good lyrics in a track because that leads you immediately to what you’re going to do."[14]