Johnny Flynn reveals video for 'Raising the Dead' ahead of new album release - premiere

Exclusive: Singer-songwriter reveals visuals ahead of fourth album release

A still from the video for 'Raising the Dead'

Johnny Flynn is back and gearing up for the release of his fourth studio album Sillion.

The record was put together between Flynn's work as an actor, composer and time spent with his young family.

To keep fans content until Sillion's release on 24 March he's put together a beautiful video for the first single, 'Raising the Dead', which we're premiering on The Independent.

Check it out below:

Q&A with Johnny Flynn

How did the idea for this video come about?

I've been working with my friends Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz and Simon Ryninks on the visual elements of the record. Hanna is a photo journalist and a performer and Simon is a director who I worked with last year on a short. They are a couple and a wonderful force as a pair...we became friends and I thought it would be great to work with both of them together so that they could have a joint project and the three of us could make a series of films and images around the music.

Hanna's been taking the photos for the album artwork. We had very ambitious hopes to do a series of interlinking films with big, abstract themes and this film may be the first of those but because I've been in Prague doing a tv series we had to shoot something in pieces and kind of fit it together.

I liked the idea of the different strands of the story - the guy singing in his home with his kids etc and the girl on some kind of reconciliation mission. The girl is my sister Lillie and the guy is me... and that's my daughter Ida who was the first person to hear the song when she was a few months old and I sang it at the top of my lungs as she stared at me wide eyed. It's somehow about her.

What have you been listening to recently?

I've somehow gotten back into The Smiths after loving them and then dismissing them and now... it's about Johnny Marr really. Peruvian Chicha. A constant diet of old blues, gospel, country...

What are your plans for 2017?

To have more time. To align myself with a force for positive investment in the future of our race and our planet. It can feel like we're on a sinking ship at the moment. I'm keen to understand what hope there is for my children and their children and to teach that to them because right now I'm seeing the bleaker side of things.

What was the first gig you ever played and what’s been the best so far?

I had a series of jobs in the small fishing village in west wales where my family lived when I was a teenager. I worked as a fisherman in the day and then the skipper and his wife ran a small restaurant - she'd cook the fish he caught.

If I wasn't on the boat then I'd be serving in the cafe/bar and when the kitchen closed at night I would sit and sing songs with my guitar. The other fishermen from the village would come in and make requests. I sang Johnny Cash songs and old folk songs and some of my own. It was pretty much the perfect job.

I can't remember a 'best gig' and my brain doesn't work in absolute terms like that. Glastonbury in 2014... was it 14...? We played in the Avalon tent and I'd been up all night. It was the first time we had played as a 7 piece and I thought I would freak out because I hadn't slept but it was absolutely brilliant.

Sillion, the fourth record from Johnny Flynn, is out on 24 March 2017 , pre-order here