A is for ANY DAY NOW

Celebrating 20 years of Soup in letters…

‘Any Day Now’ is the first video from Elbow and our first major project. Andy Soup wrapped it up nicely a few years back:

“Mark and I had just graduated from our Interactive Arts course at Manchester Met in the summer of 2000 when we made the video for Any Day Now with Elbow. We’d spent a lot of our time over the past few years stockpiling and playing around with obsolete bits of projection equipment- 35mm slide projectors, old 16mm and Super8 projectors, 3 Bulb video projectors, overhead projectors and anything else that we could lay our hands on.

We used to turn up at clubs and gigs with the car full of a ton of heavy old analogue bits, bobs and boxes full of slides and shredded bits of old film stock. We’d spend the day running up and down ladders rigging it all in the rafters then get drunk and put on these expanded cinema shows. We were calling ourselves Soup Loops.

Any Day Now video with Elbow came about when the lads stumbled into one of these nights we were doing, liked what they saw and asked us to do the same for them. At that point the band were still unsigned but they had budget – a tiny budget but the biggest budget Mark and I had ever worked with. I think it was about 300 quid. We spent the money on shooting some 16mm film and projecting it back over the band in this Velvet Underground / Factory inspired gig that we put on at the Roadhouse. I think it was right after that gig that the band got signed and, bless em’ – they repaid us by letting us have a crack at making their debut music video. It was cool – it was the first video any of us had ever worked on.

I remember the thrill of first seeing it up on MTV2- I don’t think we could believe that something we’d made had actually been deemed cool enough to broadcast. One of the nice things about making films collaboratively is that you have the film to look back on and reminisce. I’ll always be grateful for the Elbow boys giving us that break and also to Mark for having the energy, enthusiasm and stamina to see the project through and make it the best it could be.”