Tribal Energy club flier
Tribal Energy, November 1994

This flier represents the start of overscan. To be honest, we had not even come up with the name yet. It was not until months later that Jez, the promoter, insisted we should be added to the flier and thus needed to come up with a name.

It was never even supposed to happen. We were accidental VJs.

Jez had been encouraging me to come along to his Tribal Energy nights, and he put me and my friend Paul on the guest list. I had never been to a rave before and it completely blew my mind. So many rooms, so much going on. The main stage would start the night gently with chilled beats, then gradually build into a full frenzy by the end. With the lights and lasers I just thought it was incredible.

But I also remember thinking the ambient room was a bit… lacking. Not offensively bad, just not doing what I wanted it to do.

Then, in one of my rare out-of-character moments, I opened my mouth. Paul and I bumped into Jez on a train coming back from central London and I suggested that we could run the ambient room. At the time I had been experimenting with some pretty awful ambient music myself. Weird tape loops, dodgy drum machines, that kind of thing. Paul had a Commodore Amiga, and he would occasionally show me demo disks made by teenage programmers, pushing the machine to the edge with swirling graphics and impossible effects.

So I pitched it to Jez. I would do live tape loop weirdness, Paul would run visuals from the demo scene, and we would make the ambient room feel like something. Jez listened, then said something like, “No. Forget the ambient room. Do the swirly graphics on the main stage while the band is on. We will get you a projector.”

And I said yes. Immediately. Without thinking. Date set. Six weeks.

When we got off the train, Paul looked at me like I had lost my mind and made one thing very clear. We were not playing demo disks on the main stage. You cannot just rip off other people’s work and call it yours. Fair point.

So we went away and hatched a plan. We started teaching ourselves computer animation using the tools of the day. Deluxe Paint. Brilliance. Slow progress and lots of tiny wins. Paul had the inspired idea of using a piece of software called Scala for playback. I started animating elements from the Tribal Energy fliers that I had been designing.

Six weeks later there we were. On stage. In front of nearly a thousand people. I had never experienced a buzz like it. People seemed to like what we were doing too, although I honestly could not have told you what it was. I just knew it felt important.

And then we were booked again. Next month. Then the next. Before long it was not just “while the band is on”. It was the whole night. So the work began. Create more original material. Learn 3D modelling. Learn how to render. Spend every penny on new hardware and upgrades, just to feed the urge to make more, make it better, and push it further.