Magnet & Gemma Hayes - Lay Lady Lay

What this video is

Released as a single in March 2004, this cover of Bob Dylan's 1969 classic arrives at a pivotal moment in British and European indie culture — the height of the post-Britpop acoustic-folk crossover that produced artists like Damien Rice, David Gray, and Snow Patrol. Magnet (Norwegian songwriter Even Johansen) represented a Scandinavian current of introspective folk-pop that found significant UK audiences on labels…

Why it matters

This video is a significant artefact of early-2000s European indie-folk crossover aesthetics, documenting the reinterpretation of classic rock canon (Dylan) through a Scandinavian-Irish folk-pop sensibility. It captures director Scott Lyon at the start of his celebrated music video career,…

The director

Scott Lyon is a British director and Central St Martin's graduate who won the Vogue Young Photography Award before transitioning from fashion photography to music video direction in the early 2000s. He directed videos for Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian, Mark…