1997 – no ground on my bass and it shocked me

Goldfinger, 'Chris Cayton'

To paraphrase a band from Iceland that we’ll probably return to in a decade or so, I was so smart when I was 17. I’ve got the A Level in Media Studies to prove it.

All it cost me was my pride, and a nasty foot injury that still bothers me now and then.

I’m going to assume you’ve seen at least an episode of Jackass. Enough to get the gist, anyway; a group of daredevils hurts themselves and each other for the purposes of car-crash entertainment. Three skits off the top of my head: riding full pelt around a car park inside a very wobbly shopping trolley; testing out tasers and stun guns; and a group of riders including Tony Hawk and Matt Hoffman, trying to ride their respective modes of transport through a full loop-de-loop and into a lake.

Jackass was aimed squarely at the short attention spans of the MTV generation. A typical 20-and-a-bit-minute episode featured these high-risk stunts punctuated with physical comedy, celebrity guests (including Brad Pitt taking to the streets as ‘Night Monkey’), and lots of pixelated shots of gruesome bodily injury. With these skits served in small doses to an early Noughties audience, the programme was hugely addictive, genuinely dangerous, and it was not to be tried at home.

So naturally, for our A Level assignment, me and my best mate Ben tried it at home.

As a pair of media-literate punk rock fans, we decided a music video would be the most fun thing to create for our coursework. The Venn diagram of bands we both liked was small, so we went back and forth for a while on which song to do. (I distinctly remember wanting to make a video for the Rage Against The Machine cover version of ‘Kick Out The Jams’, which means we were making our decision on the song during the one month in my life where that was the greatest song of all time.)

I’m not sure why we settled on Goldfinger – aside from ‘Superman’ which had been living rent-free in all our heads for a couple of years, for video game-related reasons, I wasn’t too big on the band. I think I was maybe OK with us choosing a song that I didn’t necessarily enjoy, knowing that I’d probably get a bit sick of it after a dozen hours in the editing room. But I do remember a fondness for 1997’s Hang-Ups album. Listening to it now, there’s a polish in the production which I don’t remember being there before.

We probably thought about doing a skating video for ‘Superman’, but we didn’t really know any skaters, so we settled for the next best thing. ‘Jackass’ may have been a mainstream mainstay, but at its low-budget heart, it featured a group of friends pissing about with video cameras. And as a pair of straight-shooting gonzo journalists, the only way for us to present an authentic exploration of the intersection between punk rock and MTV...was to ride full pelt around a car park inside a very wobbly shopping trolley.

(If you ask really nicely, and if I can find the DVD, I’ll rip the video to YouTube.)

I’ve played my own music in live bands, I’m (technically) a published playwright, and I’ve even written and directed a short film. But the experience of producing and sustaining bodily harm in the name of a low-rent Jackass ripoff was by far the most rewarding creative process I’ve ever had.

We’d scoop up whoever was around in between free periods at college, or on the odd Saturday afternoon, and make our way to the nearest open public space armed with footballs, skateboards and whatever other props we could get our hands on.

I don’t know if it was youthful exuberance, the wish to help out their friends, or just boredom, but our artistes committed to every shot, every hit, and every dip into a lake. We wove these skits in with a mimed band performance in that garage I’ve mentioned before, breaking the fourth wall with a revolving door of drummers and bad lip-syncs.

My favourite edit in the whole thing was a ball dropping into shot and bouncing off the side of someone’s face, distracted by the camera. It just drops into a key change in the song so beautifully.

My favourite day of shooting was the aforementioned shopping trolley dash, which if I remember correctly ends the video too, as the muffled voice at the end of the song gives way to groans as my best mates writhe on the ground in pain. I think that was the same day I came a cropper on the stone staircase with the skateboard, landing funny on my foot and causing a swelling that’s never actually gone away.

But oh, how we must suffer for our art. And our coursework.