I recently came across Jez Turner on Facebook. Jez was behind Tribal Energy and, indirectly, was responsible for Paul and me becoming Overscan in the first place.
I got in touch and asked whether he happened to have any old flyers or other material from those days. I mentioned that I still have amazing memories of The Rocket. For that to have been our first ever live visuals gig seems slightly ridiculous looking back. I can still remember standing on stage at that first event, and I gave Jez a very belated thank you for trusting Paul and me to actually pull it off.
His reply made me smile:
“Yes it was great to meet you back then, you were so good on the computer... Creative... Great ideas...”
He also pointed me towards a Tribal Energy video on YouTube.
And there we were.
Among the footage was Overscan material from 1995, including our live visuals at The Forum in Kentish Town.
At that point we had only just got our collective heads around 3D rendering, so much of the material was crunchy 16-colour sci-fi video grabs and weird rendered things morphing into other weird things.
The setup itself was probably no more than a couple of Amigas, a single genlock and a copy of Scala MM300 for live playback. The much more elaborate multilayered collection of computers, genlocks and video mixers came later.
What surprised me, watching it again after more than 30 years, was that it wasn’t actually dreadful.
It was actually quite good.
So perhaps Jez was right. We were quite good on the computer.
I’d gone looking for some old flyers and instead found Overscan actually running.
Not a bad result.