‘We wanted Torvill and Dean skating in the video!’ How we made Godley & Creme’s Cry
‘Machines were revolutionising recording.We were told to lay down a 20-second backing track, a guide vocal – then go and play table tennis’Lol Creme and I left 10cc at the height of the success because we felt things were starting to become repetitive.We came from an art school background and we were thinking visually.Even at that stage, there were two film-makers waiting to come out.We made a short video to promote our single An Englishman in New York, and thought the medium was brilliant.
After we made the Fade to Grey video for Steve Strange’s Visage, people like Duran Duran and Herbie Hancock asked us to make videos for them,We were in New York editing a Police concert film when we met Trevor Horn in the hotel bar, and we decided to make some music together,We had this idea for a song called Hit the Box based on channel-hopping in the US but realised it wouldn’t work in the UK because there were only three channels,Then we remembered a song we’d started to write 15 years previously,All we had was the first verse – “You don’t know how to ease my pain” – but Trevor liked it.
We had always produced ourselves, but Trevor and his crack team were revolutionising the way records were being made.We laid down a 20-second backing track and a guide vocal and were told to go and play table tennis while their machinery ingested it.When we came back they’d created this lovely bed of sound.Lol added some delicious chords and I was told to “Just sing something” to fill four minutes.The lyrics were stream of consciousness, but we knew we had something special.
We wanted Torvill and Dean to skate in the video! But their diaries didn’t match.So we picked loads of faces from a casting book and filmed them all singing Cry.Some said they could lip-sync but couldn’t, but it all looked great in 35mm black and white.This was before morphing, so we used these things called “wipes” which meant one face could dissolve into another.A man might turn into a woman or a punk into an old person, creating an entity that didn’t exist before.
It felt magical.Of course, Lol and my faces are in it.Our “plan B” ended up becoming one of the most talked about videos of the 1980s.Years later Elbow asked me to recreate the Cry video for their song Gentle Storm.Guy Garvey said that when he was a kid it had been a “seismic event”.
I was in New York trying to produce Foreigner when Thereza Bazar from Dollar rang to tell me she was hanging out with Godley & Creme in the bar at the Meridien, and asked if I’d like to come over.Someone in the Foreigner crew had been trying to turn me on to ZZ Top by making me smoke this really strong weed called “Thunderfuck”, so I was pretty spaced out.Kevin and Lol said: “Don’t worry, so are we.”We started hanging out and one night I started to manipulate the dial on the hotel room TV rhythmically, like scratching, which was the beginnings of Hit the Box.I had the studio set up for Foreigner so that weekend we used it to record that Godley & Creme track.
But on the Monday morning Foreigner said: “We heard you came in at the weekend and we heard what you did.It’s fucking awful.” They were so angry with me that I suggested to Kevin and Lol that we put the project to one side and reconvene in England.By then I’d done loads of 12-inch singles and was getting sick of abstract electronic stuff so I asked them: “Haven’t you just got a nice song?” They found this very funny – “A ‘nice song’?!” Kevin and Lol were like a comedy duo in those days, but they got a guitar and played me Cry.We were in Surrey Sound Studios with Nigel Gray, a brilliant engineer/producer who made Andy Summers’s guitar sound so good on the Police records.
Nigel got Lol a great guitar sound,Kevin always had a beautiful voice,JJ Jeczalik from the Art of Noise did the rhythm track and Steve Lipson engineered it,We used Fairlight and Synclavier synths,It was all done very quickly and I thought it came out well.
Once you saw the video you couldn’t hear the song without imagining it.In 2017 my band played Cry live at Fairport’s Cropredy festival, with a guy called Jamie Squire singing.I just thought: “God, this track sounds really great.” It’s been in our setlist ever since.The 11CD box set Parts of the Process – The Complete Godley & Creme is out now on Demon/Edsel.
Trevor Horn plays the Cropredy festival on 8 August
Elon Musk claims he will step back from political donations in near future
Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday that he would decrease the amount of money he spends on politics for the foreseeable future. If true, the reduction would represent a significant turnaround after the world’s richest person positioned himself as the Republican party’s most enthusiastic donor over the last year.“I think, in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said during a video interview with Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum.Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked the Tesla CEO if he had decided how much to spend on midterm elections, which elicited Musk’s response. When asked why he was pulling back, Musk said flatly: “I think I’ve done enough” – drawing laughs from the audience, although it was unclear if he was joking
Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet, UK study finds
Almost half of young people would rather live in a world where the internet does not exist, according to a new survey.The research reveals that nearly 70% of 16- to 21-year-olds feel worse about themselves after spending time on social media. Half (50%) would support a “digital curfew” that would restrict their access to certain apps and sites past 10pm, while 46% said they would rather be young in a world without the internet altogether.A quarter of respondents spent four or more hours a day on social media, while 42% of those surveyed admitted to lying to their parents and guardians about what they do online.While online, 42% said they had lied about their age, 40% admitted to having a decoy or “burner” account, and 27% said they pretended to be a different person completely
Microsoft employee interrupts CEO’s keynote with pro-Palestinian protest
A Microsoft employee disrupted a keynote speech by the company’s chief executive with a pro-Palestinian protest at the company’s annual developer conference on Monday.Joe Lopez, a Microsoft firmware engineer who worked on parts of the company’s cloud-computing platform, Azure, was escorted out the Build conference by security nearly immediately after he confronted Satya Nadella.“Satya, how about you show how Microsoft is killing Palestinians,” Lopez yelled. “How about you show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?”After the disruption, Lopez sent an all-staff email explaining his decision to stage a protest.“As one of the largest companies in the world, Microsoft has immeasurable power to do the right thing: demand an end to this senseless tragedy, or we will cease our technological support for Israel,” read the email, which has also been published on Medium
How to protect your data after a cyber-attack
Another cyber-attack has hit the headlines – this one involving the personal data of hundreds of thousands of legal aid applicants in England and Wales.It comes hard on the heels of recent cyber-attacks that caused huge disruption at Marks & Spencer and the Co-op, and has prompted fresh reminders for people to be extra-vigilant for any suspicious activity.If you’re worried your data may have fallen into the wrong hands somehow, here are some tips for protecting yourself.Always make sure you have strong passwords, and don’t use the same one on more than one account.If you have had any dealings with a company or organisation that has suffered a cyber-attack, change the password that you use for that website or app immediately
Bankrupt DNA testing firm 23andMe to be purchased for $256m
The drugmaker Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has agreed to buy the genetic testing firm 23andMe Holding for $256m through a bankruptcy auction, the companies announced on Monday.Regeneron said it will comply with 23andMe’s privacy policies and applicable laws with respect to the use of customer data and that it is ready to detail its intended use of the data to a court-appointed overseer. The companies expect to close the deal in the third quarter.“Regeneron Genetics Center is committed to and has a proven track record of safeguarding the genetic data of people across the globe, and, with their consent, using this data to pursue discoveries that benefit science and society,” said Aris Baras, the senior vice-president and head of the Regeneron Genetics Center. “We assure 23andMe customers that we are committed to protecting the 23andMe dataset with our high standards of data privacy, security and ethical oversight and will advance its full potential to improve human health
AI can be more persuasive than humans in debates, scientists find
Artificial intelligence can do just as well as humans, if not better, when it comes to persuading others in a debate, and not just because it cannot shout, a study has found.Experts say the results are concerning, not least as it has potential implications for election integrity.“If persuasive AI can be deployed at scale, you can imagine armies of bots microtargeting undecided voters, subtly nudging them with tailored political narratives that feel authentic,” said Francesco Salvi, the first author of the research from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He added that such influence was hard to trace, even harder to regulate and nearly impossible to debunk in real time.“I would be surprised if malicious actors hadn’t already started to use these tools to their advantage to spread misinformation and unfair propaganda,” Salvi said
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‘We wanted Torvill and Dean skating in the video!’ How we made Godley & Creme’s Cry
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