VIDEOS

SPERM

Our first video for East West Records had a great concept. Everyone was to be naked and run and jump about while playing. Someone had suggested the idea and we had all just said... "Alright."

We went to a large studio in north London where the whole set was black, with only a few big lights overhead. All the crew was there getting ready. I believe that this was one of Gaynor's first music videos and so in order to get the work she had asked a lot of her friends to help out at the shoot. Thus keeping costs down (maybe this was the reason for having no clothes).

We had all stayed at the Columbia Hotel the night before the shoot and with it being a bit of a novelty over did it on the booze a wee bit. The call was at 8:00am, however we were still running around the corridors of the hotel at 6:00am. Absolutely pissed out our heads. Yes heads, they were all very sore in the morning. Nic came and woke us up. He got a fair bit of abuse in doing so (I'm sure he gets great pleasure from waking us up like that).

We all had been given G-string things to wear, to protect our modesty. But some of us found that they got in the way of the performance and discarded them. I think we must have still been very drunk from the night before. It was a long day, but everything seemed to go well. The finished video looked great. All in black and white it had a high contrast and was very fast moving. With lots of sweeping camera moves and strobing. There was also a really nice bit at the beginning when the words "Baby Chaos" written in light move slowly over a naked baby.

Nic.

BUZZ

A small dimly light rehearsal room in a old collection of buildings in the North of London was the location of our second video. It was to be filmed in black and white and all be taken in one shot. We set up all the equipment and started rehearsing all the camera moves. This was obviously going to be the hardest bit. The camera man had to remember exactly where to go at each bit in the song. He had the camera on his shoulder and was being given directions from Gaynor.

I guess our job was quite easy compared to the camera mans, however it did get a bit boring playing the song over and over and over. The good thing was that when we did finally get the take that Gaynor liked, it was a wrap. They only needed to process and grade the film, transfer it to tape and that was it. No editing required. It turned out OK, but isn't our best. If you get to see it, look out for our A&R man. He's standing playing a space invader machine (yes, proper space invaders) as the camera sweeps done the corridor and into the room.

Nic.

London again. This time in a studio. The idea was to have us perform and the colour of the background and our clothes would be constantly changing. For this we all had to wear white clothes and the background was black. When the film was edited they used a technical trick called "chroma key" to replace the black and the white with bright colours.

The other gimick we used was to hang up-side-down and play our guitars. A specialist was brought in to make sure that we didn't hurt ourselves. Unfortunately, however safe he made us feel, the one thing he couldn't do was to stop us feeling very ill after about two minutes up-side-down. This queezyness was not helped by us all having a large curry at lunch time.

The result was again, all right, but not absolutely fantastic. Having said that, how many videos can you say you've seen that you think are fantastic. Not many.

Nic.

For this one we went to a really cool and trendy club on Oxford Street, London. Yes, I know London again, but all the people and facilities we need are there. We came up with the idea of doing a fashion show with lots of grannies watching. We all thought that this would be a great laugh and interesting to watch. Everyone else agreed and we set about putting it all together. The club was ideal for the style we were looking for. It had leaves and flowers all over the ceiling and the pillars holding up the roof were disguised as tree trunks

It was really weird, but the Director, Craig was a very distant cousin of Grant's, and he had filmed a short film a long time ago, which Bobby and Chris' Dad had been in. This set up a great atmosphere from the beginning. When we arrived at the location a couple of stylists had brought lots of very tacky, cheesy clothes for us. It was great fun dressing up, but slightly embarrassing. So we had a few beers to loosen up. After a spot of make up we were ready to start.

We shot the catwalk stuff first, so all the very nice grannies, who had been brought in from an "old grannies agency", were sat down around the stage. The stage was actually the dance floor that raised up and it was one of those "Saturday Night Fever" dance floors with flashing lights in it. We wore all sorts of kitch clothes. Things like white plastic raincoats, blue safari suits, an all white jumpsuit and huge leopard skin coats. A lot of acting was being done on the catwalk and at one point the make-up girl showed us all how to "walk" properly. We had a few more beers.

By the time the performance shots came around we were all very drunk and unfortunately were seriously running out of time, as the venue was opening that night for one of it's weekly clubs. The film kept rolling and actually got some of the best footage of the whole shoot. The finished video is fantastic and great fun to watch.

Nic.

This video may have been shot in L.A. but it was still a disgustingly early rise (especially after experiencing an earthquake the night before!) The venue for the shoot turned out to be a small non alcoholic bar called Café Moka (no worries, we supplied our own hooch!). I still don’t know how the crew managed to fit all the equipment inside - the word "tardis" springs to mind! After crawling over cables and avoiding low flying lighting rigs, we stumbled upon the filming of the hula girls - three rather beautiful models hired to hula hoop clothed in dodgy spandex cowboy gear - maybe getting up so early wasn’t such a bad idea after all! I reckon the director has harboured a secret hula cowgirl fantasy for years and here was his big chance to fulfil it (at B.C’s expense of course!)

Our turn now. We were filmed sitting around a psychedelic set which included bright green furry tables, smoking purple drinks and futuristic sado/masochistic mannequins. Chris was pushed around in an old wicker wheelchair whilst we had to canoodle with the hula girls (life can be shit!) This was the most enjoyable video to make so far, that is until it was time for the live stuff. Take one small room at approx. 35oC, add some enormous, high powered video lights and switch on to full power. Proceed to place four band members in this room under these lights and leave to perform for a few hours. Result - dehydration, vomiting, exhaustion and lots of blood and blisters etc! This is honestly got to be the hottest I’ve ever been - not recommended!

Only one scene left to do now. This involved Chris having his hair sprayed with silver spray paint (though once it was on it looked more like grey hair - he was now 82 years old!) he proceeded to roll about and destroy a forest of the afore mentioned mannequins - not bad for an O.A.P!

Sadly there was no after shoot party this time, but, given the state we were in it was probably a good idea. So instead it was back to the bus to wave goodbye to sunny L.A as we sped off to Denver.

Bobby.

More pictures from the shoot.

For some reason I have found great difficulty in remembering this day, I think too much alcohol to soon was the sole cause of this. Anyway, the idea for Hello was to have the band playing in a small dingy flat which was in turn driving our aurally abused neighbour mad. After drilling several holes in the walls to get a better look at the band she comes across Chris singing Hello whilst lying naked in the bath. Her anger now turns to lust as she starts to breakthrough the wall to be with him (god knows why!).

When we were told that we had to try and choose someone for the part of the girl next door ,as you can imagine, some heated debates took place. Eventually, as the band had all recently seen the film Trainspotting, we tried for the services of Kelly MacDonald, who played Diane in the film. Luckily she was available thus ending any more arguments!

The location for the shoot was at a rather large studio in south London. We arrived early morning (hours too early as usual) with - you know the story by now - raging hangovers. You see we were staying in the Columbia hotel with it’s 24 hour bar service and I’m afraid you have to carry out your duties whenever possible! It’s definitely a good thing that these video shoots require a light sprinkling of make-up (a large fucking truckload of the stuff would be more appropriate on a morning like this!)

The set consisted of two rooms side by side, our room furnished with some lovely tacky furniture including a toilet for Davy to place his arse whilst bashing his drums, at least he wouldn’t have to halt shooting if nature called.

This was a pretty straightforward performance video for us lot, just a matter of playing hello over and over for what felt like a thousand times - mustn’t complain though because Chris had to get naked (again!) and lie in an old bath for ages. The problem was that the water had to be fetched by a bucket so he was either being scalded or frozen (by the look of things between his legs I reckon he must have been freezing most of the time!) Things started to get interesting when Kelly had to break down the wall showering us all with chunks of plaster. After drilling the holes she frantically tried to scrape through the wall with a spoon, following on with a hammer and chisel. Next up was a rather hefty hammer and finally, just to do the job properly, she attacked the wall with a sledgehammer which was possibly about the same size as her! - anything to get to her Prince Charming in the bath!

This was another enjoyable video to make, the days proceedings helped along with the insanity of our mate Wullie Summers who had tagged along under the guise of research for his college course (yeah, right!)

Finally it was back to the Columbia with the director, Craig, and some members of the crew. This was good timing as a coach full of Texan college girls had just arrived for a few days, but that’s another story!

Bobby.

Originally we wanted to rip the piss out of some well known superheroes - Superman, The Incredible Hulk, even Wonderwoman!, but, our record company’s bottle crashed at the thought of being sued by the likes of Marvel or D.C.(good publicity if you ask me!) Anyway, we eventually settled with our own Superhero costumes - not a million miles away from The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers!

The video shoot took place at a studio in north London, unfortunately for us it was the morning after one of our London shows - this meant about two hours sleep and an extreme ‘fuck off’ hangover (one of the worst varieties!)

We arrived at the studio and to our delight found it looking like something from ‘Space 1999’ or ‘UFO’ (two low budget British TV Sci-Fi shows from the 70’s). First up was a - "band playing live on the Sci-Fi set type of thing" - no problems there. Now it was time to change into our costumes. We emerged from our dressing room and were greeted by absolute hysterics from the crew and anyone else who happened to be hanging around. We thought if our costumes were that ridiculous then let’s give everyone a laugh, so we promptly headed out of the studio and onto the streets of north London - complete with our guitar tech Del, who was dressed in a Dr Who style space alien suit. Cars stopped and kids got out to have their photographs taken with us while Del halted the traffic and proceeded to attack the occupants of the cars! We decided that it was thirsty work saving the world (especially Del who had by now lost a few pounds inside his alien suit) and headed into the first earthling pub which we came across. We had a few drinks with the rather bemused regulars - some of whom probably thought they’d had enough alcohol already! (we still had to pay for our drinks - well Nic did because there were no pockets in our space suits and anyway superheroes don’t need money!) Eventually Nic dragged us from the pub bleating on about time being money, or words to that effect.

Once back at the studio we discovered a small, but nonetheless very important design flaw in our space suits - no fly’s! (surely Superheros have to take a piss once in a while!) Filming was held up again as we had to struggle in and out of our suits to do the business (note - at this point I can remember congratulating myself on my choice of carry-out, because whilst Chris, Dave and Grant had piles of lager to consume, I had opted for a bottle of rum - this meant far fewer visits to the gents for me!)

The filming now involved us saving the world from a huge, ugly marauding alien - Del! We took it in turns to kick the shite out of him (sorry Del, but it had to look realistic!) Next up was bouncing around on a trampoline pulling as many Superhero poses as possible (pulled muscles more like!)

All in all a fairly enjoyable video to make.

Bobby.

More pictures from the video shoot.