Mute Records have released a special deluxe edition of The Pop Group’s debut album Y seeing the iconoclastic album remastered and cut at half-speed at Abbey Road.
To mark the 40th anniversary of this groundbreaking 1979 album, there’s also a box set including the original album, “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” on 12” single and two additional albums Alien Blood—a 10-track album culled from the original 2” tapes of their studio sessions including studio recordings of “Kiss The Book” and “We Are Time (Ricochet)”—and Y Live, a compilation of live performances from shows in New York, London, Sheffield and Manchester. More information at the Mute website.
In the following essay, director Michael Calvert describes what it was like to make a short film with The Pop Group. You can download a special PDF booklet with stills from the 1979 shoot here.
The Ray of Sound
Closer in time to D-Day than the present day, The Pop Group film is, nevertheless, instantly recognisable as the modern world, which fortunately still exists today. It shows the world of bands, drum-kits, amplifiers on chairs, and singers holding microphones facing an audience in a non-hostile environment. Back then, all this was alternative culture, now it is the mainstream.
They had rented a Chapel—Hope Chapel on Hope Chapel Hill—which was disused at the time. It was in Hotwells, where ideas come from the earth, like the hot water which bubbles up from underground. It was the perfect location for the film we wanted to make, which was a ‘promo’ film for the band and their first single. Dick O’Dell had me on the lowest of low budgets. That was a good thing, as it prevented any form of cinematic excess. It was one camera, one lens, and a few lighting ideas stolen from classic Hammer horror. I had promised them that it would be nothing like Tony Bennett’s “Stranger in Paradise,” the first promo from 1952.
I drove down from London with Phil Reynolds, in a rented car with a load of rented gear in the back. We had both just graduated from LCP. Phil took the b&w photos shown here for the first time.
Cinematic discipline, the careful synchronisation of the film to the music track which was playing back on 1⁄4” tape, went out the window in the first five minutes. I was standing in the middle of the audience and things were happening in a different way. I realized the only way to shoot this was to go with it, just to look for good footage, good angles, good light, and hope it would fit together later on.
It was a good performance, and not just by the band. The audience, their friends and fellow travellers, all played their part, some in strange costumes. The lack of a stage meant that everyone was on the same level, so there was an atmosphere of a happening rather than a gig. It was a 60s thing mixed with a punk thing. We might have done four or five separate takes; they got increasingly abstract.
The fire scenes were set up across the river in the woods. They had built “Beyond Good + Evil” as letters supported by long staves. It was hard to get it all burning at the same time. The best part of that scene was when a few people took the staves and used them as torches, spinning them round. It was improvised.
About a week later, I set off for Bristol again, a couple of big tins of cutting copy under my arm. I had hired an editing suite down by Temple Meads.
This time I was staying on Simon’s sofa. He was programming me with the meandering Eric Dolphy, alternating with slabs of Ornette Coleman. The next afternoon, when I finally got to the cutting room, I had Eric Dolphy’s fingers. I cut and cut. People would drop in from time to time, to see what was taking shape.
When they left, I would cut and cut again. It became a mosaic of footage. It was more like making a stained glass window out of tiny coloured fragments.
This went on for a week or so. I eventually ran out of material to stitch into the seven minutes or so running time, so I took it back to the negative cutters, who translated my battered cutting copy - which I still have - into the master negative. Some of the shots are no more than six frames long: a 1⁄4 second.
Looking at the film again, what stands out, in comparison with most other work in this genre, is the lack of a fixed perspective. Every shot is from a different take or a different angle. The time-line is inconsistent, it meanders, it’s disorientating, it’s raucous.
But this is all as it should be; this is The Pop Group. It wasn’t planned like that, it just happened.
—Michael Calvert 2019
The Pop Group will be touring from the end of 2019 and throughout 2020 in support of the release.
“She is Beyond Good and Evil,” directed by Michael Calvert.
“The Boys from Brazil,” directed by Michael Calvert