Archive: Pure - Pure (video)

This was the last video we made from our debut album Pureafunalia. This song has a long and interesting history too. The song Pure was written when we were still calling ourselves The Grin Factory. Though that name was short lived this song wasn't.  We made a demo with John Webster (the producer of Jordy, Todd and Leigh's former band After All). John had been working on sessions with the likes of Motely Crew and Bon Jovi and had built up a respectable array of sampled drum sounds over that time. When we brought him this song he has a Tascam 488 (8 track cassette multitrack) that we striped one track with sync to drive his Mac running MOTU Perfomer. John loaded up his Akai S1000 sampler with some incredible drum sounds that he told us had been made either for a Motley Crew album or maybe it was Aerosmith, they had been made at Little Mountain Studio for a record that Bob Rock had produced (John was usually brought in to play keyboards and generally make things sound even huger than normal).

Leigh Grant, the drummer in Pure, played his parts on a keyboard, triggering these fantastic drum samples and then Jordy put down the bass part. (I don't remember if David Hadley was in the band at this point). Todd laid down one rhythm guitar part and I sequenced all the strings and the clarinet sample along with the little percussion sequence that I'd done in my Ensoniq ESP-16. I vividly remember the moment when John flipped the tape and told Todd to play a solo, but in reverse. The result was mesmerizing. Jordy's vocals went down pretty quickly and we had a killer demo.

Pure, the song, was then played at a Music West listening panel (in fact the festival was called Westex that year) wherein Ron Goudy from Restless Records stood up at the end of the playback and announced to the room that "this band will be signed in 24 hours." We weren't, but it did lead to us meeting a music lawyer and later signing to Reprise Records.

Months later we found ourselves living on houseboats in Sausalito, California and recording our album Pureafunalia with former Talking Head's guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison producing. We tracked an entirely different version of the song with live drums and Dave on bass but something didn't feel right. Turned out we'd recorded it a bit faster than the demo and we had lost some of its groove. That lead to us getting John Webster to transfer the music to a 2" 24 track up in Vancouver and sending it down to us in California. The real irony came later when we built the song up to so many tracks we had to transfer everything over to a Sony PCM 3348 digital multitrack. We managed to go from the day's cheapest recording medium to the most expensive in the course of recording one song!

Pureafunalia came out, we made a handful of videos, toured several times and then figured we could get one more single off the album and made a video for the song Pure. It was filmed in a rehearsal room that was decorated with the items you see in the video. Co-directed by Rob Chong and Jordy Birch, with camera and editing done by Rob. It's a great song and typically Pure looking clip (all our videos seemed to look alike) that I'm happy to share with the world 28 years later.

Thanks for reading. Stay healthy. Cheers!
Mark

Major Labels vs. Youtube

So I just got a note from Jordy stating the Anna is a Speed Freak video has been removed from the Youtube site. Checking, it has indeed been taken down, with a message that reads "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG." (Warner Music Group). Kind of a shame really as the label hasn't done a thing for Pure in the past decade and an inspired fan posted a decent copy of our best video up for others to enjoy. The small mindedness of this decision - of which I've read MANY thousands of videos by many other artists have also been taken down - seems to be in line with the way the major labels have reacted to almost every aspect of the internet age. They tried to close down Napster and instead created hundreds of smaller file sharing sites that they could never contain. Now they want their rewards from online video sites too. Hey, I understand it's a business but videos are almost always just commercials for the recorded music anyway, agreed that there have been works of art over the last thirty years or so, but generally they are nothing more than ads for the songs.

Ignoring the relevance of videos for a moment, I'd like to firstly say thank you to the person that had originally uploaded the Anna video. Never knew who you were, but thanks. That was a Floria Sigismondi directed clip and it looked great. She is a brilliant director, who's made lovely videos for Sigur Ros, The White Stripes, The Cure and many more. Almost everything she does is a step above and has true artistic merit (well in my opinion anyway), so it was good to see that one again. The original edit of the video was rejected by Much Music because they found the images of the girl lying in the bathtub too disturbing: I guess promoting ODing to children might be considered bad taste. A re-edit was made and the video received medium rotation on the nation's music station, however it was never really shown to any great amount. Which is a shame as it was our best video. That's why it's upsetting that Warner's has opted to remove it. I mean there had only been around 20 thousand viewings on the Youtube page anyway, could that truly have amounted in a loss in revenue? I think the argument could be made that the videos were the only possibilities of promoting the music once the band stopped performing, so why stop it? The albums are finally up on iTunes, but only after David Hadley personally contacted the label from Australia, and I think I can state the company wasn't too bothered with our back catalog up to that point (ask anyone looking to find a copy of either of our Warner/Reprise records - they just aren't anywhere!).

So, sorry to those of you who may be looking for that video, sorry to those of you who never saw it - it was a nice looking clip - and sorry to Warner Bros for being so damn short sighted on this issue. It never ceases to amaze me how the major labels keep making small minded decisions, still, even after all the mess ups they've made in the past decade. Oh well, what's one more misstep, it only really hurts the artists right?

Good luck to everyone out there, hope you're doing well. If you've still got a job you're probably going to do alright, if you've lost a job, you've got my condolences, but just remember, you're all doing better than 99% of the musicians out there, because we've been in a recession since 1999!

Ciao for now.

Mark

p.s. Please buy your music: out of every 99 cents you spend on a track at iTunes the indie artist gets 61¢. That is a better percentage than has ever been offered to any recording artist - ever.