Monthly Archives: April 2023

After 4 weeks we added a little push to the sales of the Peel Session by “releasing” Dada 331. I had been working on the video for a while. It had not been a very easy process. First, Nick had found the master tapes from the Paradiso show in his loft and took them to Manchester where he had a friend who had taken his old Betacam machine off him, and proceeded to transfer all the stuff for me. He did everything, all the camera angles from that gig, some behind the scenes stuff, and he also had all the rushed to all the pop promos I made for Cranes. Inescapable, Adoration, I hope, and Tomorrow’s Tears. When back in Winchester he started to un the lot thru the Topas upscaling program and sending me bit and bobs. Meanwhile I had got the lyrics for Dada 331 from Alison and started animating them on “The Machine”.

And it went so well and was SO MUCH FUN! I was so please with this, I have been wondering that when I ever really got around to working on the machine (instead of building it, and tweaking it and fixing it) that maybe it was really boring, or did not work well. I have to say I haven’t had so much fun or been so content in myself as when I was working with this. I didnt even do it right the first time and had to worried of annoyance tin doing it again. See my idea was to cut out all the letter sand just animating them in and maybe out again in maybe ways. Of course this could have been done in After Effects, that that is just such a horrible program to work in, I’m always fighting it. Everything looks so so smooth and fake. You always have to pay attention to easing things or using wiggle plugin to make anything seem charming or not like Powerpoint. Anyway, first I printed all the letters out and animated them on my desk. That is white paper on black background. (See the video above) That was the mistake. When i looked at it over the footage of us playing it looked PUNK! Very cool, but not very Cranes! That damn Jamie Reid, no no-one can do it. Anyway some of that stuff stayed in, but most of it I redid, white on white but with the edges of the paper pieces sometimes showing. Looked great.
the rest of it was really just a jgsaw puzzle, some stuff downloaded from Archive.org… god I love that site… who needs Netflix?

The video was launched on the Cranes YouTube channel on April 5th.