Musical Reflections #7 – Band on the Run

I have mentioned before that my memory isn’t good, especially around my younger years. There are only a few things I can remember, and some I’m not sure are real memories, or those created from stories my mum told me.

One thing I do remember is when my brother Neil Daws was heavily into film making. For those that are not old enough to remember pre-mobile days, it was a lot harder to make a movie than it is today. You couldn’t just film something a watch it back there and then, it had to go and be developed and then you had to physically cut and paste it together to make the movie.

The one movie my brother made that I still remember clearly is a music video for the song ‘Band on the Run’ by the band ‘Wings’. Here is a passage my brother wrote to explain the story behind it.

 

Dad loved technology and the family had been filmed by him on his compact cine camera during many family holidays. I inherited his cine camera after his untimely death, a time when I was becoming interested in movie special effects, especially through sci-fi, and upgraded to a flashier cine camera. The early 1980s would see an explosion of music videos so I decided to experiment. I liked the band ‘Wings’ and chose one of their songs, ‘Band on the Run’, because of the many named characters in the lyrics such as ‘county judge’, ‘jailer man and sailor Sam’, ‘rabbits on the run’, and ‘undertaker’. It gave me the opportunity to create costumes for them and build sets, e.g. a coffin in a chapel of rest, prison cell, etc. Filming on location and in sets built at home, cutting and splicing on a hand-wound editor, syncing a sound track and replicating the overlaying of two different shots (using my friend and I as actors in front of a projection screen) was enormously challenging on 8mm cine film. That said, the whole enterprise was great fun, the final effect was actually pretty good and the whole enterprise remains a treasured memory.

My memory of this song is tightly linked to this movie, which unfortunately I cannot share as it is still in pre-digital 8mm cine film.

It is great that I still have such memories of fun and excitement from that part of my life, and I even made the odd cameo in these movies. I wonder what my brother would have created had YouTube and modern technology been around then?