Music video: How Are You Doing? by The Living Sisters

The Living Sisters, three former solo artists, are not actually sisters, or even related to one another. Eleni Mandell, Inara George and Becky Stark’s music is based, by their own admission, on the “sheer joy of singing”, and listening to their charming, unflappably optimistic tune   How Are You Doing? is likely to be met with the response “a lot better now, thank you”. It’s not a complex song, its harmonious refrain lilting through it like a sweet scent on the breeze, nor is its video overwrought.

French quirk-icon Michel Gondry is behind the lens here, and his video is refreshingly simple and homespun; each of the trio is filmed at the same time, all on the phone talking and trying to get to the hospital where one of them is giving birth. Despite enduring all kinds of disastrous phenomena – from a plane crash to an earthquake to what appears to be an alien invasion – a smile never leaves their faces.

This being Gondry, of course, the catastrophes they endure are all comically captured using miniatures and handmade effects in a manner that reminds us of his brilliantly inventive movie Be Kind Rewind. This approach melds perfectly with the trio’s lovely vocals, and the result is a wonderfully judged video which works perfectly for its audio accompaniment; if you’re having a bad day, you’re unlikely to find a better cure for it than this.

Luke Grundy is a fervent assimilator of media living amid the bright lights of London, England. If he’s not watching films or listening to music, he’s probably asleep, eating or dead. An aspiring writer, journalist and musician, he is the creator of movie/music blog Odessa & Tucson and lives for epistemology.