We came across the hand-held footage of the band performing the song Electricity (see below) on the beach at
Cannes in 1968 as part of the MIDEM music festival and this formed the starting point of Beefheart On The Beach.
We liked the fact that we have beaches here but also the idea of reaching people while their guard is down, while they are at leisure and potentially more open to taking a leaflet, stopping for a chat and thinking about new ideas.
With help of Mike Badger, we put together a group featuring The Probes fronted by Edgar Jones and I invited Imogen Ettridge a Fine Art student from Manchester School of Art
to research and design the costumes and props. We devised what effectively was a miniature Music Festival for the August Bank Holiday Monday - one band playing one song - on
New Brighton prom on the Wirral, with Liverpool as the backdrop - we see the cranes and docks that once served as the conduit with America - and also as a nod to Wirral-born John Peel.
On the day, we handed out hundreds of leaflets with information about the Beefheart Weekend and met a new set of Wirral-based Beefheart fans while chatting with many bemused
Bank Holiday locals and tourists attracted by the noise and colour. We invited Tim Brunsden to document the performance by following the original 1968 camera
movements and some things to look out for in the three and a half minute film include Imogen's charity shop lampshade hats, two Bill Drummond-inspired
ice cream vans, the lighthouse referred to in the song (Lighthouse beacon straight ahead), a song that asks us to sing along with a source of power, years before OMD -
also from the Wirral - also asked us to consider electricity within popular music as in the background, we see the wind turbine farms out in the Mersey that look to supply our electricity now.
I shared the film with some Beefheart-aware colleagues at Leeds Beckett University where I teach and they have further shared it with small Beefheart networks in Nottingham,
Bradford, Birmingham and Huddersfield. At the other end of the spectrum, if you watch just as the camera pans around to the gathering crowd for the first time (around 1min 38sec),
we see a young lad in his Liverpool home top and demin shorts who gradually gets drawn in to the sound and vision and starts nodding his head, hearing the weird and wonderful Beefheart for the very first time and realising there's another world out there.
