| Colourbox Shotgun (extract)1985 |
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| PBM - After making the Torch Song Video, Grant Gilbert, asked me to come to NY to project films on the band as they performed for the record industry in a club. I shot a load of black and white 16mm off the back of a motorbike. Abstract trees and stuff. I then scratched the film with a wire brush and punched holes in it with a paper puncher and took it to NY. While rehearsing I discovered that the film threw too much light on the band and as they were miming, this wouldn’t look good. I bought some felt tip pens and some cellotape, unrolled the film on the floor of the bar, scribbled all over it and stuck it back together with tape. On the night it looked great, bathing them in colour from the felt tip pens like some blobby Pink Floyd projection. After the gig we celebrated in a bar somewhere pretty dodgy (it was the 80s pre Giuliani) I was downstairs trying to give very useful advice to some accapella players, like get some instruments, and the band left without me. I eventually found my way back to the hotel around 3am and I got in the lift with a band that were on tour. The road manager was a guy named Ray Conroy. It transpired that my brother had given his brother a lift back from Essex University one icy night and managed to spin the car 360 degrees at the main roundabout. We got on well and he gave me the music for the band he was managing called Colourbox.I loved it and decided to shoot a promo for Shotgun in the studio at college. I got Ray to blow the harmonica and crawl around on the floor. I was experimenting with movement: objects moving through frame with a fixed camera or the camera moving. In the edit Rik plugged in Peter Donabauer’s video synth and we started messing with the signal to get that feedback effect on the face and shoes. That was probably the most interesting thing about the video except Ray crawling around like a cockroach on crack. It worked well in the multi-screen performances as we delayed the images and the sound so it sounded very weird. Colourbox went on to form MARRS with DJ Dave Dorrell and had a No.1 hit with Pump Up The Volume. |
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