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Music Pig Brown
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.
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.
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