| Making
The Project The Artists The Band The Audience The Production Crew The Songs and Songwriters |
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The project began with six months of preparations and research. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard set about sourcing the right people to work with. The Institue of Contemporary Arts were first to offer support providing the ideal space to rebuild and restage the performance. Alongside putting together the perfect band Forsyth and Pollard engaged in ongoing discussions with the organisers and members of Core Arts and Mad Pride to enlist the collaborative participation of users and survivors of the psychiatric care system. The band finally came together around the core of Holly Golightly, a legendary solo artist as well as a founder member of Thee Headcoatees, as guitarist Poison Ivy. Holly was joined by Bruce Brand, a key figure in the Medway scene, as guitarist Bryan Gregory and John Gibbs from The Wildebeests and Holly's current band as drummer Nick Knox. Fronting this formidable group of musicians would be no easy task, but Forsyth and Pollard finally met the singer they wanted to work with in a Tapas bar in Camden Town. Alfonso Pinto, then lead singer of The Parkinsons, left for a month-long tour of Japan the next day. From the moment Alfonso returned to the UK he went into rehearsals with the band and prepared to give his explosive presence and mesmeric performance for File under Sacred Music.
Alongside sourcing and preparing the band, Forsyth and Pollard secured financial support for the project from Shooting Live Artists and set about securing an excellent production team to enable the realisation of File under Sacred Music. In Novmber 2002 Forsyth and Pollard attended a conference at the National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield to discuss the project they were due to film the following February. This very nearly resulted in having to cancel the entire project, when Pollard was hit and hospitalised by a reckless driver. On 3rd March 2004, remarkably only a month later than initially planned, Forsyth and Pollard brought together all the elements to direct a re-staging of the legendary 1978 performance at Napa by The Cramps. After various rejected attempts at digital post-production, together with their editor Robin Mahoney, Forsyth and Pollard decided to explore more 'tactile' strategies for degrading the footage. Several days were spent re-filming from dusty television screens, borrowing ancient VCR machines and outputting to second-hand VHS video tapes that were then scratched and physically damaged by hand before being redigitised and compiled into a final edit that is File under Sacred Music.
Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard met and began working collaboratively while studying at Goldsmiths College in London in the early nineties. 'The World Won't Listen', their first live art event was presented in 1996, and since then they've produced five major live projects, with commissions including the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In 1998, 'A Rock 'N' Roll Suicide' was presented over two nights at the ICA to capacity audiences. The project re-created in microscopic detail David Bowie's legendary final performance as Ziggy Stardust exactly 25 years later. Forsyth and Pollard continue to produce a dynamic range of challenging and accessible art projects, always questioning what constitutes a work of art and how that work accesses an audience. For more information, visit their web site at www.iainandjane.com.
Shuntel Adams, W. Auchaybur, Alex B, Ian Ballard, Simon Ballard, Jodie Banaszkiewicz, Juliet Baptiste, Ivan Best, Tunde Busari, Big Steve, Jo Cadman, Charlie Chadwick, S. Champion, Karen Clarke, Stewart Cliff, Melanie Clifford, David Craig, Peter Cridland, Simon Crimp, Laura Cronin, Mark Davis, Gordon Dawson, Robert Dellar, Jodun Dunsheath, Steve Farrant, Paul Feely, Alfonso Martin Fernandez, Stuart Flory, Andrew Gibbs, Michael Hill, Tim Hogan, Alan Hush, Dominic Jarmain, Heather Jones, Justin Knopwood, Tony Loosley, James MacDougall, Kevin Martin, Tom McCarthy, Charlotte McLachlan, Richard Middleton, Gary Molloy, Paul Monks, Claire Morales, Gloria Nieto, Claire Norman, Mark Pickerel, Tina Pinder, Ann Pitkin, Nanci Sarrouf, C. Scanlon, Gini Simpson, Tahir Suleyman, Russell Thorpe, Victor Torpedo, Everett True, Mary Vallely, Mark Waugh, Ian White, Joe Wilson, Alison Wonderland
Lighting & Cameras - Stuart Roweth "Mystery Plane" Interior/Rorschach "The Way I Walk" Jack M Scott "What's Behind The Mask" · Interior/Rorschach "Human Fly" Interior/Rorschach "Domino" Sam C Phillips "Love Me" Marty Lott "Twist and Shout" Interior/Rorschach "TV Set" Interior/Rorschach
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"The band's versions of 'Human Fly' and 'The Way I Walk' were every bit as charged as the originals... The spirit of the afternoon carried through to the evening's lively discussion. Glasses and insults were hurled across the room amid discussion of exactly which part of the whole process constituted the art. Was it the gig? The film? Or the whole thing? And were the audience viewers or participants?" Iain Aitch in "Perhaps the best and most honest lesson to be learned from these artists' obsessions and inspirations is the importance of accessibility and lack of pretension in any artistic sphere." Susan Corrigan in Links to relevant sites: |
| www.iainandjane.com |
| weblog.iainandjane.com |
| www.hollygolightly.com |
| www.corearts.co.uk |
| www.ica.org.uk |
The writer and critic Tom McCarthy witnessed the staging and filming of 'File under Sacred Music', read his text and other writing about the project in the reading more section |
Images throughout this site were taken during the making of File under
Sacred Music by Alison Wonderland and Claire Norman. File under Sacred
Music is a Shooting Live Artists commission supported by The
Culture Company, Arts Council England, the BBC
and Studio of the North with additional project support from
the Institute of Contemporary Arts. For more information or if
you are interested in screening the film, please contact
us