First official fan-made music video

Alternative rock trio Placebo (Belgium/Sweden/UK) were so impressed by fan Grégoire Pinard's (South Africa) self-made claymation video for "English Summer Rain" that they decided to use it as the official promotional video when the reworked track was released as a single in 2004. Inspired by Placebo's Reading Festival performance in 2003, the part-time director took six months to create the video, which features modelling clay puppets of Brian Molko, Stefan Olsdal and Steve Hewitt performing the song. Pinard also made many other clay objects that appear in the video, including guitars, a microphone stand, drum kit and books on a bookshelf. While many fans upload their own videos and claim that they are "official", Pinard's "English Summer Rain" was the first (and perhaps most noteworthy) video adopted by an act and remains one of only a few examples of music videos made by fans that were used for official promotional use, although the practice has now become more fashionable thanks to the popularity of video-sharing websites like YouTube. In 2010, Dutch DJ Tiesto (aka Tijs Verwest) challenged his fans to create a "crowd-sourced music video" using their mobile phones which became the official clip for his single "Work Hard, Play Hard", and a clip for "My Shadow" was used by Keane (UK) in the same year. In 2013, Iceland's Sigur Rós launched a fan-made video for the track "Stormur", and also in 2013 Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros (USA) adopted a fan-made video for "In the Lion".

"English Summer Rain" was the fourth single from Placebo's fourth studio album, Sleeping with Ghosts (2004). It was released by Hut Recordings and peaked at No.23 on the UK's Official Singles Chart on 6 March 2004.

As of 11 December 2013, Pinard's video had been watched more than 500,000 times on YouTube.

In 2004, Placebo were Brian Molko (b. Belgium), Stefan Olsdal (b. Sweden) and Steve Hewitt (b. UK). As of December 2013, the band consists of Molko, Olsdal and Steve Forrest (b. USA).