The Public Domain stuff has all been something that kind of fell together from researching for the Boom records. I guess I probably err on the side of caution more than I need to but if you know it’s PD you can really go to town on it like at the beginning of ‘Strange Transformations’ which was pieced together by me from stuff across the whole broadcast (rather than being one continuous bit of prose). It’s funny because on tons of dubstep records they used big chunks of film quotes without apparently invoking the wrath of film companies so I reckon you can actually get away with a lot. I often wonder did GZA have to pay the makers of Shogun Assassin anything for the repeated use of those samples on the ‘Liquid Swords’ album (one of my favourite albums of all time, hence the little Shogun Assassin nods at the beginning of ‘Danger! Danger!’ and ‘Ya Basta!’). Because that’s the dubbed version of the film, I wonder if the fact that it’s dubbed has something to do with everyone’s ability to sample it? Probably not but it’s interesting because it’s so sampled in hip-hop.
Anyway, here’s the list of sites I use to come up with the sampling stuff. The best site on the net for PD stuff is Archive.org. For City Of Thieves, and loads of other stuff, this was absolutely vital as all the public info films were from the Prelinger Archives on here which has a cool search facility.
http://www.archive.org/
Another thing I will do is find films that are public domain and then check them out on IMDB and check the Quotes page. If you read through the quotes and find one you like, it’s then a case of having to watch the film. Which is a good excuse for work! When we were recording City Of Thieves I was basically watching two or three old films a day.
This is a great site for all films.
http://www.openflix.com/
This is a great list of horrors.
http://steve-calvert.co.uk/pub-dom/pub-dom.htm
And this is a decent list.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_in_the_public_domain_in_the_United_States
The main thing though is to check through a lot of different sites because there are lots of films that were never famous enough to go on all the lists.
Of course, there is horror radio too, which is where I got the Vincent Price stuff from!
http://www.steve-calvert.co.uk/old-time-radio/horror.htm
In terms of the matching colour schemes, no it was absolutely nothing to do with The White Stripes! Not a band I’ve ever really listened to but I know they’re good.
When we started the band, one of the ideas was to capture that element of bands like The Specials and The Ramones that seemed like a gang, so being colour-co-ordinated was one way of doing it. Another element was that we aren’t one of those bands like The Lost Prophets or Young Guns who are five lads of the same age who are all very handsome and dress similarly. Put us together, and we didn’t really look like a band and we knew that and that wasn’t really a good thing. Like eating food, a lot of appreciation for a band comes through the eyes, conciously or not. That’s not to say that a band has to look amazing, simply that the way they look needs to reflect the music they make. Those disparate influences were part of our music so it was fine that they were there but we wanted a way to be able to wear clothes we were comfortable in (which would be very different from person to person) but still looked ‘together’ as a package. And we still do that, but change the colour schemes around now and then. My favourite ever was the black with camoflague I think, which you can see in the ‘Sound of a Revolution’ video.
It’s funny because there was a point where we dropped doing it for a while because it got stale and Ben got really sick of it but now looking back they’re the worst photos of us live. We all look like we’re in different bands, even though we all thought individually we looked alright. So we went back to the colour scheme things, but just tried to keep it more subtle. It’s just another little gimmick of getting out there and performing as a band, just another small way to make it more interesting than stepping out of the crowd in what we would wear to the shops and going through the motions. It’s just an effort to do something.
Old school!
Ta! Great questions. Keep them coming in people and I’ll keep on blogging!
Barney :)
