The Idea (April-August 1997)
The Beginning. Studying an MA in Film and Video at Central St Martins art school I came into contact with these ideas:

Blue Velvet. The material of the blue velvet offers an all powerful fetish object. One imagines one could crawl down the soft fibres of velvet and nestle in its warm backing, being safe. If you scraped back the surface of the film, you would discover a substance, like in:

Alien. The monster bleeds. Its sulphuric acid blood dissolves everything in its wake, all rectangular structures, it functions like:

The Rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari wrote about an organic structure, like algae - there is no hierarchy, it spreads. Perhaps it is a way forward, a fun way to think.

I am grateful I came into contact with their ideas. Cerebral and esoteric, from a world of the closed self referential intellectual elite. Ideas that students would benefit from mentioning in a tutorial. Not ideas traditionally sung about. I enjoy this fact.

This is what spurred me on. The perversity of the form/content contrast excited me. Eventually these ideas would manifest themselves in lyrics such as:

"I'm becoming a rhizomatic distraction of sexual energy. It subdivides and recreates, eroding and eroding."

Quoting Deleuze the French philosopher would never again exist in the musical form. I enjoy this fact.

Then I saw the film Society. I do not think it is a great film. But it does contain a powerful idea. It is about people being "shunted". This is an activity that takes place at parties in America, it involves lower class peoples bodies being turned inside-out by upperclass people. This was the image that I was looking for, it could embody the ideas above, but it could be a celebration, it all came together.

The development (August-October 1997)
A body without skin, a substance. It has powerful connotations. I explored the idea through different media, like the comic strip. Time-consuming oil painting on glass animation provided a period of reflection and consolidation.

Images developed by festering in my mind. The animation techniques failed. I achieved greater self-knowledge. It was useful to understand how the images and ideas related to my life, that made it seem worth expressing. Yet this period culminated in stagnation. I got too precious about the idea.

Pre-production (November 97 - February 98)
I put adverts requesting a producer. Part of me perhaps was relieved when there was little response.

But then I met someone called Lola Knipe. Immediately her decisiveness over a meeting place was impressive and offered a way forward.

I had a problem, - the idea was mine, not open to criticism and as brilliant as I cared to think it was at any moment. (Also utterly useless - it was not communicating anything to anyone). In my mind it had burrowed itself in my brain like a sleepy mole. The lazy creature was reluctantly awoken by the prospect that this angel-producer Lola offered: realization.

It all came into place - she knew camera-men, production designers etc. I could talk to her about the script. Through regular meetings, things developed.

Casting
It was still just an idea. It needed characters, to be something. The opportunity of choosing from two-hundred actors who replied to my PCR advert was exciting. Then I was in the BBC sports club, auditioning people. One aspect to the audition was requesting the actor to sing a song of their choice. One actress demonstrated an amazing falsetto voice, another actor revealed a laconic humour. By seeing these components available, I then wrote parts for them. You don't really know what you want until you get the ball rolling, then things fall into place.

Creating the music...
Flesh Song...
The Shoot (Two weekends in February 1998)...
Post-production (March-September 1998)...
The film's Reception (October 1998)...
The future...

Writing the music for Inside-Out Man - by David Schweitzer...