We’ve been trying to sort this interview for ages and mainly owing to some administrative cock-ups at our end it’s been too long coming, but finally we’ve got it down. It’s the boys from Addictive TV, otherwise known as Graham and Tolly, who’ve been storming the blogs with their viral videos of mashed-up Hollywood trailers. We’ve featured a few before and I’ve posted a few at the bottom for your enjoyment.
So tell us about what you were doing before Addictive TV started.
TOLLY: Believe it or not, I was a professional puppeteer! Our backgrounds are both pretty different; Graham comes from film and TV and mine is from being a composer for theatre turned DJ/producer. But yeah, before that I was a puppeteer, touring the country and performing for quite a while before I met Graham.
GRAHAM: Yeah, we met on the Channel 4 electronic music series Transambient that I was producing in the late 90’s, and Tolly wrote music for the show. I also produced series like Mixmasters, the late night ITV1 series of DJ and VJ mixes – that show ran for 5 years – and long before that I was an assistant director, working on commercials.
And how did Addictive TV come to be in it’s current form?
GRAHAM: Well, I was also a VJ back then, gigging in clubs and at festivals, and from there me and Tolly began working together more and more, first as a DJ and a VJ but slowly developing our live show to become what it is now – completely audiovisual. What you see is what you also hear and vice-versa. If you took either aspect away it just wouldn’t really make complete sense. We’re interested in making the musical and visual elements one thing – AV.
TOLLY: Yeah, I’d say what we do now is a total fusion of both our backgrounds, I mean we’re a music act but we work with film if that makes sense.
What’s been your favourite piece of work you’ve done?
TOLLY: Well, I think our remix of Slumdog Millionaire is definately one of our most accomplished peices, but so is Sportive – which wasn’t a film remix but a video installation in China last year for an Adidas exhibition for the Beijing Olympics, we created music entirely from the sounds of sport. Difficult to say which is my favourite though.
GRAHAM: I still feel one of our best peices was a remix of the 1970’s gangster film Get Carter, that we created for a film festival in the UK – it was incredibly complicated and intricate to do. It’s over ten minutes long and we really took the time to develop new ideas and audiovisual tricks, playing with sounds and images – and many of those ideas carried across into our recent work like Sportive and our Slumdog Millionaire remix. But favourite, well, I guess that has to go to our remix of ‘The Italian Job’. We made it years ago now, but it still stands up I think!
Tell us about your VJ style and how the trailers have affected it.
GRAHAM: Well, actually we don’t really VJ for other DJs any longer, we took that decision long ago to perform our own integrated music and visuals AV sets, very occasionally though, we might do a guest spot VJing for an act if we get asked to do it, like the Chemical Brothers we did a gig with in Rome a couple of years ago.
TOLLY: …and the film remixed trailers are our style, we’re really into the idea of remixing films, creating original tracks from audiovisual samples in a movie, but still keeping the film’s narrative in some manner. Oddly not that many artists are taking that approach.
Any future projects we should be aware of?
TOLLY : We’re involved with an audio/visual remix competiton for a French music festival called Tilt, we’re part of the judging panel and are also playing at the final in March. We’ve also been asked to remix another movie for a Hollywood studio for a summer release, which is great. Our next gig is in Berlin, we haven’t played there for a couple of years, so really looking forward to going back.
GRAHAM: …and more on the art tip, we’re working on our new live cinema project ‘Sampling the Culture’ about the little isolated Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, which last year actually became the World’s newest democracy. It’s a very closed off country that not many people have ever been allowed to go to, let alone film there. They only allowed television a few years ago and most of the country still has no electricity. We spent time there filming ancient dance rituals in a monastery with Buddhist monks way up in the mountains. We also filmed completely stoned cows eating wild marijuana that just grew everywhere on the mountain sides…! Absolutely incredible place. It’s a slow burner this project and taking a long time to create… so check back with us in a year or so!
Ever been tempted to remix some older films instead of the new releases?
TOLLY: We do! In fact that’s what led to the studios commissioning us to remix new movies as alternative trailers.
GRAHAM: Yeah, we’ve remixed Laurel & Hardy in their film “Way Out West” – that’s from the 1930’s! And as I mentioned earlier, we’ve remixed films like 60’s classic The Italian Job and 70’s gangster film Get Carter.
Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever woken up?
GRAHAM: Mmmm… let me think, probably on a terrible rickety old train in India, on a 3 day train journey from Delhi all the way to Goa! But that wasn’t travelling doing a gig. We did tour the Gulf States a couple of years ago, waking up in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait was pretty different.
TOLLY: Well, certainly not weird but very different was the monastery up in the Himalayas in Bhutan we stayed in. Being woken each morning by gongs and bells at around 5am, when all the monks went to prayers, that was pretty incredible.
What’s the first thing you think when you wake up?
GRAHAM: Where am I ?
TOLLY: I need a coffee!
How far can you throw an unfolded piece of paper?
GRAHAM: Well, you don’t say how small the unfolded piece of paper can be – so we ripped a small 4 inch square off a gas bill and threw it, and it spun off and reached 11ft 9 inches! Not bad huh?
Favourite film ever?
GRAHAM: Brazil by Terry Gilliam. It’s a bit of clichéd answer I know, but it’s a visionary piece of film-making and it stands up to this day. In fact, in many ways it has more in common with what’s happening in the World now than it did at the time in the 1980s.
TOLLY: Mmmm, difficult to narrow it down to one film really, but City of God is definately in my list.
Cheers guys!
These words came from , posted on February 2, 2009 at 5:03 pm, filed under Interviews, Video. Read and leave comments here. Follow any comments here with an RSS feed.
