the duvet brothers
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A Partial History of the Duvet Brothers by Rik Lander (work in progress)
How the Duvet Brothers got their name. Peter gave me a call. It was spring 1984 and I had just started as an engineer at Diverse. “I’ve got hold of a video camera. Come down to Holland Park and we’ll do something.” It was the first time we’d touched a camcorder – they were quite new – and it was the first time we’d made anything together. We knew each other well by then from the Colchester Film Workshop which Peter had set up. He was definitely the best film maker I’d met. I’d only met about three. He thought he was Polanski. His 16mm and Super-8 films like Real People and The Drug Victim were brilliantly dark and surreal.
I was the only person he knew who could match his energy and imagination and I’d got used to him by then. He seemed to live in a state of abstraction, both aesthetically and personally. My creativity was contained within social conventions, Peter’s was blurting out in all directions. But even on this first shoot in the park we settled into a creative balance. We made a parody of a pop promo and woman who’s boyfriend’s camera it was, typed in the name Duvet Brothers as the name of the band. We cut it VHS to VHS using insert edit to Motorcade by Magazine. The camera had an invert button and slo-mo playback. Our use of colourisation and slo-mo where established there and then. Airhole / Real People / Drug Victim / Secure – Pre-Duvet videos I bought my first super-8 camera in the summer of 1982 when I was twenty-two. Airhole contains the first roll of super-8 I shot walking out the gate at the end of my parent’s garden near Colchester. I ran down the lane filming my feet and into the fields treating the camera as an extension of my blinking gaze. I span round and filmed the shape the horizon made as it blurred. I shot until the film ran out and then I fell over. The rest of Airhole was filmed with Giles Smith, who now writes car reviews for the Guardian, as the man in the coat at the Minories art centre. I was interested in taking simple actions and breaking them into blinked fragments. This is one of the conceptual starting points for my version of scratch, before the Duvets and the use of found footage. The aim was to take the fragments and organise them in a musical way. The cuts are the beat and the movements within the shots become associated with the instrumentation. The images represent the sound. The approach was quite mathematical but it becomes emotive because we crave meaning from images. You can see this visual/sonic equivalence clearly in the bungee sequence in Pump up the Volume or the missile sequence in Blue Monday. I met Peter Boyd that summer because he ran the film workshop at the Minories. I found him both friendly and anti-social. He thought he has Polanski. His 16mm and Super-8 films and animations like Real People and The Drug Victim were brilliantly dark and surreal. Peter was the best film maker I’d met. I’d only met about three. He knew all the interesting and unapproachable people in town. We didn’t have much to do with each other at first, I just started editing my Super-8 films including making a promo, Secure, for a band called the Reasonable Strollers. It was a terribly difficult thing to do given that there was no Super-8 pic-sync. I had to send off the soundtrack to be recorded on magnetic stock then mark where I wanted the cuts on the mag stock, take it out of the machine and cut out the same number of frames from the film stock. It is one way to learn exactly how long a frame is. I edited Airhole a year later at Diverse Production where I got a job as an engineer after college. I taught myself to video edit with Airhole. The coloured rectangles were my first use of a vision mixer. How the Duvets got their name / Torchsong - Don’t Look Now I spent so much time at the workshop Peter and I got to know each other. When we both moved to London in 1983 Peter called me up saying he’d managed to borrow a camcorder from a friend. This was the first time we’d ever touched one. We went to Holland Park and pretended to make a promo. The camera had an invert button and a titling tool. For some reason this woman put the Duvet Bros in for the name of the band. I think it was because she was having an affair with Peter. Then we did an instant edit using the camera and another VCR to the soundtrack of Magazine’s Motorcade. A while later Peter told me he’d shown it to a band and they wanted us to remake the promo but with them in instead of Peter poncing around. The band were Torchsong, the song was Don’t Look Now and we got £3,000 cash. The reason there are so many effects in that promo is because William Orbit was self-conscious about his appearance and wanted us to hide his face as much as possible. The third person in the promo is Grant Gilbert, the band’s manager, he didn’t play on the records but in a classic 80’s way they thought it was entirely legitimate that the manager should be part of the band. Peter Donebauer / Videokalos One of the owners of Diverse was Peter Donebauer who had been a video art pioneer in the 70’s. His thing was slow, endless, trippy feedback visuals often performed live using a huge video synthesiser called a Videokalos. We used it to full effect on the Torchsong promo. Peter D was very encouraging of the Duvets although I don’t think he knew just how many hours of headwear we put his kit through. Blue Monday / Performance / Oni Baba Blue Monday took ages to make in evenings and weekends from material gathered from the Diverse video library. Peter was making things like Performance (x2 versions) and Oni Baba on VHS at college. Performance is a classic of speech scratch where edits are used to highlight inflection and exaggerate underlying emotion. It is brilliantly annoying the way it keeps looking back on itself. Oni Baba is all about rhythm and movement. The nature of the images and sound give it a sense of developing threat. I find it very beautiful and musical and infinitely intriguing. When I’d finished Blue Monday I went to Manchester to show it to New Order but foolishly allowed myself to be diverted into a visit to Ikon who made all of New Order’s videos. They were very worried that I was encroaching on their territory as they were filming their own (inferior) promo at the time. The band were away. They later commented on the video in Melody Maker. War Machine / War Machine Guns Like Don’t Look Now, this was a full collaboration. It started with the flashing guns then we cut in material from Vietnam and an ad for a magazine called War Machine. We used an extended version of the intro as the opening for the live show at the Fridge and as the opening for Pillow talk. Bruno de Florence / The Fridge / Scratching for a New Texture / Horses / Opening Seq The Duvet Brothers formed in response to an invitation to present a show at the video lounge of the Fridge club in Brixton. We did our show on 11th August, 1984 and we called it Scratching for a New Texture. Thierry Henry reminds me of Bruno. We spent most of the summer doing all night edit sessions to get the show together. We made an Duvet title sequence out of archive clips and bits of Pete’s surrealist back catalogue. Peter cut Horses out of his Super-8 material. How Scratch got its name I can’t remember when we found out what we were doing was scratch or that we were part of a movement. Certainly when we saw the work of Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher, George Barber and Gorilla Tapes it was uncanny that so many people had been experimenting in the same area without knowing that the others existed. In my mind a journalist called Pat Sweeney came up with the name scratch, but scratch video may have already existed as a named form in the US. Andy Lipman ran a City Limits cover story on Scratch Video in October 1984 where he tried to create the myth that scratch was made by disaffected youth taping the TV and reediting it on VCR’s at home. If anyone knew this was not the case it was Andy. He was one of the few people who had actually met all the people involved. Dessa Fox in the NME tried a similar hype when she suggested that scratch video was a televisual punk rock. Duvet Bros are gay A lot of people assumed we were gay because our work was shown a lot at Heaven. Stuart Marshall had set up a very cool editing and image processing booth overlooking the dance floor. It had the best video set up of any club. I remember seeing Blue Monday remixes screened in there and Constantine Giannaris, who now makes feature films in Greece, remembers being given Pillow Talk to re-edit by Stuart. It was good to see the work messed with like that, the scratchers scratched. A few years later half a generation of video pioneers died through Aids. Andy Lipman wrote our first review and got me my first job as a director in television. Bruno kicked it all off for us. The man who’s camcorder we borrowed. The great motivator, Stuart Marshall. Pat Sweeney died around that time too. Blue Monday / Miners strike / The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video Volume I / Pillow Talk Blue Monday was our kind of hit. It was both critically acclaimed and popular although it was seen by very few people compared to if it had been the official promo, it was seen by more people than most video art works. It was screened on Channel 4 in September 1985. Mainly it did the rounds of video festivals but it was also seen by some real people due to it being included on tapes sent to miners organisation for screening at all sorts of events to do with the miners strike. It was part of an Arts Council touring show Subverting TV and was also, along with War Machine on George Barber’s compilation, The Greatest Hits of Scratch Video Volume I. We put out our own compilation tape called Pillow Talk which merged just about everything we’d made to that point. It has the promos, the abstract stuff, the comedy scratches and the hard political stuff. For good measure it also had a couple of dramas on the end, Real People and Breakside. In his review, Andy Lipman, accused us of ‘too many late nights in the edit suite’. Take It When we tried to get permission to screen Take it (I, II & III) on TV we were refused. Who knows why. The feeling is great when something this simple and powerful comes together. It’s like what Barabara Hepworth says about a piece of rock – that there’s a form inside the material that you have to reveal with your hacking and tapping. With scratch there’s a sense of chipping away and layering and moulding an existing form into something new. Art world status Scratch video divided the video art establishment. Video Art was twenty years old and from hugely inventive beginnings a lot of what I saw at that time was very long, slow and boring. It was often ponderous and self-serious and the people who supported this kind of work hated scratch. Mike O’Prea wrote in 1986 that scratch temporarily hijacking video art was only possible because it had fallen into such a dismal state. For the video art cognoscenti scratch was too like TV and video art was supposed to be the opposite of TV. But we saw scratch as video art that could play to a TV audience, not just a self-selecting elite. I once sat with one of the ponderous video artists at a dinner party at Terry Flaxton’s in the early 90’s as she told me that she taught her students that scratch wasn’t really video art, but merely an editing technique. I confirmed this for her when I said that our entire output was a series of experiments in communication. “There,” she said, “I knew I was right.” In the 80’s video art was a separate world from contemporary art, separate festivals, separate venues, separate institutions. In the mid 90’s, around the time Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing won the Turner Prize in consecutive years, video became just another medium and video art merged with the new art mainstream. The divide between populist and anti-populist form in video still persists today, indeed it’s works that combine the two that are the pieces that are most popular today. Simple imagery, very long loops. It’s a time based medium you see, so long means it is not knowable, which is profound. Short, sharp, shocks are still not the done thing. Distribution / Nostalgia Our work was never properly distributed. For the last twenty years the only pieces that have been available are Blue Monday and War Machine as part of a LVA/LEA/LUX scratch package. The Arnolfini may still have a VHS of Pillow Talk. Our other pieces and the multi-screen work is only known to people who saw it at the time. This site is part of a belated remedy. I am still ambivalent about returning to this work. It is hideously nostalgic and nostalgia is epidemic and dangerous what with all those 70’s and 80’s rock bands and 90’s DJ’s making comebacks. Peter and I had a nostalgia/regret conversation over and over every time we met for years. The reason I can write this now is because we moved beyond that loop. I read recently that sampled music is intrinsically nostalgic; sampling James Brown or referencing Aretha Franklin is a harking back to a purer musical age just as every ecstasy pill is a nostalgia for the first. Scratch video, despite it’s common roots in Hip Hop is anything but. We’re not nostalgic for the ‘voice of Britain’ or the school where girls learn to laugh. Scratch was about raw critique of the meaning given to the footage we plundered. The lies on TV news were so blatant and the scratch technique enabled us to expose the lie and reveal the true meaning within by repetition and juxtaposition. V-V-V-V-Vertov. Laughing Girls / Working methodology I love Laughing Girls because it has just one source that is repeated, reversed, slowed and speeded. The original intent of the original film-makers is shredded. Laughing girls becomes amusing, annoying, disturbing and finally oppressive and psychotic depending on how long and how loud we dare run it. The target is the viewer. There’s nothing cosy between you and us. Sure it’s entertaining, but it’s unsettling too. It fucking works and it’s not ponderous. When we were putting together the first show we had two online suites running at the same time. I started messing with this and Pete came in and got it straight away. It happened quickly; means, motive, opportunity and alibi – each other. When we worked together instead of pulling in different directions, the energy, the ideas, the possibilities would escalate. Sulphate, beer, tobacco, dope. Usually we didn’t preview edits we just did them, but in the roll back time, I’d find myself taking a drag or a slurp. Self-medication to maintain the high through the night without blurring the eye. It could be a hugely technical process, sometimes rewiring the whole system backwards to create effects for Torchsong – Don’t Look Now or Colourbox – Shotgun. Sometimes I’d work all day, leave, meet Pete in the pub or the Italian, wait till everyone had gone, do an all nighter, leave at six, have a fry-up and report for duty at nine. The three hour gap was to let the smoke clear. Colourbox – Shotgun / Sid Presley Experience Peter shot the Colourbox promo at his college then edited it at Diverse. I just wired up the feedback effects. The Sid Presley Experience promo was something that Peter inherited from someone he’d helped out on the shoot. We cut it into a great little promo, but when we put it on Pillow Talk the band started threatening us and we had to take it off. We got a letter from their lawyer and then we went to visit them in a Tulse Hill council flat. They said things like, “If you don’t take it off, the next time you see us will be in court.” This may have been prompted by Dessa Fox goading people to sue us in her NME article. Virgin / the ethos of Diverse Virgin was never going to be another Blue Monday. It had a dub reggae soundtrack, not the biggest hit of the year. It had shots of dead bodies. It was conveying a complicated message. It was pushing the form towards documentary. At Diverse as an engineer and later, briefly as an editor, I was surrounded by documentarists working under the radical ethos that impartiality was an illusion and each programme or item should admit its bias. In programmes like The Friday Alternative and Diverse Reports, balance was to be made over the series of rather than in each programme. Hence I worked on films giving the point of view of the residents of Broadwater Farm one week and a right wing libertarian polemic that said black people will never be free of racism until they own their own businesses the next. The left wing programmes tended to be better because the right wingers were so unattractive in almost every way. Richard Belfield and Christopher Hird’s film on Reagan’s policy in South America was hugely influential on Virgin. The Diverse video library was getting a constant stream of new material and Phil Windeat was always keen to see the Duvets mash it up. He’d come down holding a tape and say, “I think you might like this.” The best sequence in Virgin is the section with the rocking hammock and the limousine. I’d been working on the whole thing for weeks and was getting bogged down and defensive. Pete came into the edit suite one night when he’d run out of things to cut next door and said, “That bit’ll be good.” We tweaked it up together beautifully. Psycho Circus at the Electric Ballroom The Reasonable Strollers became Psycho Circus and when they supported Nick Cave at the Electric Ballroom in November ’84 I did the visuals. I had bought a load of reconditioned teles at OTV and humped them round to gigs. They didn’t last long. For this I did two channels of images and made a piece of Normal Tebbit being pulled from the rubble of the Brighton bomb. I scratched back and forth over his face caught in a photographers flash. I was nervous as to what the reaction might be. In the end it was somewhere between hostility and indifference. Everyone wanted the main act. Help Neither of us owned a video camera so if one of us had a camera for some reason something would happen. I’d hired a camera to video a friend’s wedding and Help occurred the night before in my flat. It was an appeal for funds for electro-music therapy. I screened it at a miners fundraiser in a squatted pub called Cuddly Toys in Kings Cross in July ’85 and a woman was so disturbed by the references to electro-convulsive therapy that she cut herself and smeared blood on the screens. I haven’t shown it since, except for the teeth part. Image Factory / Edinburgh International Television Festival / Samco Peter was at Saint Martins college in Charing Cross road and spent a lot of time hanging out in Soho. All the jobs we got were through his talent for shmoozing. That’s how we got the Torchsong promo and the Fridge gig. Even though he was still a student and I had a day job, Peter got us signed to a company called the Image Factory, run by Peter Nolan who was best known for having produced a soft-core masterpiece called Giselle. The best scene was when a couple make love in a field inspired by copulating horses. Nolan had the backing of Virgin to turn promo directors into commercials directors. He had Tim Pope and us. The first job was a corporate video for Samco Sunglasses. Peter directed the shoot and we edited together at Diverse. It was hugely groundbreaking for a corporate video. We showed it at the Edinburgh TV festival when we appeared there on a panel about scratch video in August 1985. I have since met a corporate video director who told me that seeing that video in Edinburgh was why he went into corporates. I can only apologise. I think we were regarded as a director/editor team by Image Factory and I wasn’t happy with that. It played on my insecurity. Peter was a natural on the set and I was a natural in the edit, but I wasn’t happy to accept a lower status. Music Box Idents The next job was to make twenty idents for a London based rival to MTV called Music Box. Peter Nolan got hold of a 1 inch tape of Nasa and Russian space footage and some Eastern European classical music on the basic premise that it was all copyright free. A few of the idents turned out good, mostly they were annoying cut-ups of the presenters. We recut a couple of pieces together to make a new intro for the live show at the Limelight. The Callender Company / Fizzy Ribena Around this time, August 1985, I got invited to meet a producer called Colin Callender. The connection was that Jon Savage, who was a style journalist, had picked up on the buzz around scratch and the Duvet Brothers. I arrived late and complained that their office wasn’t very easy to find. My arrogance knew no bounds in those days. We had a few more meetings and Callender wanted us to sign. We pointed out that we were already signed and Callender was so keen he offered us a retainer of a grand each a month, that is, we’d get paid even if we didn’t work. Great for us, but ultimately not for Colin Callender. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to work, it was just that we weren’t very tame, or sympathetic to commercial concerns. Callender didn’t know how to handle us. We were put up to direct a commercial for fizzy Ribena. We did the meeting, giving our directorial response to the creatives idea as we were supposed to, but Peter couldn’t resist offering his own idea at the end. “Actually, I’ve got a much better idea...” Silence. Tumbleweed. “There’s a monkey in a tree and he starts singing, ‘Yes, we have no bananas.’” Distant rumble of imminent volcano. “There are no bananas in Ribena, get it?” It is very rare that you actually witness steam coming out of someone’s ears. We had to literally run out of there. Another time CC shouted at me to pay attention during a meeting at an Ad agency. I remember thinking that his shouting was more likely to undermine our credibility than me looking at the artwork on the wall. We joined them in January 1986 and did a few good jobs for them. It meant that I was able to leave Diverse and do the Duvets full time. We were looked after by Tracey Scoffield who later had Hanif Kureishi’s twins and was given a mauling in his novel Intimacy. She used to call me Bandy, which annoyed the fuck out of me. Greatest Hits of Scratch Video Volume II / Perfect Scratch / Champagne Greatest Hits of Scratch Video Vol II had a few pieces of ours. Perfect Scratch which is one of my least favourites segued into one of my favourites, Champagne, made up from Capstan commercials. It is funny, suggestive and slightly disturbing. Mostly I like its musicality. In a few pieces I felt I’d made genuine video-musical compositions. This is one, also Quarry and Harry. (Perfect Scratch and Champagne are sometimes known collectively as Chat show.) Blue in Heaven – I just Wanna We flew out to Cork with a couple of super-8 cameras and a load of stock to film with the band. I remember wondering what we were going to film. “Don’t worry about it,” Peter said. He didn’t have a clue either, but that didn’t bother him. We turned up and found some corridors in their hotel which were off limits and just started filming straight away. And a basement with a crucifix in. Peter was and remains excellent at making things happen and getting people to perform. The next day we filmed the gig. There is a perception that Scratch video is cutting technique and has to use found footage. Gorilla Tapes seemed to apply this as a rule only allowing themselves to shoot burger boxes or condom packets. We followed no such rule and innovated in filming techniques too. Compare Blue in Heaven with other promos of the time. The notable technique is the BWP (blurry whip pan), that is not filming the subject, but letting the camera quickly pan over and around the subject, then slo-mo the result. You see this technique on Newsnight nowadays, but it has to be remembered that promos were still generally shot with steady cameras in 84/85/86. Soho in the 80’s / BLFA The 80’s in Soho was a time of great upheaval and absurd possibilities. Like every age it was a time when young people thought they could do everything better than the people who were actually running the show. In the 80’s some of the people who were running the show agreed and actually let Soho idiots do stupid things with their industries. Thatcher was a huge spanner in the national works, destroying the power of the unions and trying to undermine monolithic state institutions like the NHS and BBC. The market was creating all sorts of problems for British industry and in desperation they sometimes turned to the ever expanding creative sector to help them out. The British Shoe Federation was a body that represented Britain’s struggling shoe manufacturers. They were in trouble, feeling they had lost touch with the market. They let a Soho consultancy come up with a ‘new concept’ in retailing that would save their bacon. Forget everything you know, you Northampton hicks, go with the Soho coca flow. BLFA was one of the most absurd and doomed attempts to reinvent the wheel ever undertaken. There would be four ranges, Basic, Leisure, Flash and Action. Since women often choose men’s shoes for them, men’s and women’s shoes would be jumbled up in the store, products would only be divided into the four price ranges. We were given a huge wadge of money just to make videos to be shown in this soon to be successful chain of high street stores. Man or Dog was made to be shown in a shoe store called BLFA. The 80’s was a time of great upheaval and absurd possibilities, particularly in Soho. Like every age it was a time when young people thought they could do everything better than the people who were actually running the show. In the 80’s some of the people who were running the show agreed and actually let Soho idiots do stupid things with their industries. The British Shoe Federation represented Britain’s struggling shoe manufacturers. They let a Soho consultancy come up with a ‘new concept’ in retailing that would give them access to the youth market. Forget everything you know, you Northampton hicks, go with the Soho coca flow. BLFA was one of the most absurd and doomed attempts to reinvent the wheel ever undertaken. There would be four ranges, Basic, Leisure, Flash and Action and since women often choose men’s shoes for them, men’s and women’s shoes would be jumbled up in the store. We were given a huge wadge of money just to make videos to be shown in this soon to be successful chain of high street stores. BLFA / Man or Dog I set up a VHS edit suite in a spare room, gathered a load of cheap footage and started playing. I’d cut a couple of pieces called Judges and started hacking up a sequence of a man going mad from Dead of Night. Separately I was messing with some dancing dogs. After a couple of days I was slightly tired and dazed and showed the bits to Peter and he said, “What are you doing? That goes with that.” Man or Dog was born. I visited the pilot store in Chester a month after it had opened. The manager told me it was a disaster. He was particularly pissed off with the soundtrack of the video, Colourbox, Cocteau Twins, Fela Kuti, Erik Satie. “Who the hell chose the music?” “God knows. Twats, eh?” They opened and closed the two pilot stores within six months. Open the Box By 1986 everyone else was doing scratch title sequences so we were glad to be paid to do one ourselves. All the other ones were built around the repeat edit, which is what people assumed scratch was, Open The Box was about the distorted view that television offers. Multiscreen - Limelight Colin Callender started losing interest in us when he found this lanky and very hungry talent called Jonathan Ross. He made the pilot for The Last Resort at the Callender Company. It was basically the same format as his current chat show. Unlike us with our self-destructive urges and ambivalence to success this guy actually wanted to be something. One of the final straws in CC’s patience was the forged ticket fiasco of our Limelight show. This was to be showcase of our multiscreen show for an invited audience of music / TV/ advertising bigwigs. This was going to put us on the creative map and get us work. The Limelight had just opened and hadn’t yet sunk to it’s out of towner Slimelight rep. I think by now our judgement was permanently impaired. We named the show ‘Wet Dreams on 18 Screens’ and this inspired the people who printed the flyers to illustrate it with an erotic image of a naked woman. The free tickets we’d been given to give away to important people were the same as the flyers, only they had a little John Bull printed addition indicating free entry. We didn’t think we had enough so I bought a printing set and made a load of fakes. Naturally the door staff spotted the fakes and half the fucking creatives and A&R bods in London were locked out. What is so painfully ironic is that we hadn’t realised that the original tickets were plus one anyway so we didn’t need to bother. I can’t remember what happened. I confessed and I think the patient bigwigs got in. We went on to do a blinding gig, but God knows who saw it. Multiscreen – Berlin For a while we both lived off Acre Lane in Brixton. The day of the Brixton riots the atmosphere was literally cracking with static. I had no idea what was brewing but I could literally feel the tension as a charge in the air. Sally and I were called over by Tim Leandro who had just been mugged on his doorstep and he pushed us into his flat just as the riot started. We watched it from the window and on the news simultaneously. Sal and I walked home past a terrifying formation of riot cops on the march in formation like a Roman legion. Peter and I drove to the airport next day and landed in the middle of a riot in Kreutzberg. In comparison to Brixton the riot seemed good natured. They were described to us as common. Like the first Brixton riots in 1981, the 86 riots were important because they brought attention to issues of racism and heavy handed policing. Politically I supported the riots, although I was terrified of both sides. Dark suppressed forces were unleashed on that night. We did a number of shows in Berlin. In a bar and in a tent. They didn’t go well. No one seemed interested. Kreutzberg was so cool and so insular because it was an island of madness within an island of madness. An anarchist alternative world within the capitalist city fenced off from the grim and paranoid communist East Germany. It was populated by draft dodgers, queers, artists, and punks who didn’t give a shit for any experience other than life under the wall engaging in a living critique of capitalism. We played in this bar to a room full of anarchist punks who didn’t even look at the screens. The moment we stopped they put on some punk promos and they all stared at the screens. The woman who organised our shows later became a prostitute in what she described as a life/art experiment. Faced with that kind of intensity of violence, commitment and indifference, what value are a few experiments in video tape. We went over to the East for a day and did some filming by the wall that later appeared in the multiscreen Harry. Maybe it captures a little of the feeling of the static potential of change in the air. Multiscreen – Window Box / Strickley Trigalig Of all the artists who were invited to do a show at the Fridge by Bruno de Florence, we were the only ones to pick up the baton of multiscreen. We took Bruno’s multiscreen format of 21 screens and three sources and toured it all over the world for four years. Strickley Trigalig was commissioned by LVA and the AIR Gallery for a project called Window Box which toured the country. It was a silent two or three channel video wall of nine screens that was displayed in various shop windows. We added a soundtrack and modified it for the live show. Peter had the field of vines location in mind – he knew the shot he wanted. The material of the man was improvised at PJ’s flat. Again Peter knew that there was a huge window and the video camera could be pushed to make amazing images against it. Aesthetically it’s Peter’s baby. It was the most beautiful and haunting part of the multiscreen show. When we played in the US Peter read some poetry to it live which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. He cringes when he hears it. Multiscreen – Harry I told Peter the idea for Harry and he didn’t get it. I wanted to add a narrative element to the multiscreens, nothing too literal, more developmental. Jeremy Theophilus, who’d run the Minories in Colchester, had taken over the Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno. He invited us to do a show and offered to commission a work. Harry became that work. Pete Townsend has a studio in Eel Pie Island with an elaborate video set up and he let us use the studio to shoot it. Terry Flaxton, Nina Kelgren and Clive Gillman shot it on three cameras. Sally is in it, my sister Ruth and it starts P. Boyd. The story was simple. A pondering man at a desk becomes aware that he is being watched from several directions. He panics and tries to get a box from a drawer without the cameras seeing it. Once he has the box he takes a walk by the Berlin wall then discretely throws the box over the wall unleashing a tide of history and memory. Once it was cut Pete told me he finally got it and thought it was rather good. The editing of the walking sequence is the culmination of years of experimentation in rhythmic editing, starting back with Airhole, now on three channels. Edits as orchestration. The soundtrack was composed by chopping up classical music and turning it into reggae. The only work that I’ve seen that matches what we were doing with Strickley Trigalig and Harry are Isaac Julien’s multiscreens cut by Adam Finch. Multiscreen - Sigue Sigue Sputnik Very early on we’d done a gig at the Zap club in Brighton and while we were setting up a bloke from the band that was also on came up to us. “I edit videos too, you know.” “Yeah, great mate,” we sneered dubiously, “Like the haircut.” (For he had a bog brush haircut) “Yeah, I cut up Blade Runner and stuff like that. It’s quite similar to what you’re doing.” How could we have known that he was Tony James, the band were Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the imminent fifth generation of Rock’n’Roll and that they were about to take over the world. Later Tony started going out with Janet Street Porter who also knew our work. A collection of scratch video makers had been presented to the TV industry in Edinburgh. Janet had asked, “Why aren’t these people working in television?” She subsequently got us in to make stuff for Get Fresh and Peter directed for Network 7. She’d nicked the name from Bruno’s pirate TV station, Network 21, and nicked wholesale scratch ideas like the use of text, subverting footage and general editing style. At least Peter got some work out of it. When SSS signed for a fictional million pounds they put on three showcase gigs, one in the Albert Hall, one in NY and one LA. We did the visuals. We chopped up all their promos and all Tony’s favourite films into two channels of video. He wrote out a list of what we could and couldn’t show – no mushroom clouds, no black and white. ~He knew exactly what he wanted. We had three live cameras and live TV and satellite feeds, going into video walls and projectors. We also had a sound feed to the main desk. For the Albert Hall gig we vision mixed it live from the side of the stage wearing white coats. It was the best gig I’ve done. There were some sublime moments of synchronicity between video and band. We’d cut some bits of film to have sound that came through for the band to play along with. Then we found we had a Mike Tyson fight coming in live on one channel and the Reagan Gorbachev summit from Reykjavik on another. We just kept switching and the band kept playing along as it unfolded. For the NY and LA gigs it didn’t happen because the sound guy wouldn’t put up our feed. In LA we went to Disneyland with Martin Degville in his full outfit. The people at the gate made him take his gloves off for some reason. Less than Zero Pete scored us work on the Hollywood movie Less Than Zero making the multiscreens for the party scenes. We had an apartment, a car, an edit suite and loads of assorted footage (Stalin, Monroe, Hitler, Submarines, Pharaohs) plus, Pete had shot some super-8 of surfers and body builders at Venice beach. Pete had a cameo in the movie that never made it. The Brett Easton Ellis book was great but they changes the ending on the film which made it not make any sense. We met Rick Rubin, who was the music consultant, in the producer’s office. He impressed me hugely by insisting on ice-cream before he could talk. Pump up the Volume Pump up the Volume was made by the guys from Colourbox with some other musicians and DJ’s. It was the first UK produced hit of sampled music and MARRS were sued by Stock, Aitken and Waterman for their troubles. This was because it contained a sample of one of their songs and also because PUTV knocked Rick Astley off the No. 1 slot. I don’t know where Peter was, but they asked me to make the Promo very quickly. I had the tape of the space footage from the Music Box job. We filmed the dancer, Cath Coffey, who years later had her own minor hit single, I spent a few nights in the edit suite and bingo a No. 1 and a proper scratch promo. I wish I’d done it for a percentage not a fee. As soon as it hit No 1. I got a call from someone who claimed that the footage was his, or rather the tape that the footage was taken from was his. He was asking for money so I passed him on to Ivo at the record label. The footage was public domain, but since it had been taken from his tape, maybe he had a case. I think Ivo paid up. He was probably punch drunk from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman lawsuit. In the end they had to re-record the record to take out the dodgy samples. It sounds very similar. We recut the promo a little too. Lots of people loved the promo. But when it was shown on Top of the Pops they couldn’t show the bit with the bungees because someone had just died on the Noel Edmonds show doing a bungee jump. One of my proudest moments was having Beavis and Butthead snigger over it and ask, "What was that all about?" Scratch Corporation / Doc‘n’Roll / Media Show There were a number of attempts to create a scratch TV programme. The only people to succeed were Gorilla tapes with. The Duvets, the Gorillas and George Barber were somehow invited to meet Denis Main Wilson the legendary and by then quite eccentric producer of Till Death Us Do Part. He encouraged us to enter comedy and, calling ourselves the Scratch Corporation, we came up with an idea for a magazine show for young people along the lines of That Was the Week That Was meets The Word presented by really old people. This idea was so far ahead of it’s time that it still hasn’t been done. At the Callender Co. we proposed a series with Gorilla Tapes called Doc’n’Roll; scratch documentaries on apartheid, nuclear proliferation and, this was ahead of it’s time, blokes. The commissioning editor who quite liked it was replaced and that was the end of it. Gorilla Tapes did end up making some TV programmes for Channel 4, Invisible Television and Zygosis. They were also commissioned by Andy Lipman, now a producer, to make short scratch pieces for the Media Show. Video Police was the third in a line from Blue Monday to Virgin and took the form of Gorilla Tapes, Low Pay No Way, one step further by making the rappers the presenter of the item. The other piece, The Whole Picture, was never screened … How the Duvet Brothers broke up / That Petrol Emotion. I remember the meeting with the art directors for the Big Decision promo. Art Director – “You want a living room set. How do you want it to look?” Rik – “Kind of dark and dingy.” Peter – “Bright and upmarket.” The Art Director looked at his assistant and shrugged.