An Interview with Stephen Jones and Tom Ellard

Amey:

Amey Mazurek, the interviewer.

Stephen:

Stephen Jones, who worked on the video side of Severed Heads for a number of years.

Tom:

Tom Ellard, the mainstay of Severed Heads.

Amey: How did you get started in Severed Heads? Or how did you find out about working with Tom?
Stephen: I've been involved in the video stuff since, I suppose I had my first video contact in about 1973, with a mob called Bush Video, around a big hippie arts festival called the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin. I'd known some of these people before then, and hung out a bit with them up there. And they had an old black and white quarterback type open reel video system in those days, running a kind of community network thing there. So that was my very first contact, but then I got into it and developed in all sorts of stuff... living in Sydney in '78, was is '78 or '79 you did that thing at I.C.E.?
Tom: Oh, end of '79.
Stephen: Anyway, '78-'79 living in Sydney I was at a squat place in Darlinghurst called Side Effects, which is an old school building. And there was a whole, really major kind of scene down there, I'd been building video synthesisers at that point. I'd done a little piece with SPK in the rehearsal studio, we just recorded them in one night and stuff like that. It was all sorts of odd things, you know, with the video. And I went down to this place called the Institute of Contemporary Events, which was really just one person's own sort of gallery set up that he was kind of using with various people to do interesting new shows and stuff like that. Severed Heads played, it was Tom and Richard Fielding and they had 16 mm projection and all that stuff. It was this crazy music, and it was great. And so, I'd kind of met up with Tom a few times, and so we just carried on our sort of pathways. I was building the synthesisers and that sort of stuff at that stage. Then in '82, the Paddington Video Expo Center, which I think at this stage had become Metro Television, they used to run these monthly big seminar sessions of different topics and one of the months was just new stuff, new technology experimental video sort of, and they asked me to demonstrate the synthesiser in the studio there. And I figured, well the best way to do this, is to get a band in and work with them, get some people whose music is interesting, and work with it and do it, actually, as a live recording of it, as it turned out, of the music and the pictures. And so I asked Tom if he was interested, and they were interested... And so we shoved all my synthesiser stuff into their studio and I sort of got it in, in the right way, so that it was all part of the mixing desk in the studio and things. And they all stuck them all downstairs in the floor in the studio and they played their songs.
Tom: Well, that was the tape with Petrol, Lower Than the Grave and Nightsong on it. It was that tape.
Stephen: It was really raw, psychedelic all over the place, lots of Odin masks, things like that and so on.
Amey: Oh, yeah, yeah. There was that video that only came out on PAL, that first one, that early one, that's like an example of that, yeah?
Stephen: Yeah, that was just one or two of the tracks on it, I think.
Amey: And that live performance on there, where was that?
Tom: That was Metro Television.
Stephen: That was in the studio. So essentially it was a live in the studio day. And it took about five or six hours to make, actually about four or five hours to make all the pieces go along with it, because they made two versions of each song. So we had all this raw material. And then the next year -
Tom: '83 -
Stephen: That we finally cut it into something usable. And then we started to show that on a big screen in front of the boys playing. And then eventually it sort of turned into me doing it live with them, you know, actually doing another mix of the whole thing 'cause the synthesiser was there, so I could do all of that as well. And that's really where it all started.
Tom: Ozone Club was probably the first time that the synth was actually -
Stephen: Was it? Yeah, it probably was. There was odd things at the Trade Union Club as well, but I can't remember which order everything came in.
Tom: I think the Trade Union Club, we used the tapes. We played the tapes and stuff.
Stephen: And then Ozone, we actually set the synths up.
Tom: We brought the gear and set it up. But I don't think you performed there, I think you just set up a system so, like, we were running through it or something. So, that's like, 1984.
Stephen: Yeah. So, the first session was at a place called Art Unit in Alexandria, which is another one of these little old grungy art gallery performance type of places and things, and it was pretty amazing in its own way. There was some very interesting new music around at the time.
Amey: Were you working with other bands, too?
Stephen: Not really, no. I was actually building an editing facility at that stage, just down here, just down the road in fact, called Heuristic Video, which was then being turned into the production facility for all of the Severed Heads video material. Or the post-production facility, I should say.
Tom: So it was like, I'd go down to Heuristic a lot. It was Stephen's baby at that stage. At that stage, it was like, what, two U-matics and a bit of a mixing desk.
Stephen: Yeah, it was pretty primitive. It was developing. It's not much more than that now, except it's a bit more integrative than the U-matics.
Tom: Than those top-loaders.
Stephen: Yeah, top-loader JVC. They were frightening.
Tom: [laughs] They worked. That's what we cut that live at Metro on.
Amey: Yeah, top-loaders. See them once in a while. So what are you doing now? Are you doing projects? Do you own your own business or are you working for somebody else?
Stephen: These days, you mean like 1994?
Amey: Mm-hm.
Stephen: It's difficult to say what I do, really. I freelance as an engineer for post-production facilities, or for people who are making equipment for post-production facilities. So that I do things like design and install studios, facilities. I design bits and pieces of equipment that go into them. And I design bits and pieces of sort of sub-equipment to go into the equipment that goes into these places. It's all digital post-production stuff that I work in these days. Otherwise consult to people in matters relating to video in sort of broader terms. Like, I was working for a big post-production ho use for a long time, for the last four years until August last year and I got retrenched. And so I've been the process of building this stuff up. And it's pretty slow, really, it's not an easy thing to do.
Amey: Do you have patents on that stuff?
Stephen: No, none of this stuff is really patentable. I mean, all the techniques are quite simple. It's just a matter of combining large numbers of these simple procedures into complicated boxes, in a sense. I'm not doing stuff which is say, digital effects and things like that. I'm just doing the infrastructure. Or the glue that we use, the switches and the distribution amplifiers, and the digital-analogue converters and the analogue-digital converters. All of that kind of thing. So it's fairly low-level stuff.
Amey: As an example, what was your most recent project?
Stephen: Well, I've just been designing a chip to put into somebody's composite video to digital video decoder, so that they can get standard D-1 CCR 601 format video out of the box. So it's composite in and full 601 digital out. Which is, 601 is a component, digital format. I mean, this is all very high-falutin' stuff. So, I really - you don't really build stuff much these days. You design it in software and then you actually build it electronically, insert it into a blank chip, which is a particular kind of thing called an "erasable programmable logic device". And so we just use programmable logic devices for my sort of work these days. If you look inside any of the major pieces of electronics, you'll just see lots and lots of large chips these days. And most of the work is done in software beforehand. And then you simulate in the software and work it, it'll make it work, and then you put it into the chip and you hope to God that everything follows, but often 90% of the time it doesn't quite. So you gotta figure out - "Oh, this pathway was too long," and all of that sort of stuff and pull it all back down and rebuild it, and this time it might work. After three or four iterations of this process it usually does work. So that's what I've been doing lately. Apart from that, I put the old synthesiser back together and did this piece down at Performance Space. So, I mean, it's kind of all over there, there's lot of things going on in different realms.
Amey: [To Tom] ...Um, should I ask him about the TDK commercial?
Tom: [Smiles] I don't know what that's - Garry was, "Ask him about the TDK commercial!" I don't know. Just because you talked to him about it at one stage, you were looking at all the digitals for that.
Stephen: Oh yeah, I was trying to describe it, yeah. This has nothing to do with - I was working at Apocalypse, which is in fact probably the biggest post-production facility in the Southern hemisphere. And I'd been looking for work to get some money very fast in '89 because Heuristic got robbed a few times in a row, like three times in a row. I mean, like, OK, yes it's insured, but it takes a while for all that to come through. Meanwhile you've got to generate a bit of funds so you can replace the basic stuff and keep operating. So I took an installation job with this place, which then became Apocalypse, and put this facility in... Then I was working for them full time. Because I did have a basic understanding of the digital realm of video, they were talking about going digital, because it's the only solution at the moment for all those big facilities. So it was fairly clear I knew what I was talking about, and I got lumped with the job of designing all the bits and pieces that would go into that place, as well as modelling the system and developing, 'COs I've got a fair amount of post-production experience as well. All the Severed Heads things and all the other stuff went through Heuristic. And so there was this project brought to the management there, which they embraced as a way of getting a number of the staff used to this new way of working. And I ended up being more or less the technical producer, because I knew my way around the system, and I knew my way around post-production, and I knew what was required to make all this sort of stuff. So I didn't actually, in a sense, do anything, I just helped everybody else do it, backed everybody up, in a sense.

We, out of existing things that were in the place, there was still, even in a standard analogue composite post-production suite, there's still a lot of digital equipment, all the effects devices, digital optical devices and all of that sort of stuff, and the tele-cine chains and everything else, they're all digital. So the stuff was transferred in digital from the tele-cine train. And we borrowed an early digital recorder from Sony. The guys from, Alex Proyas from Minivale Eye Contact - he's a name you'll recognise these days in America. And he's done a lot of major commercials and stuff like that, and now makes films of sort of weird mien, quite interesting. He's quite a good head, very strange kind of mind. He developed this idea for this, for TDK, for this thing, in the spaceship, the woman in it, in the control seat in the spaceship, apart from the fact that it's null grav[ity], and there's all the intercom between that and the rest of the control centre, which is like, still on earth or wherever the hell it is, you know, universe central. And that was all Chromakey stuff. Now, Chromakey work is a matter of being able to separate layers and put people and things into other situations, sets and so on, so that all the stuff was shot more or less as set, and then a lot of things were inserted. And, because of the number of items that were needed to go into this thing, just because it was like, a seriously psychedelic event was what they were proposing to do as far as the art direction and all of that, the look of the thing. So they decided the answer to this was the digital procedure, because you can layer endlessly without losing the quality of the first layer in digital. So you don't get that terrible problem of generation noise every time you go down a layer, like you do in composite video.

Basically, we just put all this stuff down layer by layer by layer, and eventually, there in one shot, like, it's a 60-second commercial, and each shot is about a second long. But then they blend and merge, so you get a few shots and then you've got this thing going around and around that's going to go through three of them and stuff. And it's a monstrous process. But there are, in one shot, there are 40 objects spinning around this spaceship cabin, with this woman with the headphones on and everything kind of whirling away - oh, no, actually she gets up and dances on the podium in there on something, god knows why. The motivation for the whole thing is pretty weird, but - suspect in general, but - and eventually she just blasts off into space because the whole thing -
Tom: There's an explosion at the end -
Stephen: And then you cut to the exterior view, and the ship is kind of flying off and the TDK cassette floating through space. That was the product shot. I mean, God, the arguments that went into the product shot were just outrageous compared to the rest of the thing. There was more trouble about how long that product shot should last. It was crazy, absolutely crazy. That was a fairly major process because essentially it wasn't done in a digital suite. It was done in an environment in which a lot of the equipment was digital, and it could be converted into a digital kind of context.
Tom: Well, all of this digital stuff that's coming in that's essentially starting to hit the artistic world in a lot of ways. The stuff that we were using in Severed Heads was always U-matics, analogue video gear, treatments. I mean, like the most digital thing we ever used -
Stephen: Was the Fairlight.
Tom: Was the Fairlight. And like the Fairlight we were using in '85 was on loan from Fairlight. There was an earlier one that didn't even fill the whole screen. You see the videos, I mean, you've got Overhead, right?
Amey: Yeah.
Tom: You know there's these black bits at the top and the bottom of the screen on some shots? That's the old Fairlight. See, it didn't have enough memory to fill the whole. 'Cause that's the thing, like talking about this TDK commercial shows the way everything's sort of digital-minded these days. I think that we actually had was this sort of non-digital way of working, which of course just had to be that way, didn't it?
Stephen: Well, you know born of necessity.
Tom: Getting back to '85, when you left Garry, Garry left in '84 or should I say the thing that was not said yesterday was that Garry Bradbury and Paul Deering were rung up and told that their services were no longer required. And him [Stephen] and I went over to England in '85, which was a bit of a mess, but hey, you know? [Laughs]
Stephen: Yeah.
Amey: Was that where your equipment was stolen or was that in America?
Stephen: It was in Spain, where the equipment was stolen. But that was the second version of it.
Tom: Well - that's '86.
Stephen: That was much later.
Tom: No, '85 -
Stephen: - was the trip to ICA in London, and then a show at Everyman's Cinema in Hempstead in London.
Tom: Big mess. But no - remember all the gear got ripped off while we were in London, and then Phil White found it all. Remember?
Stephen: Ah, yes. There was stuff - the night we left for London, all the gear, there was a theft here, at the studio here, large parts of the editing facilities, and it turned out it had been done by somebody who should've known better, because they were too well known within the environment, within the sort of local sort of scene, and it became very obvious that they'd suddenly acquired all this extra equipment.
Tom: Just found it on the corner, a couple U-matics and an editing -
Stephen: Just fell off the back of a building. [Laughs]
Tom: In '85, we were with that English record label, Ink. And the guy said, "'Ere, why don't you fellas come over. Do a show, you know what I mean," sort of thing. So off we go. And we did a thing at the ICA, which is the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. And what's really funny is, 'cause what we did was a sort of 30-minute long ambient music piece, right? Which of course, these days, would be like, "Oh, yeah," 'cause everybody's doing 30-minute long pieces. But in those days, it was like, "Now what do these guys think they're doing?" Yeah, so, hmm. Which is on one of those Ikon tapes as well. The Kato one.
Amey: Yeah. It goes on for what, 20 minutes?
Tom: I take all the blame for it. I take all the blame for all the horrible -
Stephen: I thought Kato was a wonderful piece, actually!
Tom: Naw, it was a piece of shit. [Laughs] It was really bad. I didn't know what the f**k I was doing.
Stephen: No, no, don't put yourself down. I think it was actually a really good piece. And it also, as Tom says, in many ways was, I mean, yes, ambience was kind of, has a long and venerable history going back into the early '70s. But I think this was the first time that anybody had sort of tried to do it semi-live in a performance environment without it being sort of Brian Eno.
Tom: Mmm. They didn't boo, but they weren't real pleased. And then we did Sheffield. Went up to Sheffield and did it again, and they didn't boo, but they still didn't go for it much.
Amey: What kind of audience were you getting for these shows?
Stephen: Well, I think they wanted, 'cause it was an Australian band, it was a big sort of scene about Australian bands. There was The Birthday Party and Nick Cave's band, before it became the Bad Seeds.
Tom: There was shit-loads of publicity for it.
Stephen: And there was various of that guitar-based grunge kind of stuff that the Birthday Party were doing, and the (Moodists) and people like that.
Tom: There's a lot from down in Queensland, you know.
Stephen: The Saints.
Tom: The Go-Betweens, and the Saints had been through.
Stephen: Yeah, they'd sort of opened this thing up, the Saints, and now it was the Go-betweens, the (Moodists), the Birthday Party and things like that. And so they expected us to be like that.
Tom: Also, all the publicity had been for like, you know, a band, like four people, right?
Amey: So that's the stuff you were talking about (in earlier interviews), people were expecting -
Tom: A band. Yeah, well there's pictures in the NME of like at least three people, sometimes four. But this thing came up and it was just me, "Hi!" standing up there on stage. So it was like, "Boo! Get off!" So that was the end of that one. Although it was.. .
Stephen: And then I came back to Australia and picked up a synthesiser and went back to London, and we did the show at Everyman with that.
Tom: Well, see, like, we were supposed to be back in about a month, right? Go over, do a couple shows, come back, month showcase thing. So we go out and do Sheffield, which of course we arranged. We met up with this band Hula from Sheffield, "Why don't you come up to Sheffield and do something," which we did. And then just as we had to go home, "'Ere, I've got this thing going on at Everyman's Cinema." And we go, "Alright, when's that?" "Two months from now." Two months we had to sit around, scratch around. He [Stephen] came home, at your own expense, didn't you?
Stephen: Pretty much.
Tom: Comes home, grabs the synthesisers, and the whole set was made up of a couple of old backing tape demos that I happened to have on a cassette while I was over in England. It was like, stupid, stupid. Should've just said, no! Then we arranged something down in Brighton. Did a thing down in Brighton. So we got another gig like that, right? What night? The night before the Everyman! So it was like, two months of nothing, and then two gigs, back and back. The only fortunate thing out of the whole thing, in terms of what I think, is - Stephen can give you his angle on it - is that Jarett from Nettwerk happened to be in London trying to sell Skinny Puppy to Ink Records. And, in fact, we went over to Canada and saw them there.
Stephen: Yeah, I think that was what actually stepped us up to that next level.
Amey: [To Stephen] I'm sorry - trying to sell Skinny Puppy?
Tom: Yeah, he was over in England trying to sell Skinny Puppy, Grapes of Wrath and all that sort of stuff, right, to English labels.
Stephen: License it out.
Tom: And, like he was, not doing real well, like, Nettwerk never seems to do particularly well at selling anything, you know? And he came to Ink Records, which is sort of like, the bottom of the barrel, "50 cents, 50 cents," "Oh, I dunno about this thing." But we went over to Canada, and that was fun.
Stephen: Another night in some godawful black hole, it was the Luvaffair, in Vancouver.
Tom: Another dodgy show. It's like, dodgy shows R us.
Amey: So right after England you went over to Canada?
Stephen: Yeah. We had the option of pretty much deciding how we could get back to Australia for some reason, I don't quite know how this occurred.
Tom: It was £750 to get back to Sydney -
Stephen: Yeah, either direction you were going, so we just thought, well, we'll stop in Vancouver.
Tom: Drink moose beer... There was good shit that went down then. I mean, and then there were the Max Headroom people.
Stephen: Yeah. There was a lot of good things, actually. I don't immediately recall how it occurred. I met the woman who was the publicist and kind of assistant general manager of the Everyman's Cinema. Or actually, publicist and programmer for the Everyman's Cinema, Liz Wren. She was organising this animation festival two months down the line. She'd been pretty interested in what we were doing... This is all '85, this is this first trip to London in '85. She introduced me to Rocky Morton and Annabelle Jenckel, who were clip-makers who did some of the early Elvis Costello stuff. They had a studio, they were basically advertising art directors and and film directors, and they had a studio in Soho somewhere, where they worked for advertising and all of that stuff. And they had been producing this film for Chrysalis, which was a thing called Max Headroom. And they made the Max Headroom: the Movie, they made the first version of Max Headroom, the English version, which was called 20 Minutes Into the Future. Have you seen the English version?
Amey: Uhh, no.
Stephen: There was an American version as well.
Amey: Yeah, the American version was less violent than the English version. Stephen: And was also rather more soppy in many ways.
Amey: Yeah... I've got some tapes of the TV series. I've got like five episodes of that.
Stephen: Yeah. Well they said to us, listen, why don't you give us a song for Max Headroom the TV series? You know, for the clip shows. So we had three things that would've been fairly easy to do it with. And they took about three or four minutes from Goodbye Tonsils.
Tom: Imagine that on British television.
Stephen: And that, there was this roaring, screaming kind of -
Tom: Garry particularly -
Stephen: - totally crazy sort of picture.
Tom: Garry particularly asked me to ask you to describe how he had an epileptic fit while he was making that.
Stephen: An O.D., yeah.
Amey: [Laughs] He did?
S & Tom: Yeah.
Tom: Poor guy.
Stephen: We were in the studio sort of working through material... He had a Super-8 film loop of, you know, maybe a second or something like that, that just had like basically almost single frames of stuff that he'd chopped together somehow. Or actually, I think he frame-shot it off the screen, off the TV screen, and so he shot a frame and - So Garry made this film loop, and we'd dumped on super-8, and we were projecting it on the wall, and videoing it from there, and putting it to tape. And we'd sort of done, you know, like, endless repetitions of this one way or another. Garry was sitting in the studio, I was on the phone outside, and he suddenly started falling over, he was watching the tape, just reviewing it. And he suddenly started falling all over and foaming and yelling, and it was just really horrific.
Tom: It was a critical success!
Stephen: It was extraordinary.
Tom: Critical success for the bloody clip.
Stephen: And I dragged him out of there because he was really jumping around, and he could've quite badly damaged himself. So I dragged him out and laid him down in the main area, 'cause there's a big sort of space over there, and he was gone. And then rang up the emergency people and said, "What do I do?" And they said, "Just make sure he doesn't swallow his tongue and leave him, he'll come back, he's alright." And so he just did.
Tom: And he never came back. [Everyone laughs].
Stephen: Well, you know, he came back within the limits of what they would mean anyway. And so once he did get back, he was incredibly angry about having lost all the experience of it in a sense.
Amey: What?
Stephen: 'Cause you go unconscious when you get wiped by it. And he wanted to have had the experience of most of it -
Tom: I was sitting in the wherever I was staying, the hotel in England, when the Max Headroom people broadcast it. And I was staying in a hostel, and there were all these people sitting around in this television viewing room and it all comes on, "yeah yeah yeah!" and I'm in front of everyone, watching, looking around, and all of a sudden they all - [silence], you know, no one frothed, no one bowled over. I was really [pounds fist on table] really disappointed. [S & A laugh]. But the Max Headroom people liked it.
Amey: Now, they didn't do that for the American version, though, did they?
Tom: Yeah, it was on the American version.
Stephen: Yeah, it would've gotten to the States. This was just the half-hour rock show stations, when once Max Headroom was up - I mean, the movie was just the movie, that was just the opener. I mean, they used the set -
Amey: I mean, did they use Goodbye Tonsils on there?
Tom: Yeah, it was on three.
Stephen: Was it? Yeah, it should've been on there.
Tom: Yeah, people saw it in the States. Oh, yeah, I had people mention it, yeah.
Amey: I'll have to look at it again.
Stephen: So that went quite well. Then, this animation festival, we were the entertainment, the final act for the show. And there was a big day of forum, you know, lots of people talking, panels, showing various examples of stuff and things like that. And then we came in and set up and did this roaring loud show.
Tom: Too loud.
Stephen: Too loud it was.
Tom: Well see I had to find the PA, f**king over in England, and I said, "Where can we get one up here from?" and "Oh, I dunno, why don't you just ring somebody up?" So I rang up some guy and he didn't know what he was doing and I didn't know what I was doing, and he asked the front row, "Is it loud enough?" They go "No!" "Is it loud enough now?" "No!" I didn't realise, 'cause the audience would just go "No!" no matter what you'd say. They just wanted it louder. There was like a thousand people trying to get in and a thousand people trying to get out, and 350 people -
Stephen: Like the Cinema! Tom: I was off my tits because bloody Kitson had bought me two Sam Smith's Sheffield Specials before going on. I didn't know which end was, like the one I was singing out of. It was really stupid, it was our English tour. It was stupid but good all mixed together. And like this Volition records that we're on in Australia, I met Andrew who's like the management guy, in England at breakfast. He was down in Australia trying to get shit together and there's this guy Dave Kitson, who runs Ink and Andrew Penhallow runs Volition, sitting having a power breakfast, while I'm sitting there, going, "Oh, what you got him from?" "Oh, I think I've got him for, like - " "You can have him for Australasia." "Australasia? Does that mean like in Asia?" "No, I get to keep Asia." These two guys just talking about, where's commodity going to stop and end, you know, and that sort of stuff. And then they shook hands and off they went. And I was sort of f**kin' the commodity.'86 there was another tour. No, wait, in '85 there was there was the tour of places like Armourdale and Melbourne and things like that. Tour, tour, tour.
Stephen: In '86, that was the first serious American tour, wasn't it?
Tom: World tour.
Stephen: World tour, yes. Yes, it was the world tour.
Tom: Canada, all the way across Canada and then to Europe, and I've got all this written out in like, articles and stuff that were written at the time, so I don't have to go - but yeah, it was like, horror tour!
Stephen: - Interviews and things like that -
Tom: Horror tour!
Amey: Yeah I've got some examples. Nettwerk sent me some Canadian magazine interviews and stuff.
Stephen: But we haven't even seen those ourselves.
Tom: Horror tour!
Stephen: Nettwerk were never real good on sending us the documentation.
Amey: I've got 'em right here.
Stephen: Some of it we got, some of it we didn't. So that was, well, those sort of things you can read about. Some of them bear retelling, some of them don't.
Tom: Well, you know, those little shitty bits are all down there. Like '85, '86, and then the Fairlight got taken back about '86.
Stephen: Yes, early '86 was the period, end of '85 - early '86, when we got back from England and then before we did the world tour was when I had the Fairlight. It had been loaned to us to just sort of develop. We'd used it for a couple of clips, and it was pretty interesting.
Tom: For the time.
Stephen: Very, for the time, and then we used it for - Hot With Fleas was the most successful one.
Tom: That was when we got the first Amiga.
Stephen: As well, when Tom started to put in the graphics from the Amiga.
Tom: That was '87.
Stephen: The combination of the Amiga and the Fairlight CVI were fantastic, just amazing at that stage.
Tom: Yeah. Good shit. The first Amiga I bought at David Jurgenson, yeah, Grace Bros., which is like Sears & Roebucks sort of outfit. Yeah, 1 MB of memory and we got one clip out. We got most of the way through Hot With Fleas and it blew up. And it was out of commission for five months after that. Quality shit that was. And then they took the Fairlight back.
Stephen: Yeah, I did some work for Fairlight at that stage, which was how I went into the beginning of the development of the CVI. We borrowed the thing. They had a change of sales manager and the new sales manager just decided he didn't like what we were doing, so we didn't warrant having it anymore. Fact that we were touring the damn thing around the world with CVI by Fairlight on the ends of every bloody show was totally irrelevant to these people. Well, to him anyway , not the Fairlight guys but to this particular individual who had the power.
Tom: It ended up on that train, didn't it? There's this technology train that goes around the country and then they installed it in that. Whatever. Got another one now, $A750 in the Trading Post. Mine's white, too.
Stephen: I used to have a black one.
Amey: Now you say CVI, you mean -
Stephen: Computer Video Instrument.
Amey: ... Now there was a point at which, was it the later tour you had some equipment stolen? How did you deal with that?
Stephen: The world tour was when the equipment was stolen.
Tom: Yeah, it was in Madrid.
Amey: It was mostly the video equipment, right?
Stephen: Right.
Tom: Well, no, see, like on the back of Rotund, it goes, "Those guys who stole all our video gear..." that refers to the second series of break-ins at Heuristic which was like the Home Shopping Channel going on in Surry Hills. It was the way they got in that really struck me that time.
Amey: Oh yeah, how was that?
Tom: [To Stephen] Remember the sledgehammer one? That was a good one.
Stephen: Oh, Christ. Through the wall, just straight through the wall.
Tom: With a sledgehammer.
Stephen: It was just outrageous.
Tom: They didn't worry about f**kin' breaking the door down, they just went through the wall!
Stephen: ... Well, the door was locked and was a problem, so the wall was easier. It was much easier to go through the walls. See, it wasn't a brick wall or anything, it was just an interior wall, plaster walls.
Tom: Wasn't there a brick one on the outside?
Stephen: The whole building is brick but, no, this was just the interior walls they went through.
Amey: So we're talking like a big, man-sized chunk of wall?
Stephen: Essentially.
Tom: So when was that, (when all that kind of stuff came?) It must've been pre-'89 or something?
Stephen: Oh, no, no, that was even later, it was another set.
Tom: So that's why I call it the Home Shopping Channel. Yeah, happy days, yeah.
Amey: So were you able to get the video gear back together before you went on tour again?
Tom: Well, '86 -
Stephen: But I think you should deal with - there was a theft in '86 which happened again while we were away. I think people tended to kind of observe what was going on and come in when I'd gone away. As in the '85 thing, but we never really found any of that gear again this time. There was a big problem in Spain during that tour when they broke into the truck and stole all the papers, all the customs papers and all that sort of stuff -
Tom: And everything I owned.
Stephen: - and all of Tom's clothes.
Tom: It was across the road from the King of Spain's palace, that's what got me. We parked the van across the road from the King of Spain's palace under a big bright light. There was these f**kin' guards across the road, wearing wool hats and they actually just came up to the van and they cut the window out, waved to the guards and in they went, you know? Took all my gear, didn't they? His [Stephen's] synth was everywhere in the van all torn up, too, just all over the place.
Stephen: Yeah. Things are reasonably easy to put back together. It's when they don't exist that's the problem. I think the major problem there was that it completely screwed up all the paperwork. And so we had to go back to London to get all the paperwork done. By this time we lost so much money on the whole damn thing that I had to drop out because we couldn't afford to keep the video projectors and things for the tour anymore. And I think in retrospect it might well have been a bit of a mistake to have dropped out, it seemed to be the best way to handle it at the time.
Tom: Oh, but it was so much fun to performing to 800 people -
Stephen: By yourself -
Tom: And with one television set, apart from all that. It was the gig in Hamburg where we had no video gear so I had to describe to the German audience, "And if there was a video playing now, you would see this."
Amey: So was Stephen with you as well?
Tom: No -
Stephen: Naw, I was just skulking around in London at this stage.
Tom: Living on couches. [Grins] I was with this, oh, the German tour promoter...!
Stephen: Wanted to get him on the couch!
Tom: "I get you ze beamer, we go back to my place." Anyway, so like we had stuff stolen here, stuff stolen there. Back in the beginning of '87, Melbourne, Adelaide and stuff...
Stephen: Yeah, there was always the sort of annual Australian tour, or parts of Australia -
Tom: Gig, gig, gig.
Stephen: We sort of did quite well in Brisbane and would always get a great response in Sydney, and Melbourne would basically completely ignore us, and Adelaide and Perth, if they could get a hold of us, would be sort of quite excited. You'd only get sort of 200 or 300 people.
Tom: And then '88, we get to the Chasing Skirt thing.
Amey: Which was documented in the newsletter, pretty much?
Tom: Oh, I think Stephen can probably flesh it out a bit better.
Stephen: Chasing Skirt? Oh that was the Biennale in Sydney. I suppose I've been sort of interested in interactive stuff, but I mean , I don't mean CDI or CD ROM or multimedia, I mean larger scale, where a dancer can control the sound or something along those sort of lines. Of course, particularly with video and with sound. There were some chaps in Melbourne who had developed a rather spectacular system for tracking people's movement, and using particular locations, in a particular space, like a stage or something like that, or in an outside space or whatever, as triggers, in their interests, for musical events, MIDI-controlled type musical events, but we did an interface to drive the video synth as well. The video synth is actually computer programmable to a certain extent, and only to a certain extent, more just in terms of the way it's switched than in the way the actual patterns and things operate. And so we built up this piece out of this system for tracking, it's called a 3-Dimensional Interactive Stage, or 3DIS. Essentially it's a system for, you point a camera at a space, and then it goes into a computer programming area, a frame buffer, and then set up overlays in the frame buffer, which are little rectangles, into which if there's a change of brightness, you can program a particular event to occur. So it could trigger a particular synthesiser to play a particular sequence or something like that. So we'd been asked to do a piece, to prepare something for the Biennale of Sydney in '88. So we got a space down in the installation gallery, which was then down in a thing called Wharf 2-3, which is at the wharf end of Sydney, which is not at the Rocks but around on the other side, by an area called Walsh Bay. And that's a big old huge warehouse for dock-store, bond-store kind of space where they used to unload in the Twenties and Thirties. And they're not really much used anymore. So we had a room which is about 10 metres by 10 metres or something, maybe a bit smaller than that, quite dark. And we put the camera in there, and put a couple of big screens in there, and all the synths and things, and so you had basically vision and sound. Because we'd put the monitor with the rectangles on them so you could actually tell where the trigger points were in the room as well, so people could actually see and get some kind of concept of what was going on. And we put a bit of documentation in there so you actually kind of - a description of how it really worked, or what you had to do to make it interact. And people would come in and they'd sort of make the connections to sort of understand what to do, and then they'd sort of do their things and they'd actually move into spaces and things would occur.
Amey: Did you guys document any of that, like videotape it?
Stephen: There's a bit of videotape, not much. No real videotape of anybody. I've been absolutely hopeless about documenting, that's the worst thing.
Tom: There's the Liverpool one.
Stephen: And, we did again, we did another version of it. I was invited to put the thing back together again for a video festival in England in 1990 - was it 1991 or 1990? I'd have to go to the documentation...
Tom: That's actually on the forthcoming tape, there's a bit of documentation on it.
Stephen: So there is that version of it. But essentially what that basically was was that you walk into or you move into a particular area and it starts to act in certain kinds of ways with synth patterns and things, and the level of the mix of the synth was controlled through the system. And then some of the sounds and things were controlled by it as well. You see, there was a bed going on underneath which was always there so that if you, if there was no one in the room, it would still be just slowly kind of working along on a very ambient kind of level. And then as soon as people came into the room and into the space and go through the trigger points, it would get quite active. So it's sort of quite a nice thing. On this video, there's quite a cool version of it.
Amey: What sort of images?
Stephen: Well, the image base was the coastline south of here, national park, sort of a coastal heathland sort of space. And then in the very far distance you could see the city. And so that was the absolute base, was just kind of heath and scrawny trees and the rocks at the edge of it, and down under there's a river flowing through this area and so down in there as well. And people and water and stuff like that. And then in the background you've got the city stuff. And then we laid in bits and pieces of other Severed Heads pieces, clips and things as a kind of referencing to all the other things we'd been doing. And then that's the base tape, and then the rest of it was patent generated stuff, synthesiser generated stuff played over the top of it.
Amey: Was the Fairlight in there?
Stephen: Only in the sense that some of the material that we used had been done on the Fairlight, but not in any real sense. No, I didn't use the Fairlight for a synthesiser in that context.
Tom: Long gone that one. Long gone by that stage.
Stephen: And so, that was really about just that kind of process of being in that space, and being able to trigger and control things, once you'd spent a bit of time learning what it meant and how to deal with, and you could actually sort of get different things. And you could almost start to be able to play it, play tunes and things like that.
Amey: So you guys were there at the opening of the installation, right? Did you see anybody playing around with it?
Tom: I saw shitloads of people playing around with it.
Stephen: Ah, yeah, Tom had some great stories about it. What was that one, the dad with his kids?
Tom: The pram, the person pushing the pram 'round and 'round in a circle was good. There was one with this sort of stuffed shirt, with his wife sort of spilling out of her cocktail dress, and she was obviously bored with all the art and sort of walked in there and sort of worked out - and she was in there quite a while trying to layer it, sort of mucking around with it, 'cause it was the first time she'd been anything but bored out of her mind with art gallery openings, for like years, I'd say. So we had lots of cool stuff.

Now the really bad times was, I used to go down there every couple of days just to make sure it was still working. 'Cause if you didn't go for three days, no doubt, that you come down there and the tape [makes sound of a tape catching and running badly] - and the camera would be pointed upwards and shit. And sometimes the school groups would come and there'd be like 50 kids all going, "Raah!" You never know who'd be jammed down and things like that. You know? That's the problem with interaction with people, it's the people. If you get rid of the people, then we could get into interaction really well.
Amey: Then you'd just have indestructible equipment.
Tom: Yeah. I'd say so.
Amey: Especially with kids. They can really tear things up.
Tom: Oh, I saw this great thing at a computer show, just as in this summer, a CDI controller, 'cause normally you got a little joystick. It was a kiddie - just a ball -
Stephen: Oh, yeah, I've seen that, just the big thing, yeah.
Tom: - a big ball, a big red ball, and it was just like, great, it was really clever.
Stephen: So someone's actually designed for kids, a remote control for CDI systems.
Amey: I think I've seen that. Big buttons and big - everything's big. I know some adults that would like that too...
Stephen: Yes, I mean there was that kind of thing, that was always part of it, the game -
Tom: So technically it's interesting how it always - now everyone's so used to it. You go down and get a Mac, pop a board into it and a camera and away you go. You got all these sort of control systems for it based in the digital stuff, in software. And there's this gap between like the early analogue sort of material, and then there's the current computer controlled stuff. And it's funny, because we existed - most of our - so far, has just been the bit in between that was a really difficult sort of transitional period. It's just been so much easier.
Stephen: Is your tape going? Your little red light's gone off.

Amey: When you were touring, did you usually stick around to do the set, or did you do anything live, as far as mixing images?
: Oh, I was like on stage every time. I've been a full time part of the show. You know , the video was just like the music. We treated it exactly the same as the music. It had exactly the same function as the music. So, I mean, there was never any, me running, just sort of setting up and leaving, no, no. I mean, I would set up and I would play, just like Tom did. Or whoever else, Paul, whoever else was playing with us at the time. Basically, the core, in a sense, was Tom and I, and Tom was the sound and I did the pics, the vision, in terms of the stage show. And Tom would usually have another keyboard player with us as well. And the three of us, generally, two or three of us, we'd be up on stage, and that's what all that gear is, all that rack-full of equipment there, that you saw, is for stage performance as much as anything else. I mean, I would do live mix, literally a live mix of the vision onstage. And the layer used, there'd be two tapes, a sort of foreground tape and a background tape, plus bits of pattern-generated stuff and things. And so you have the synth and the mixer, and like another mixer. And I'd do like a full mixdown of the clips live onstage as part of the band, as part of the show. So it was very much, that was the really important part about the whole idea, was that we were doing a real-time, live mix of the vision, as much as we were doing of the sound at the time. So, yes, I was up on stage.
Amey: For each song?
Stephen: Every song. There was a clip for every song.
Amey: Now for each song, did you have specific ideas?
Stephen: Yeah, no, generalised ideas, not composed in the sense that music is composed, but yeah generalised ideas. Most of that was sort of dealt with in the making up of the backing tapes. So, yeah, that's a very crucial thing about Severed Heads. In fact, it's probably the most crucial thing about Severed Heads, apart from Tom' s sound generation practices, was that in terms of the live performance, we were actually putting up real live pictures up there on stage and making them then and there. So you never ever saw those pictures again. That was it. And it really was live. That's probably the thing that needs, that Severed Heads did, most importantly, which has been least recognised, because I think most people, because I was up on stage, would've just assumed I was doing sound, in some sense, making keyboard sounds in some way. But I was actually doing pictures, and it was a live process.
Amey: So basically, which equipment were you manipulating the most? Was it the synthesiser?
Stephen: The mixer. The vision mixer. So I was setting the key levels, setting the slicing levels of how pictures cut into each other, and setting up the dissolves and spinning from one track to the other, putting in patterns and things like that. And all actually as a real-time process. So, I mean, in a sense, people claim to be doing live video these days onstage , but as far as I can tell, we were the very first people to ever do it. I wouldn't want to say absolutely that we were, but as far as I can tell, we were certainly the very first people to do live video work as part of the sound show. So a Severed Heads show did not exist without the couple of projectors, or without the projection screen - certainly not since about '86, anyway.
Amey: Except for that bit where Tom had to go -
Stephen: Well, apart from the European stuff, which was a disaster and essentially it didn't exist, there wasn't any other way.
Amey: Poor guy.
Stephen: It was a real drag then. That was a terrible disaster. But apart from that, no the video was very very important to the show. So that, for example, the Australian shows, they're probably the best shows that we would ever have been able to do, with the big cinema shows at the Paddington Town Hall. We'd book out four nights and sell out for four nights. You're talking sort of 400 people in the cinema. Put a big video projector in there and you would have like, up on the cinema screen, and us down on the dais in front, the two or three of us there, and - it's like being in a thunderstorm. It just takes you up and carries you away. And then when you finish it, it puts you down. And then it sort of drains away. It's like a very different show from anything most people experience with standard bands. And I think part of the problem that we always had was that we couldn't be categorised. We couldn't be sort of - I mean, we got categorised as industrial music and all of that, yes, at that level you can be, but people just didn't know what to do with the shows. And the whole thing is, that it wasn't just a rock-n-roll show, it really was almost a cinematic experience, and it would take you over completely.
Amey: So how did most people react? I mean, it's sort of an ambiguity -
Stephen: Oh people loved it! As far as I can tell, anyway. It really does, it just picks you up and takes you off, you know. I mean, I always viewed it as being, like, we were creating a thunderstorm, a big storm...