INTERVIEW
look at the individual frames and then I did the splicing, it all took quite a long time. I was using a special kind of tape a bit like Sellotape but stronger. I think I had a cutter of some sort, but it was 60 years ago and I don’t remember the details of what I did, but I do remember that I spent a long time doing it!
Deluxe: What do you think Mirry would have made of it all? Geoffrey Drage: Really quite pleased, otherwise it would all vanish, nobody would know about it, well nobody would know about it after I died, it would disappear. Deluxe: Tell us about your interest in film and audio capturing technology, it feels like the images and audio that you captured at home with Mirry was really quite ahead of its time?
D: A real labour of love. GD: It was all quite crude, I think nowadays it’s all much more sophisticated, they have much better tools and implements and all the things that you need for editing… when I did it everything was quite primitive.
GD: I made my films with a little 8mm cine camera, those were quite popular you see at the time, I don’t think they are much used nowadays as people have video recorders which are much better than the little cine cameras.
D: The audio recordings have a beautiful quality as well. GD: It was a German recorder, one of the first ones that Grundig made after the war. It really was a great heavy thing, it weighed something like 60 pounds, big too!
D: The footage is so beautiful and dreamlike though? GD: Well, do you think the quality is as good as the quality of these videos made by the video recorders? I think they provide more detail and probably better colour too.
D: Was it complicated to use? Did you just implement trial and error? GD: I don’t know whether I turned the tape over or whether I moved the tape head up or down, I think the tape head could be moved and so was in contact with a different part of the tape. The tape was divided into two with an upper and lower level and I think you could move the tapehead. I remember I had to mend that with a soldering iron, but otherwise the old recorder worked quite well.
D: Was the equipment difficult to use? GD: Yes actually, I didn’t like them very much because if you got a hair caught in the shutter mechanism then things could go seriously wrong, it was difficult to get the hair out too, you had to partly dismantle the camera and then get it out with a tweezer. D: Did you ever edit the footage together or did you focus more on just capturing it all for posterity?
D: Were you interested in contemporary music when you were recording Mirry, or was it more about the process of the technique that interested you?
GD: Oh yes I did edit it, I had a little editing machine. It had a magnifying glass so I could
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