Coming Saturday: Interview with Nacho of Nacho Videos!
This Saturday, I’ll be posting my interview with Nacho, the British self-taught filmmaker behind the YouTube channel Nacho’s Videos. Nacho lives on a small island off the coast of Hong Kong, where he teaches early-morning yoga and quietly produces some of the most compelling Bowie-related video work you’ll find online. His channel has drawn over 30,000 subscribers and more than 15 million views—and if you’ve seen his videos, you’ll understand why. If you haven’t, I’ve embedded an excellent example of his work– restored footage of Bowie performing “Station to Station” in 1978 that will remind you not only how grateful we Bowie fans should be for nacho, but really why we like Bowie in the first place.
Nacho got his start restoring existing concert footage and music videos that, as he put it, “weren’t being done justice.” He noticed that many Bowie clips on YouTube were in rough shape—bad audio, poor sync, incomplete cuts—and began by cleaning those up. But very quickly, he moved into more creative territory. Today, his channel includes everything from restored performances to original “new” videos constructed from archival material. Sometimes he replaces mismatched or poor-quality audio with official live recordings. In other cases, he builds something from scratch—such as a video for “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise),” which he assembled from scattered live footage and film clips to accompany a rare concert audio track.
In our conversation, we discuss his involvement in the upcoming Back to Berlin tour (also known as the DAM Tour), which will reunite Bowie collaborators Carlos Alomar, George Murray, and Kevin Armstrong. Nacho’s video work is set to be featured in the shows—possibly even performed live in VJ-style setups—and he reflects on what it means to contribute to a tour where the missing presence is Bowie himself.
The interview will be up Saturday. Whether you already follow Nacho’s work or are discovering it for the first time, I think you’ll find it an insightful look into how one fan’s dedication evolved into something far more lasting. I’ll be featuring more of Nacho’s work this week, so keeping coming back and don’t miss out on the intevriew Saturday.