Well just before you came, I started capturing more stuff from my video camera into the computer. To try and do another video, but I’m digging into footage that I’ve used a lot, unfortunately. There are bits of images I haven’t used, but I’ll have to go out and do some more filming. Although I am treating the things I’ve used before in a totally different way.

Not yet, no. Sometimes I work from the song first, then other times I capture a set of images, then look at them together. Not edited into any particular sequence or with any effects, then look at them and see what they’re saying to me, then I try to find a piece of music that might feel like the right thing.

Well I copied some to VHS yesterday to send to Harold (Budd), I copied twenty, but there’s more. I think there’s probably twenty-four altogether. And that’s in six months.

Well it’s unfounded if I work this way, because what I’m doing is just getting stuff from footage that I’ve taken while I’ve just been travelling around. There are bits of footage from America, England, Japan, from holidays in France. So it’s travelogue footage mostly, or things that have just caught my eye as I’ve been wandering around. I haven’t yet sat down with a plan, like making a video of a performance.

I don’t know. That needs a bit of time and planning, I have to be in the right frame of mind. Basically I’ve used this material as a means to getting to grips with the system, finding out what it can and can’t do, I’ve been experimenting.

Oh yeah, probably early next year. That’s something I’d like to tackle. Ideally, I’ll wait for my new recording gear to arrive, and I make a start into the new record. When I’ve got some way into it, I can choose something that will be a good piece to do, and put a group together to perform it visually. If I’m going to spend a lot of time on it, I would like it to be something new musically as well. Everything I have used for the twenty-odd videos so far, has been pieces of music from the eighties or early nineties, apart from a couple of pieces that are a couple of years old. I haven’t been able to make anything specifically to go with a video, as I haven’t had the recording gear.

Well, when I start making them, I don’t think, ‘I’m going to do a video influenced by this person, or in the style of that person.’ Sometimes a particular image, or a treatment of it in relation to the music will make me think, ‘that’s very David Lynch, that section’, but it’s realised after the event. Talking of influences, David Lynch is a director that I am a huge fan of. His style is something that I don’t particularly want to emulate, because it’s his style, I’ve got my own way of working with images, but his style speaks quite strongly to me.

In the eighties, I did actually ask Mark Rye, who was managing me at the time, to send some of my instrumental work to David lynch, because I thought it might be right up his street. In fact I remember when I did the soundtrack for the movie Dream Demon, and when Twin Peaks came out, there were some similarities. Although the settings and directors were totally different, Harley Cokliss directed Dream Demon. But there’s that sense of the surreal in the ordinary, the way things are photographed just to bring out the strangeness of something that looks quite normal. It gives a new perspective to things, a quite uneasy perspective, unsettling but beautiful for all of that. So when I saw Eraserhead and later Twin Peaks, I thought he would be somebody I could be inspired to do something really good for. I don’t know what happened, at that time I was throwing so many balls into the air, that for whatever reason, nobody ever caught them.

I think it was a compromised film. It was made by Palace Pictures, and the backers I think wanted a straight-ahead horror film. The original story actually had a lot of subtleties in it, particularly concerning the relationship between the two girls, who are the two main characters. There was a stronger feminist agenda in it, and also a possible lesbian/gay element to it. The director was a fan of Cocteau, the opening sequence is almost a homage to Cocteau, with the mirrors and the girl being dressed for the wedding, and the way the camera moves around. So when I worked with Harley, and we spoke about films and stuff, we were both tuned into similar things. But there was a certain amount of pressure, that if it got too arty and intellectual, it wouldn’t hit its target audience. So there are moments that were intentionally gross, in the way that horror films try to be, yet there were a lot of disturbing dream images. Some sections of it worked perfectly well as an art film, while other parts worked as a kind of B-movie, trash horror film. In a sense, there are two films in there, both struggling for dominance.

I was pleased to do it, because it was my first chance to work on a big movie, and it was an ongoing learning experience, as it went on for many weeks and I quickly found out that nothing’s set in stone. I would receive a video cassette, with a ‘final edit’, and I would spend a week making the music to fit perfectly, timing everything, as this was before I had any kind of sequencing, it was all played real time. So every movement in the scenes were timed to a stopwatch, if somebody did a physical gesture that needed some musical underpinning, I had to know the exact point that it was going to happen in the piece of music. So after a week of doing the music for one scene, then the director and the producer would arrive from London at my house, and bring me another version of the same scene, saying "that old one doesn’t fit anymore, this is the new one". So I was working until two or three in the morning just to keep up with it. Even after the film was finished and shown at the Cannes film festival, there were queries from certain people who didn’t understand certain elements of the plot, the director and producer realised that some of the film needed clarifying. So they re-wrote the film's ending, and re-shot the end sequences. Meanwhile, I thought it was finished and had begun the Henry Moore Landscape documentary film, so I ended up having to do both at the same time, to finish it off. So it was a really stressful and shocking experience, I hadn’t really been up against that kind of challenge before. Exciting, but very, very stressful.

I would, if I could get one that demanded the right kind of music. It’s pointless working with people that want you to be something else. There are a lot of film composers who can turn out anything required, in whatever style. I don’t work that way. I was chosen for Dream Demon because they already liked what I did, so there wasn’t much interference musically at all. To be honest, a lot of the music was fairly abstract and spiky, not very commercial at all.

Okay, films I like as a viewer. I’ve got a lot of film director heroes, because of the amount of years I’ve been watching films. The older you get, the more baggage you accumulate. Things you’ve absorbed and seen and some things you liked when you were younger. So there’s a huge backlog of things. Just naming directors off the top of my head, we’ve already said David Lynch, Orson Welles is a big hero of mine, I’ve read two biographies about his life and watched many of his films. There are some artists that arrive on this planet with incredible passion and vision. They’ve got almost a mission, a task which they have to accomplish, they’re able to see into things in quite a deep way and they have the strength and dedication to take that depth and make it tangible. Make it possible for other people to share that vision. There’s few of those type of people who manage to actually pin it down, Orson Welles I think is one of those. He was worthy of the term genius for me, he’s a huge influence. Citizen Kane particularly, and The Magnificent Ambersons. Citizen Kane is still rated as the best film ever made, even though it was made so many years ago, and it was his first major film. If you go to any serious film school, they’ll go through Citizen Kane virtually frame by frame and say this is the genius of filmmaking.

There’s an English director called Michael Powell, I’m two-thirds through reading his autobiography. His style is very English in some ways. He did 'The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp' and 'A Matter Of Life And Death,' which had David Niven in it. And a film called A Canterbury Tale, which is very, very English. His most well known work was done through the forties and in the war years. He’s just a very poetic man. I think what I look for in film and in music, is a sense of poetry. That doesn’t mean poetry that rhymes in terms of words and literature, poetry for me is a quality, it’s inherent in something, a feeling, a poetic sense or sensibility. So any film that manifests that quality, I tend to gravitate towards. Cocteau is a great example of that, he was a poet in the traditional sense anyway and also a visual artist. When you put the poet and the visual artist together with a camera, you get some magical images. So Cocteau’s films were just pure visual poetry all the time.

Music wise, I think as much as I’ve made music for so long, the music is secondary to what’s going on, on the screen. Even quite average music can still be okay with a film, if the acting and plot are strong enough to carry it. I think mediocre music can ruin a good film, but there’s more of a tolerance in terms of good and bad music, compared to the images, because primarily people see a film and their eyes are engaged, the music is just a punctuation, underlining things. The film composer’s task is to express what action is being depicted and what is supposed to be coming across to the viewer. You can put funny music to a sad scene and it completely twists it. Sometimes it’s not always best to go the obvious route. Sometimes by going against what’s happening on the screen, you can intensify it even more. There are all kinds of possibilities by twisting the rules, but eventually you have to get back to what’s being done and said, and what the audience is supposed to feel.

I’m not sure what he means by ‘film’ footage, there’s been TV programmes which I’ve sometimes had copies of, and unfortunately lost. Be-Bop never made promo videos, they weren’t so widely used at that time. We did do TV programmes. Things like ‘The Old Grey Whistle Test’ we did around three times. We did ‘Top Of The Pops’ and a BBC In Concert thing. There are some I’d forgotten about, which I notice Mark Rushton has put up on his site. Red Noise did a promo video, for ‘Revolt Into Style,’ we filmed it in a private club bar off Oxford Street. We used some shop window dummies dressed up, a sort of mock sixties fashion style. The ironic thing is if you saw it now, it would look quite up to date, with the amount of sixties revivalism that’s gone on over the last five years. The title of the song comes from a book that was written about that period. I don’t have a copy, Mark Rye had a copy, he got the original one from EMI who had funded it. But it would be on an old system, not a digital system, I haven’t seen it at all, but I’m sure there must be something floating about, knowing how these things tend to leak out from certain sources.

Indeed.