These lines are from a poem of mine that became a song and then a live cross-dressing-morphing-into-geriatric performance and then finally a Super 8 film with live spoken-word and musical accompaniment. Kodachrome 40 Super 8 film proved to be the perfect medium, with its distinctive 'home movie' quality. Why?

8mm home movies, as you'll often find them used on TV, have come to represent a 'golden age' of safe communities, happy holidays, an unassailable way of life. That ideal was very far from the reality of the estate I saw around me and Purple Rinse explored a creeping fear of the place that I was living in, using the medium which amateur film makers had previously used to preserve their own Great Britain.

This was the first film on which I worked physically, scratching into the emulsion of the film, a direct extension of the 'performance', literally underlining the message with a blunt needle and neat toilet bleach (please do try this at home, it's great!). Small, angry mark-making, projected large.