Before my trip, my friend Caroline sent me a link to the INXS video, Never Tear Us Apart, which had been filmed in Prague. It’s a great song, a beautiful video, and Prague shows up really well in it.

I wanted to walk in as many of the places as possible from the video. I used a great article from LivingPrague.com as my guide. Between that and a little of my own detective work I can say that I followed in their footsteps, walking in all the Prague locales from the video.

The opening scene, the cemetery scene, and other scenes are filmed in and around the Jewish Quarter.

The second scene is filmed on Strelecky Ostrov (the Czech name), or Shooters Island (the name Living Prague provided), an island in the Vltava River. I went there specifically because of the video and had a lovely experience watching people feed the swans, ducks and “capybaras”. (Look for an upcoming post about those “capybaras”.) It was also there that I saw the rainbow over Charles Bridge and took a ton of shots, three included here.

At 1:25, when you hear “two worlds collided”, you see two buildings through the trees. It amused me because I was trying to get that shot without (or with less of ) the trees but it really wasn’t possible.

As noted in the Living Prague article, the part of the video (at 1:40 in) where Michael Hutchence sings “we could live… a thousand years” with such great passion is the most difficult area of the video to locate in Prague. But Living Prague did – in Little Venice – and I did today, walking under the bridge and around the Little Venice area until I located the exact spot…or at least I think so. What do you think?

There are several scenes on Charles Bridge in the video. I would guess that Charles Bridge is one of, if not the, most photographed spots in Prague. To that end, I’ve included a few of my own shots of the Bridge.

After reading the Living Prague article, I imagined that the old guy who has a cameo at 2:21 is a Communist official who’s keeping an eye on the whole production. I don’t think he likes it, lol. Just my imagination, of course, but feels like a fit to me.

The view at 2:28 is from the top of the Castle Stairs from what is now part of a Starbucks (yes, groan, they really are everywhere). I did a little digging here as well to locate the exact view, and in my picture you can see the same building as was in the background in the video. The surrounding area seems a bit different now but the building is the same.

The saxophone solo is filmed in the Old Jewish Cemetery in the Jewish Quarter. It’s a beautiful, haunting, dilapidated-yet-still-elegant place. I walked around the entire cemetery (within the bounds of the publicly accessible areas) but I could not locate the exact spot in the cemetery where the solo was filmed. I do know exactly where the street view is that immediately follows the solo, as the camera lowers down from the cemetery. As noted in Living Prague, it is an area where several street vendors now have stalls.

The Living Prague article didn’t specifically mention the location of the stairs in the scene at 3:16. I was annoyed that I didn’t know where it was but then, serendipitously, I found it while paging through the guide book I got from my driver, Jaromir from Prague Airport Transfers. I walked up the stairs, watched the video once or twice from the top and located the exact area from the video.

The ending scene begins with a view of the Astronomical Clock; it’s a very popular area so I only have one shot that isn’t totally degraded because of all the people. (People, ugh; ruining photographs the world over with their overwhelming presence, lol.) From there, it pans over to one of the buildings in Old Town Square.

That’s the end of the video and the end of my walk with INXS. I hope its inspired someone to visit Prague and do their own walk.

Much thanks to the folks at Living Prague for the great article! I couldn’t have done it without them.