Michael Eavis at Glastonbury gave us our own field for three days. At one point on the Saturday night, another sound system kind of overtook us and that was really interesting as well. It was open to pretty much anything happening. The cool thing was that at that time the spirit was so positive and peaceful that nothing bad happened, it turned into something really positive.
RS: One last question on the live thing, very few dance and electronic acts do live CDs/DVDs, how did the live DVD capture your vision, especially if it changes every night, how were you able to get one vision on that DVD per se?
Karl: Yes, that’s an interesting point of view because it is changing every night, but what we wanted to do was make a document of the group as it was up until that point. There were three of us and we were taking out the Tomato visuals, which we were very proud of and had been an ambition of ours for many, many years. We ended up amalgamating several shows from around the world. Rick, whose project it was, was told about all these things that DVD technology could do and there were other layers that you could look at and there were other layers that you could hide games in, there were other layers where you could put code to link you to web sites, and so we did all those things.
So this thing became a document that was about how the band had been up until that point, to that year, that season, and a statement of intent about what Rick and I would be going on to do in terms of our internet activities, in terms of interactivity, and we’re fulfilling those things now.
It was a tricky one because no one in the UK that we spoke to was enthusiastic about DVD, they were all kind of saying either what is a DVD, , what can it do or it will never catch on, which is kind of fairly ludicrous if you look back now. And so Rick and I had to invest our own money in that project for quite some time to get it to a point where we can show to people look, this is what a DVD does, and Rick had already done his research, spoken to people in America and it was fairly evident that DVD was going to be the next thing that was the most important carrier of music. And over here it was small but talking to the stores, it was again fairly evident it was the fastest growing area, and so we kind of knew that if we made something good, there would be a place to sell it. And it’s something that I’m still really proud of, even the live CD itself, I think it’s one of my favorite live albums of any that I’ve got.
RS: You mentioned it just now, what led to the development of Tomato, your visual arts side?
Karl: Well, again, it was the end of the 1980s, Rich and I had lost our record deal with Sire Records, you know, we’d just come off of a tour supporting the Eurthymics, their farewell tour of America, we had no band, we were pretty much bankrupt, and together with a friend of ours, John Warwicker, who’d been in the original band Fur in 1982 and had always done the artwork and stuff like that for our albums. A bunch of people got together at his office, that was going belly-up, and they were other artists and we all talked about our displeasure with our experience of the 1980s and how we’d like to do something about that. And we felt that there was strength in numbers and that we liked each other’s work a lot and that in itself was enough to draw us together, just to be inspired by being around other people’s work, that were people that were open minded enough to share their ideas with one another. And we just said look, we just want to get paid well for doing work that we enjoy doing, and that was it, we went yes, that’s a good idea. And it was so nice to be around non-musicians, you know, and I had a background in the arts in the 70s, but again it sort of felt so disgruntled with the way that it was a pretty exclusive area of the world and why I turned to music really because it was more accessible. And then I met this group of artist and it kind of fired me up again, everything about them fired me and Rick up, and that’s kind of really been the story every since, for whatever storms we’ve weathered together, when Rick and I see their work we get excited.
