Melody Maker, 20 Oct 1984
Don't Look Now
3 mins 41 secs, 1984
Phantasmagoria
Music Box Channel, 1985
They also had a one of the first colour Sony camcorders. I called Rik one day and we all went to the park and decided to make a piss take pop video with me prancing about shouting the alphabet because we’d heard you can sync the words of any song in post production if you mime the alphabet.
We were having a coffee in the park café and she wrote the Duvet Brothers on the titling machine and that’s how we got the name. I cut the video at her house to Motorcade by Magazine and I couldn’t believe that her artist husband thought it was great and loved the textures.
I showed the video to their manager who at that time had a house in Maida Vale’s Little Italy. He managed a band called Torch Song and had an organisation called Torch Force which was funded by Miles Copeland. There was a studio in the garden and in the studio was a man that looked like he had never seen daylight. It was William Orbit. He liked the video and said just make the same thing again with the band in it and we’ll pay you.
I phoned Rik and asked him if he could get the Diverse camera for the day which he managed to do and we shot the video one Saturday morning.
We went into another marathon edit at Diverse and finished the vid on the Thursday by which time I think Rik was loosing it because we were cutting all night and he was working in the same edit suite all day.
I delivered the tape and was given £3000 in crisp fifty pound notes. I had never seen that kind of money and rushed back to my flat to meet Rik and we took pictures of us covered in money then went to buy loads of champagne. This was the beginning…
RL - The camera had an invert button and slo-mo playback. Our use of colourisation and slo-mo where established there and then. The reason there are so many effects in the 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, 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.
PBM - At college we were always being shown films made by painters and I thought why can’t film makers use the camera to make paintings, so I started experimenting; shooting colourful objects like flowerbeds with their reds and yellows and would whip the camera across and crash zoom in and out. When the tape was slowed down it made colourful blobs and lines which looked beautiful and because film has an intrinsic nostalgia particularly when in slo-mo it seemed to give it an emotional value. The Torchsong video is the first video we did using the effect. We named it the BWP, the blurry whip pan, and it was our secret weapon and signature.
RL – I bought my first super-8 camera in the summer of 1982 when I was twenty-two. The first roll of super-8 I shot, walking out the gate at the end of my parent’s garden near Colchester, was a dizzy point of view, running 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. I used this material in Airhole. This wasn't yet the BWP, it required Peter’s introduction of bright colours and the use of slo-mo to make it the trademark style.