How Do You Eat An Elephant?

Gosh, this “starting again from a fan-base of zero” malarkey is hard. Once upon a time, one play on my local station, Piccadilly Radio, Manchester, UK would garner more listeners than my entire Spotify back catalogue has had in the past ten years.

But one thing is for sure: for every audio stream of my last single, “Uncomplimentary” released into a world-on-the-brink of COVID-19, the accompanying video was watched five times. This could simply be down to the enormous popularity of its creator and star, “The Ape”, AKA DJ Alf Kremer, from KTCL Radio, Denver or its videographer Bryan Bugfrog but I have to also conclude, people would rather “watch” music these days.

So with the release of my follow-up single imminent, (fortuitously delayed as it turned out - it hadn't occurred to me that my distributor CDBaby would be inundated with new releases from fellow locked-down songwriters), I got my finger out and made a video for it.

The idea was effortless and had been at the top of the pile for twenty-five years, waiting to be made: me, playing all the instruments, a bit of singing, the odd lyric plastered on top. Simple. Obviously a video idea I could only use once, but valid and no better time to make it than now, whilst stuck at home.

The single itself, a re-multitracked, re-produced, re-mixed, re-mastered, 2020 version of one of my first and most-loved BTF songs, “Are We Having A Good Time Yet?” came out of the work I’ve begun to do, saving my Old Masters from their now obsolete recording formats (Roland VS and Fostex D-90 multitracks) potentially to use them as part of whatever technological setup I end up with, whenever I end up taking Bikini Test Failure out on the road, whether solo, with a couple of musicians or as a full band. Somehow, that glockenspiel will need to be heard and I don’t think I can justify the expense of a dedicated glockenspielerist.

Five minutes into scrolling through those now-un-synched instrument tracks I realised some of these songs really should be dusted-off, given a polish and shown the promotional light of day again. AWHAGTY is the first off-the-line and between releases of brand new songs I’m planning to renovate a few more.

But OH! the video. 

I’d set my parameters: it would all be filmed on an iPhone i6 (either on a tripod or using a Hohem gimbal), and edited in iMovie. I’d written a shooting script of sorts, which had thrown up a few additional “B-roll” ideas (“slow-motion falling and smashing beer bottle”) and whilst I tried really hard not to fall down the rabbit-hole of watching TOO many YouTube tutorials, it quickly became clear that if I were to try and chop the by now more than 50 performance clips together, I’d need software with more umph than iMovie offered. 

A quick download of the free and very excellent "Da Vinci Resolve 16" from Black Magic Design (plus several MORE tutorials) and I was ready, six weeks after I started filming, to start the edit.

When you take those 50 video tracks and chop them into 250 beat-synched clips, you soon realise you’ve just given yourself 12,500 editorial decisions to make - and that’s before you consider jamming in the near-100 “B-roll” clips you’ve come up with (“Some sheep, looking at the camera”).

But it turned out really well. Have a look!

So how do you eat an elephant? 

Answer: one small spoonful at a time.