What are you gonna do when you’re on the back slice of life wondering where the fuck your dreams have all gone? Are you still going be there waiting in line at fifty or sixty, the rain running down your neck wondering what you could have been if you’d had just a little more faith? Had a little more desire to change and be the very one thing you always wanted to be?
Peter Boyd-Maclean took that chance. He quit his stellar career as a London-based filmmaker and award-winning TV documentary director and formed a band called Book of Shame. Boyd seemed to have it all but he wanted something more, something real, something to call his own. He teamed-up with multi-instrumentalist Gary Bridgewood from Troubadour Rose. Over a two-year period the pair jammed, rehearsed and laid down tracks for their debut album (out this month) with a little help from singers Jo Foster and Claire Nicholson, percussionist Fergus Gerrand, pedal steel BJ Cole, and renowned record producer (Wire, Depeche Mode, Swans, Laibach, and St. Etienne) Rico Conning.
With a handful of singles already released, Book of Shame has earned comparisons to Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Radiohead, and even Alice Cooper. Boyd-Maclean’s life-so-far and the beginnings of Book of Shame read like a once-upon-a-time in a land not so very far from here tale full secrets, a bad step-parent, fortuitous meetings and a helluva lot of talent.
Boyd-Maclean started out making Super-8 movies as kid ‘cause he thought in pictures and couldn’t express himself in words. He had a difficult childhood, one that was much darker and far more disturbing than he might ever care to admit. As a student at St. Martin’s College, London, he teamed up with Rik Lander and pioneered scratch video under the name the Duvet Brothers producing promos for New Order and M|A|R|R|S track “Pump Up the Volume.”
The Duvet Brothers promo for ‘Blue Monday’ by New Order.
The Duvet Brother presented a three-hour installation of their scratch video work at the Edinburgh Festival in the late 1980s, where media exec. Janet Street-Porter stood up and said “Why aren’t these people working in TV?” Cause TV back then was clunky and dull and had hardly changed since the 1960s. The installation eventually kicked-off their careers in television but first they were invited to Hollywood to make video installations for the movie Less Than Zero and then back-projections for Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Through Street-Porter, Boyd-Maclean brought his handheld shaky scratch vision to “yoof TV” providing the style-template for the next decade.
Everyone wanted a piece of Boyd-Maclean’s televisual craft and somehow he ended up in the Music & Arts, or Musical Farts, Department at BBC Scotland in the early nineties. That’s when I first met him. It was obvious from the get-go young Boyd-MacLean was a prodigious talent whose natural flair far outstripped the lesser hopeful ambitions of his contemporaries.
But television is a rum beast which like Kronos devours its children or at least their talent for lesser rewards.
Yet, Boyd-Maclean made a highly successful career in TV-land, directing films and documentaries, producing animation series, and winning a shitload of awards. But something was missing. That ability to express his inner thoughts and emotions thru film were constrained by the demands of TV and the adverts who financed it all. With the rise of reality TV, television was little more than the wrapping paper to sell advertiser’s product.
One day, he chanced upon an old broken violin at the family home which he thought might be valuable. He took it to a menders to be fixed where he met Gary Bridgewood. The violin proved not to be that valuable but the meeting with Bridgewood undoubtedly was.
Having not spoken in a long, long time, I contacted Boyd-MacLean to talk about his new and so-far well-received career as a middle-aged indie rock god.
More from Book of Shame, after the jump…
