It’s been a rough time for me, recently. This weekend’s been quite difficult – lots of DIY related upheavals, and some of my darkest moments for quite a few weeks. I could blog about that, about how hard life feels at the moment – but I’m not going to.
Instead, it’s time for a brief look back at a happier time, and one of the most genuinely fun afternoons I can remember spending. My friend Tris and I were always talking about working together to break into the Media, and while it never happenned (One important life lesson – if you talk about doing something more than actually doing it, it’s fairly likely that it won’t happen) we did have one brief moment of glorious collaboration. We’d done plenty of stuff separately and together- he’d helped out on legendary video project The Alchemist, while I’d co-starred in the even more legendary fan film spoof The New Airwolf: The Next Generation (the first chapter of which has notched up over 90,000 hits on Youtube, a fact that never fails to stun me…), but the only point where we truly collaborated and created something together that was neither mine nor his but by both of us – it happenned one afternoon in 1999, and involved creating truly crazed jingles for an audition tape to aid Tris’ aim of breaking into radio. Tris’ radio career never took off (in the same way as my filmmaking career hit what could politely be described as ‘a few snags’), but he did get plenty of experience, including a run on Hospital Radio where the following jingle did get some airtime. It’s only about a minute long, it was written with the track ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ by Barry Adamson as a backing, it rhymes ‘cool’ with ‘strawberry fool’ (as well as suggesting a different use for furniture polish Mr Sheen) and it never fails to makes me smile. So, if you’ve ever wanted to find out what it’d be like to hear me both singing and (believe it or not) rapping – now’s your chance… (Although if you have, consider me officially scared…)
Saxon Bullock 
Ha! Thank you so much!
I must admit – of all the jingles and audio bits that we did – “Strawberry Fool” was by far my proudest achievement and the one jingle I can go back to and honestly feel proud of – and not cringe at – unlike my apocryphal Gary Barlow and Spice Girls spoofs.
I still can’t quite also believe that it was very nearly a decade ago that this was done. And that we were crammed into that tiny corridor spare room of the flat in East Finchley singing merrily away and having to rehearse the line “He’s got a car and that’s no lie, it’s a 2 door souped up coupe for a racy kind of guy” over and over.
Even now I can’t say that aloud without tripping over it, so kudos to you, Sax!
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You’re welcome, sir! The amount of time that’s passed is somewhat frightening… although imagine how much easier it’d be if you just had some of today’s cheap sound mixing software, rather than having to bounce it between two tape-recorders in order to create all the sound layers!
I actually have an MP3 version of the unexpurgated run-up to the jingle (with all the layers of us chatting to each other from the different versions), plus the semi-legendary “Here’s Tris and Saxon Again” jingle. Good times – let me know if you’d like a listen…
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Ha! Yes of course I’d love a listen to that again…
I’m pretty sure that I still have the master tapes of that somewhere – though where, goodness only knows.
I have often wondered how far we copud have got if we’d sat down and actually finished “Space Oddity”, though as usual, I fear your superior knowledge of all stuff sci-fi would have carried the project through, with my tacked on knowledge of 80’s US TV – or more specifically “Airwolf”, dragging it’s heels behind.
Have you still got the draft of that?
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Very silly. Yet tuneful … I didn’t realise you could sing.
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