Maroon 5’s Adam Levine Admits ‘Sugar’ Video Was Staged

Maroon 5 is no stranger to controversy these days, and front man Adam Levine is coming clean over one of their most recent affronts.

According to an interview with the National, Levine admits that some of the wedding crashes performed by the band for their music video for “Sugar” were in fact staged, as had been reported previously by Inquisitr.

“I do want to clear up something about the video,” Adam said during the final days of Morocco’s Mawazine festival. “Half of the weddings we crashed and the other half were set up, we did that to cover our bases and to make sure we had all the footage. I would say 65 per cent of the video was real. It was crazy and a lot of fun.”

The controversy began shortly after Maroon 5’s music video for “Sugar” was released in January. In it, Adam and company seemingly surprise a number of Los Angeles couples by showing up and effectively “crashing” their weddings and performing. But soon after, it was revealed that the video itself may have been staged and the crashing fake.

A rep for Maroon 5 told Entertainment Tonight at the time that “only the grooms knew in each case” and “however they disclosed it to their bride and the wedding party, we’re not sure, but they all wanted it to be as equally a surprise as we did. They had stages set up for their actual wedding band already. All we did was some simple continuity changes to match each one as best we could.”

This isn’t the first controversy Maroon 5 has endured from material released off their latest album, V, either. More recently, the band released both a song and video that stirred up the masses. Their hit song, “This Summer’s Gonna Hurt” included some explicit lyrics in both the non-abbreviated title and the song itself, something not commonly found in the Maroon 5 catalog.

But even more striking was the reveal of Adam Levine’s bare butt in the video. Travis Schneider, who co-directed the Maroon 5 clip with Adam himself, was inspired, according to Entertainment Weekly, by a number of famous movies, including Martin Scorsese’s 1990 classic, Goodfellas, and Elton John’s “I Want Love” video, starring Robert Downey Jr.

“Ray Liotta as Henry Hill [in Goodfellas] leading his future wife into the Copacabana is one of the best shots of all time,” Schneider said. “We also spoke about [Alfred] Hitchcock’s Rope and a handful of music videos as well. Adam brought up Elton John’s ‘I Want Love’ video which Robert Downey Jr. is in and was done in one take. I knew immediately that I wanted it to feel like the music video for ‘Queer’ by Garbage that Stephane Sednaoui directed in 1995. It’s not one shot but the vibe, swagger, style and look is there. It’s one of the coolest feeling videos.”

It was also one of the most controversial, which is something Adam Levine and Maroon 5 are beginning to become accustomed to.

[Maroon 5 photo credit: Andrew Burton / Getty Images]