La Roux - I'm Not Your Toy

What this video is

Released 27 September 2009 as the fourth and final single from La Roux's Mercury Prize-nominated, Grammy-winning debut album (Best Electronic/Dance Album, 2011), 'I'm Not Your Toy' arrived at the apex of a UK electropop wave that repositioned 1980s synth aesthetics — Eurythmics, The Human League, Heaven 17 — within a post-blog-house, post-Myspace indie-dance landscape. The song's Stylophone-driven Caribbean lilt…

Why it matters

Represents a defining visual document of UK electropop's commercial mainstream moment circa 2009, bridging art-pop conceptualism with accessible choreographed performance. The video's retrofuturist tropical aesthetic and dual-persona device contributed to La Roux's identity as a visually coherent…

The director

Alex Large and Liane Sommers are a British directing duo based in London and Berlin since 2000. They studied together at Nottingham Trent University — Sommers in Theatre Design, Large in Contemporary Art — and are founding members of the arts collective Gob…