Spacehog - Cruel to Be Kind

What this video is

Released in mid-1996 as the second single from Spacehog's debut album Resident Alien, 'Cruel to Be Kind' arrived at the peak of MTV alternative rock saturation. The band — four British men based in New York City — occupied an unusual transatlantic niche, blending Britpop's melodic hooks with American grunge's power chords and 1970s glam theatrics referencing David Bowie, T. Rex, Queen, and Slade. The video's church…

Why it matters

The video is a documented artifact of mid-90s neo-glam alternative rock, a short-lived counter-movement to grunge minimalism. Spacehog's theatrical staging and costume spectacle directly challenged the flannel-and-angst visual grammar of contemporaneous alternative MTV programming, making this…

The director

Zapp Friendly is a music video director credited on the 1996 Spacehog video 'Cruel to Be Kind,' as documented on IMDb (tt8861696). No further verified biographical or filmographic details were available from web sources at time of annotation.