Gary Oldknow
visuals designer Duran Duran and The Devils

How did you first come into contact with Duran Duran?
I was asked to do the projections for the Latest and Greatest UK tour (1999 – ed.) by Vegetable Vision – a two-piece projection outfit who had a studio next door to me. They were doing projections for the Chemical Brothers at the time and needed someone to do the DD tour. They put together the concept and the slides. I made it all work... later on after the US tour Vegetable Vision split up and the DD management were happy to carry on working with me. After that I got to make all the content and I deliberately aimed it at the audience. My main job is to make the band look good but I also want to make people feel the music. Take ‘Save a Prayer’ for instance. The song isn’t about graves or angels, but by using those emotive devotional images it created an atmosphere that mirrored the way many people feel about Duran Duran. Music is a very personal and intimate thing. MTV doesn’t really leave much room for that aspect of it, but onstage we can make our own rules.

So tell us about your first encounter with the band...
First day at work....
The first time I worked for Duran I had a pair of yellow ear defender headphones to keep the sound at a safe level when I was in front of the PA. Simon noticed me during the first concert and asked the tour manager who the guy was with the yellow headphones? ‘Oh he’s the new projectionist’ was the reply. So Simon says ‘well tell him... this is Duran Duran, so if he is working onstage he either wears black or Gucci’.
Next day I had a nicely resprayed pair of black headphones with little fake Gucci labels stuck on them, and after that I was ‘in’.

You’ve done visual effects for 1998-2001 Duran tours - in what way do you feel your work was different for each tour?
Well, the first tours I did were based around slide projection, which is a very different technique to video. Also I was showing other people’s work for the first two tours. You always prefer to show your own films... then it’s more personal, a bit like showing home movies... but there was a big difference between my approach and Vegetable Vision’s. They never came to the gigs and they never met the fans. They also worked for other bands and most of the material was none specific.
Nick Rhodes had suggested visuals and had very clear ideas about what he wanted to see on the first two tours. If I remember rightly he wanted a giant ashtray and also the inside of his fridge as well as thousands of Viagra tablets.
Meeting the fans is my biggest influence when making the videos. There are a lot of people out there in the audience who have very tough lives and sometimes music is the only thing that gets them through the day. So I try to help the band get through on that very personal level.

How much freedom were you given to create the effects?
By the time I got round to making video for the USA tour I knew the band pretty well and they just let me run with it. I had to go in and show it to them the day before we all left for the US and some of them they didn’t like. Funnily enough, one of them was ‘Save a Prayer’ (it has nothing to do with the lyrics). But luckily for me, once they saw them 40’ across with thousands of fans screaming they changed their minds.

Which of the visual effects you made for Duran would you consider your best or personal favourite work?
The best ones?? Maybe ‘Save a Prayer’. I redid it for the Russian tour and used Orthodox Russian Religious icons for the end section.
Also ‘Too Much Information’. That always got a scream. The band had dropped the song from the set but when they saw the video they put it back in. Another one was ‘Silva Halo’, it only ever got shown twice, in New York at the start of the Up Close (& Personal) tour.

Was the Eastern European tour of 2001 the only Duran tour where you accompanied the band or have you been present for more shows?
Oh I did all the shows on all the tours. But usually the crew travel separately. We get to the venue at 7am and are still there at 2am the next day. We travel overnight to the next gig and sleep on the way. The band have a more relaxed time. But for the more exotic tours we all travel together, which is great for the crew... We get to sleep properly which is a novelty in itself, and we often get the same respect as the band, which is funny really. You suddenly find yourself being asked for autographs and once I found I was in a picture on the front page of the Zagreb newspaper standing next to Simon and Nick.

You’ve worked with an impressive range of artists. Is there any particular artist you most enjoyed working with or for whom you were able to create something quite different from other projects?
I guess Gaye Bykers On Acid. The archetypal grunge band. I could get away with anything there so the visuals were totally over the top.

Were you ever a Duran fan before you started working with the band?
No, in fact quite the opposite. I am the same age as Stephen Duffy and from a similar background. It is funny that we all started as punks and that out of something so hardcore came something as effete as Duran Duran with their nice suits, big hair and eyeliner. There was no way you could blend the punk ethic with the ‘Rio’ video. In my head there was a clear line between the Clash and Duran and I knew which side I stood on. When I got on the Latest and Greatest tour I was expecting it to be painful in the extreme to sit through Simon singing every night. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Mainly because the band and the crew are all such adorable misfits.
So I have done the whole thing backwards...
I met the band first as people and got to know them on a personal level, and then had to come to terms with their music... and finally have to understand that they are adored by millions. It is really odd to be in an airport with one of your mates and they are suddenly mobbed by fans. When I first met Stephen Duffy I had no idea what he had done since he left Duran. I thought maybe he had been working as a milkman or bricklayer or something. It came as a real shock later on when I heard his music. I had just spent two weeks in my studio editing with him and then after he had gone I found out he had created truly beautiful music. I won’t be able to face him next time I see him. I like his music too much now. It will be embarrassing.

Do you think you’ll be working with the band for the 2003 tour and if so, can you tell us more...?
Is that The Devils 2003 tour? Or the Warren Cuccurullo/Duran reunion tour? (I’m being sarcastic here) So far no news... but I like to think I will be invited. Touring is hard work and often can be very tough. It helps to have a nice vibe going so it tends to be a family affair; same faces year in and year out.

For The Devils you’ve worked on two videos so far, ‘Hawks Do Not Share’ and ‘Dark Circles’. Can you tell us a bit more about the making of both videos?
I had made some footage just to play around with a few ideas I had about mass hypnosis and I had edited it to ‘Medazzaland’ because I like the song so much. I went round to Nick’s to show it to him and he suddenly got all excited and started saying things like ‘we wrote this song and the lyrics are Ulysses in ugly shoes’ and ‘there’s this great church in Hampstead, but we’ll need a Goth girl’. Next thing I know I am in air studios and I am introduced to Stephen Duffy.
Two weeks after that and we are in the church filming...
The videos themselves were totally unplanned. It was like a video ‘jam’. For ‘Hawks’ we just picked a couple of nice locations, Nick sorted the clothes, the girl and the makeup. And we just did it. Made it up as we went along. So really it was a team effort. Vuk Vidor (2^nd camera – ed.) was as much involved in the whole thing as either Nick or myself. He gave the video its flickery look.
We found the organ Nick plays in the cellar of the church, and it really was totally filthy. We brushed most of it off and he played it.
I must say that it was one of the best days of my life. It made me so happy to be doing something so good that was so much fun. Film shoots can be very stressful but this one was just like being at a party. Everyone there was just so ‘sussed’ and so nice. Even the guy who drove us between locations was great.
I shot the bluescreen footage for ‘Dark Circles’ at the same time in a corner of the church. I had a basic idea of everything zooming out from the centre and did all that in the camera as I filmed it with the zoom lens. The rest I made up as I did it on the computer. Except for the spirograph patterns that came from the album cover. Nick would phone up once in a while and suggest some ideas. He nearly always thinks of things that are difficult to do. I would avoid it because I know it is so much hassle, but often his ideas are great, so I use them because they are worth the effort. It took 130 hours to put together the 3 minutes of ‘Dark Circles’ because almost all of it was made on computer and not filmed. But only 25 minutes to film it. ‘Hawks’ has over 5 hours of footage and took about 60 hours to edit.
I made an outtakes sequence from the filming of ‘Hawks’ that includes some really funny bits of us all clowning around. We had such a good time.

Now that Come Alive is said to be the first single, we presume there will be a video for that too. What is that going to look like, any ideas yet?
There are rumours of girls exploding out of things & astroturf. I am still waiting to hear the remix but I think it will have a more conventional pop video style than the other two, which were very distinct when compared to a Kylie video.
 
Have Nick and Stephen asked you to create anything for possible live/concert appearances and if so, can you reveal a bit more?
I have my own ideas, but for now it is all speculation. It won’t happen this week though, because unless someone spends a month programming Nick’s keyboards he really will have to play Rio on the Kazoo.

Will John Taylor’s geography field trip slides be used at some point and are they really as boring as you mentioned on Obscurity Vacation (Devils mailing list)...?
I think those slides are the real reason The Devils will do a gig. So that we can all enjoy John’s excellent taste in rock formations.

Is there any other Devils work for you in the pipeline?
Oh, this one will run and run I am sure. In fact... I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is another album sometime.

Has working with The Devils been different from working for Duran and if so, how?
Totally different. Duran is hands off and The Devils has been hands on.
I have known Nick for 4 years now but working for The Devils I see him more times a week than I used to see him in a year. Stephen spent 5 entire days here one week putting together the EPK (Electronic Press Kit – ed.). He is one of the nicest people I have met in a very long time.
Also Duran is quite something to live up to. It is hard work trying to make footage to compare with the ‘Rio’ video. With The Devils we can just do it. It is a totally punk thing. Just like ‘hey I’ve got a guitar let’s form a band’. That’s how we make The Devils videos. We all just jump in a car and go make a video.