a flaming 8-ball

"So wait. That's the audio for the Everything Everything live DVD?"

Yep.

"But is there any video?"

Well yeah, but it came from a heap of different sources.

From memory - the audio was recorded at this gig.

UW had ordered a full multi-track recording truck. I think they'd placed mics in the crowd to get that sense of it as well. We weren't touring with cameras, so the video recording was almost an afterthought.

I got a call to say we were doing the recording and XL Video were going to sort out a camera crew. I think they pulled a crew with multiple cameras/operators/director/engineer off the another tour that was in London at the time. I remember the crew arriving on the day, and we'd come in from Stockholm gig on the 16th on the bus.

It was a really dark gig, and the crew and director had never worked with UW - more used to stadium tours, so for whatever reason, despite the effort, band did not like the footage. I never saw it.

Didn't think much of it - they had the audio, so could do what they wanted with that. Fast forward to Fuji Rock, and we did that gig in Naeba, which was amazing. That, even more than Glasto probably remains my favourite festival - just a blinding weekend. Got do it with the Chems twice as well. The 1999 lineup was brilliant.

Then I think Rick and Karl saw the footage that Wowow TV shoot - and loved it.

Basically they managed to get all of the recorded feeds of the night - filmed with broadcast cameras - and all those lovely wide shots that captured the crowd and the scale of the gig. I remember what I most liked about the Wowow footage, was the director didn't drop a whole bunch of cheesy effects into the mix - it was all in-camera shots and cuts. A physical recording of a physical performance.

The challenge was how to map the two - and I reckon Jono Griffiths utterly nailed it in the end. Took about 6 months of meticulous editing. Rick had tidied up the audio - which I got to mix the visual layer of EE from. And Jono got that audio, and the Wowow footage from Fuji, along with footage for Moaner from Pink Pop from May of 1999, and he had access to all the DV footage Tristan had shot on stage, as well as the footage from Belgium. From memory - there's about maybe 30 seconds of the Belgium footage in the EE DVD.

I was the one that called up the TV production company with Pink Pop festival and asked if we could use the footage for an Underworld concert DVD please, and how much would that cost, and would it be alright? Lovely Dutch bloke was all "No problem" and shipped us the tapes.

Different times really.

Jono was a legend, fretted over every frame, for hours on that Avid. Because he also had the BetaSP tapes of all the tomato visual footage, which I used on tour, and mixed live - during the bits in the DVD where the visuals I was mixing on the screen in Japan appear in the Wowow footage  - he was lining up and making it look it was part of the whole edit.

As far as I know - there was no time code or useful labelling that linked any of those multiple sources - he was digitising, then eyeballing, then editing by frame the tomato visuals to align with the Wowow footage. So in this:

1:25-1:34 - Video not from Fuji Rock crowd, spliced with Fuji Rock stage shots

1:44-2:16 - He maps tomato visual source to match the tomato visuals I'm playing on screens at Fuji Rock

2:13-3:07 - Tomato visuals sources matched, as well as complete inserts over Fuji Rock footage

4:17- 5:16 - Watch how carefully he edits the footage to not have lip sync Karl's lyrics to his mouth - but there's enough similarity and some shimmy and shake in the edit that your brain fills in the gaps.

5:16-5:18 - A splash of frames from another gig (Belgium?) and then into 5:20-5:28 - Audio lipsynced to Fuji Rock footage

5:28-5:50 - Uses 3 camera shots from Fuji Rock, to cut between the lyric and the hip thing Karl does

6:18-6:24 - Flashes of footage from another gig

And on it goes right through the entire DVD.

He was a bit of a nervous wreck at the end of it all. He deserves every bit of success that's come his way since...

I quite like the shared fact that him and I worked for UW and Chemical Brothers on their concert films.

Also, he has a lovely flaming 8-ball tattoo on his arm.