Of course the other masterstroke was that I knew we must try to video everything, ready for that great documentary we’d make sometime in the next century. You see, in my head I was creating a movie. We hired a video camera to capture the first show but didn’t realise we had to charge the battery (or probably forgot due to aerosol poisoning from all the paint spraying). We filmed a little before the battery died out and Magenta managed to top this by then leaving her diary and the camera on top of the car as we drove away after the show. Amazingly a good citizen found them both and phoned the number in the diary. You win some you loose some, but we learnt our lesson. Leatherhead may not have been immortalised but everything else would be and I would never have a camera die on me again. Those magical videos are amazing today when I look at them, like looking back in time, the unseen “Quatermass and the band” film. There’s footage of Degville tying into my hair the first pink dreadlocks that would eventually define my look that was to become known as the Pink Pineapple.
Meanwhile I was in ever increasing manic Saatchi and Saatchi mode. Degville and Yana were working out of 392b Harrow road now, along with X and everyone else, making all our clothes. I was creating all the classic T-shirt designs. My vision encapsulated in these T-shirts made us look like MadMax II and you can see it in that classic Sputnik photo shot by Derek Ridger’s on a wet steel walkway at night (see it on the Chapter list page) with me wearing the ATARI t-shirt making sure it was sending out all the right references.
That night set up one of my essential rules for all future photos. Next rule in the red book was that we would only take photos at night. That’s how we created that futuristic neon nightmare look but it was to make many photo sessions difficult because we couldn't exactly just pop outside for a snap. No. This band only came out in the Dystopian nuclear night time.
The sound was ready, but not quite. There was one other element that was to shape the future of Sputnik.
I was sitting at home one Saturday morning playing with a new VHS video recorder I had just hired from Radio Rentals (that’s what you did in those days). It had some new features I wanted to try out such as being able to lay down an audio track first and then dub video from another player onto that. For fun I recorded one of our demos, Love Missile F111 onto a fresh cassette.
As I recorded the tape copy on to the VHS, I accidentally hit play/record on the cassette machine and that’s why at the start on the Jungle album you can hear a slight glitch just before the vocals come in - I’d just fucked up the only master copy!
I then started copying sections from bootlegs of my favourite movies on to the tape - all the ones that had influenced us as well as bits of exploding helicopters, screams, gunfire and any outrageous scenes I could think of. Out came Terminator, Fire Fox, Desperate Living, Long Good Friday, Clockwork Orange, Assault on Precinct 13, anything to hand using another old VHS machine.
Another twist of fate meant that when I did a dub copy onto the video master I discovered that if you flicked the sound monitor across, you could lay the sound of the overdubs on as well, explosions and gunfire... It was at 2a.m. the next morning when I finished after 16 hours straight work. When I finally played the tape to everyone we realised we had created our first home video, so much better for Sputnik than just an audio demo tape.
But also that video tape was to shape the entire Sputnik sound and it’s video impact on Rock and Roll and the sound of these effects became the final element in the actual Sputnik sound. We would feed in the voices and explosion sounds when we played live and it sounded brilliant. The sound of Malcolm McDowel saying “UltraViolence” over and over again at at live gig created a real sense of menace and it was like nothing heard before.
