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   CLUB SANDWICH 73

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Club Sandwich 73

second precision. And no one was shouting out instructions - he just knew when to act.
            "Putting together the video may have been technically very difficult for me," affirms Keith, "but it was mind-bogglingly difficult for Paul, being in all those different characters and always having to remember where he was in the song. Like, he had to remember that on one specific beat of the song his Dave Gilmour character would turn to the Hank Marvin character as a response to what 'Marvin' had done a second earlier. We even did an across-the-line shot of the four sax players. This meant that there were four layers of video tape with Paul keeping three of them perfectly in sync and deliberately making the dippy one at the end go out of sync. If Paul had have moved early at one any point in any of the takes it would have gone wrong. It had to be on that beat, on that bar, and no one was telling him when to turn - he simply knew. It was Paul's ability to make it happen that made the comedy, and I have to say that, from my memory, and it is 15 years ago, there weren't many times when we had to re-shoot something."
Beatle Paul and Director Keef Beatle Paul and Director Keef

            The other outstanding factor was the lighting. Making such a multi-layered video was hard enough in itself, but a McCartney/Macmillan idea to have the lighting constantly changing made the job much tougher. "We could have made the video far more easily without the light changes," says Keith, "but, with them, the end result came across more like a real performance video, where the lights do change almost constantly. Yes, it made the task far more difficult but it also made the end product far more realistic. The light changing made the trick work, it made it magical.
            "It was a technique I'd been developing for some time, and this was the culmination of it. In fact, I don't thing I ever bettered it, except possibly when we created- the illusion of putting Paul and Stevie Wonder together on the same piano for the 'Ebony And Ivory' video. [That's another story for another time - Ed.] Ewart's had one of the first computerised lighting desks, which enabled us to put marks on the playback tape to trigger the lighting to change in the same way however many times we did a shot. So each time we added an element, with Paul in a different guise and costume, the lighting in that segment would be the same as it had been the previous time, so that when I layered it all together it really worked."
            For those who like to know such things, the shot of the entire stage, with all the musicians, is a composite of nine different images: 'Ron Mael' with Linda as the male backing singer, 'Beatle Paul' with Linda as the female backing singer, brass player 1, brass player 2, brass player 3, the out-of-step brass player, the drummer, 'Hank Marvin' and 'Dave Gilmour'. "There's nothing out of sync, and you can't see any joins," insists director Macmillan. "Although there are all those edits you can't see them, not even if you freeze-frame or look at the video in slow motion. Even the shadows work! There's not a shot I would change if I was doing it today. OK, so we had to shoot the whole song endlessly, over and over and over again, but it was all worthwhile."
            There are other little touches that make the video really -work. For example, Macmillan shot every character in close-up, then mid-shot and then, for the backgrounds, shot them again out-of-focus. So when you see Paul as the lead singer you can also see, if you look hard enough, movement behind him, out-of-focus - and that's Paul too. "There's even a shot of Paul's feet that we used, and Paul did that," says Keith Macmillan. "He didn't use a stand-in, he wanted to do it all himself."
            Fifteen years on, how does Keith Macmillan rate the 'Coming Up' video now? "I made 621 rock promo videos," he says, "and it's one that I am particularly proud of. The great thing about this video is that it's so sympathetic to the song, as any good music video should be. OK, it's just a performance video but it's also got humour, it's got magic - the viewing audience knows that it's all Paul but there's still that element of 'how are they doing it?' - it's shot and cut quite simply and has the added strength of using traditional telly language. I think it really works."
            And his memories of the time? "I just remember really enjoying it. The crew were too. And after it went out on Top Of The Pops I got calls from BBC engineers asking how we'd done it. It was a real first, especially with the lighting changes."
            And was The Man Himself pleased with it? "Undoubtedly," says Keith. "He had to be enjoying it to get that joie-de-vivre across. He was very pleased, with it. We all were. I think I slept for a week after we made it, but it did the job: it's fun, it's entertaining and I'm very proud of it."
            And so say all of us, Keith, and so say all of us.

Club Sandwich 73