The Story behind Take A Walk On The Wild Side
WATCH THIS FULL SCREEN TO GET THE FULL EFFECT.
The story behind the music, and what became of that grand circus of flamboyant characters...
I used to think (as did we all) that the song was about taking drugs, and had somehow slipped through the BBC censorship net. It was a huge surprise to discover what the song was *really* about!
This video was created for a Music Production course I did at STC all of a decade ago.
The course taught us how to be record producers, and was huge fun. At the end we were meant to hand in a ten thousand words essay, but I asked if I could instead submit an interactive CD-ROM. This was cutting edge technology at the time! I used Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Director. My PC was so slow back then it would only work at 12fps, so that's why some of this plays back a bit jumpy, but I think it gives it a nice retro look.
I thought I'd lost all the source files, so it was great to find them on an old hard drive, and have the opportunity to re-purpose it for the internet.
The video snippets were gathered from TV programmes I'd recorded to VHS over the years about Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. Particularly helpful were an excellent BBC Arena, and the 'Classic Albums' edition on Transformer.
Although it's presented here as a wide screen video, the way it originally worked was that when you inserted the CD-ROM the PC screen would go blank, and a series of video windows and menus would start to play, change shape, and move around the screen. I loved making this, particularly the fact that I wasn't bound by any traditional video 'frame' . Great fun. You MUST watch this full screen to appreciate the effect!
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RIP, Lou Reed. 
Excellent clip that tells the story behind the song. Never knew until recently it was David Bowie on sax!
