RL – After Strickley Trigalig I wanted to add a narrative element to the multiscreens, but I didn’t want to get as didactic as the political scratches. I came up with the idea of Harry and told Peter about it. He didn’t get it, but he was happy to act in it. Jeremy Theophilus, who’d run the Minories in Colchester and had taken over the Oriel Mostyn in Llandudno, invited us to do a show and commissioned a work. Harry became that work. I blagged free time at Pete Townsend’s Eel Pie studio for the filming.

The story was simple. A pondering man at a desk becomes aware that whichever way he turns he is being watched. 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 and 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.

It took only four years from the making of this video for the Berlin Wall to fall in reality. The Duvet Brothers are happy to claim credit for this.

The soundtrack was composed half in the edit suite, where I chopped up some Schönberg, and half in the recording studio where we turned it into reggae. The editing was the culmination of years of experimentation in using edits as visual orchestration - partly mathematical, partly feel - that date back to Airhole. 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.

Cameras - Terry Flaxton, Nina Kelgren and Clive Gillman.
Cast – Peter Boyd Maclean, Sally Randle, Ruth Lander.
Musicians – Pete Brown, Mathew Fraser.
Music recorded by Mike Pappenheim and produced by Pete Brown.