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Music

The Maestros Of Mash-Ups: A Q&A With Cassetteboy

The masters of making famous people swear tell us about their latest project.

Cassetteboy – Mark Bolton and Steve Warlin – are the maestros of the mash-up, the dark lords of the loop, the connoisseurs of cut and paste. They’re satirical dons with an eye for the mischievous whose re-edited footage and audio of famous people is full of gutter humor awash with infantile bile and scathing derision. Their work consists of plundering whatever video or audio they can get their hands on and then splicing it back together to create hilarious pieces of sardonic, farcical ridiculing.

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No one is spared from their contempt in their quest to make right through mockery. Their ability to turn a person’s words against them and use it as a bat to beat them with is almost sublime—everyone/thing from prime ministers to fat-tongued mockney TV chefs, the internet and binge Britain are ripe for their vaudevillian insults.

They’re now—perhaps to repent for their sins—currently involved with Amnesty TV, a new online show which they’ll be contributing to regularly. First up, staying true to their form of being a “double act who edit footage they’ve nicked off the telly to make celebrities swear”, is their re-editing of Obama on the subject of Guantanamo. You can watch it on episode two of the show here. While they were promoting the show, we thought it would be a good time to catch up with them.

The Creators Project: You’re working with Amnesty at the moment. What are you doing for them and how and why did you want to get involved?
Cassetteboy: We are contributing cut and paste pieces to Amnesty TV, a biweekly internet show that mixes pranks and funny stuff like our videos with a more serious message about human rights. It gets its points across by being entertaining and interesting without being preachy, which is more difficult than it sounds. Basically, it's a show we would have watched anyway, so we jumped at the chance to be a part of it. We were flattered to be asked—who doesn't want to be associated with the work Amnesty does?

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Creating stuff for Amnesty has actually inspired us to become a bit more satirical again. Around the time of the invasion of Iraq we did lots of stuff about Bush and Blair, but after the massive anti-war march was completely ignored, like a lot of people, we got disillusioned and became less political. Working with Amnesty has been a timely reminder that there are lots of things worth fighting for. And also that making politicians look stupid is a lot of fun.

Your first album The Parker Tapes was constructed from manually splicing together the magnetic tape on cassette tapes. That must've taken some time. How grateful are you for digital editing software? Or do you miss the good old days, hunched over a tape recorder with scissors and sore hands?
We did work with tape back in the old days, but we never did the physical cutting and splicing thing. Our early tapes were all made on old fashioned twin cassette decks, like you used to get on hi-fis. We became very good at the precise manipulation of the record and pause buttons.

The main advantage to that system was that once you'd made an edit, you couldn't really go back and re-do it, so we worked a bit faster in those days. Plus it was obviously very limited in terms of what you could do, you couldn't layer sounds or use effects or anything like that, and those limits helped us creatively.

There were many disadvantages though. Obviously the sound quality suffered, as the final tape was always at least two generations old, and often three or four. We also used to get through tape decks very quickly, as they weren't built to withstand the punishing pause button abuse we put them through. There was one machine that started to make a deafening grinding noise as it recorded, and we had to wear headphones so we could actually hear what was being played. It had very responsive pause buttons though, so we stuck with it as long as we could. And of course, when you're working that way, it's possible to accidentally record over stuff, which we did once, erasing a fifteen minute section that had taken us weeks to create. That was pretty annoying.

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The Parker Tapes was mainly recorded digitally, although there are a few sections that were assembled the old fashioned way, most notably The Meat Section, which is nearly three minutes of cookery duo The Two Fat Ladies listing different kinds of meat. It's better than that sounds.

How do you choose your subjects?
They are generally people we like (e.g. the weather man Dan Corbett who we sampled on our Carry On Breathing album) or people we hate (you can draw your own conclusions about those ones). Whoever it is though, they need to say a lot of different words. So either we need a lot of footage of our victims, or they need to have a good vocabulary.

I saw you live at Glastonbury in 2005 (I think), which was great fun. How did you think your edits transferred to a live festival show?
If we were to sit on stage editing live it would be a very boring show. So instead we just put on a DVD of our best tracks, and arse about on stage in various silly costumes. We also act out some of the more graphic sexual encounters that we've constructed. We always try to have some new material, so it's not all stuff that the audience has already seen. It's fairly anarchic and very silly, the sort of show that shouldn't really work, but that's why it's entertaining. That's what we tell ourselves anyway.

The whole cut and paste/mashup culture has exploded in the last few years. Has your popularity increased as that culture's grown?
No idea. We never really saw ourselves as part of any mashup scene, so we tend to ignore all that, really.

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How do you measure popularity? Each album we made sold half as many as the previous one, to the point that we were almost losing money, but hopefully that says more about the record industry than our popularity. In hindsight, printing the URLs of file-sharing websites on our album artwork may not have been the smartest move commercially.

You say your stuff is about making famous people swear, but it's more than just a series of funny gags (although it is funny). In The Parker Tapes you intertwine hip-hop and other samples so the whole album has a rhythmic flow to it. Where did you get the idea to mix that with famous people saying hilarious things?
The music has always been an integral part of what we do. This whole thing started with compilation tapes made for our friends, with little snippets of vocals in between the music. Gradually, the treatment of the vocals got more complex, looping bits, and eventually re-editing them to make them say other things. The music was always part of it though.

We really enjoyed putting together the albums, making sure they all flowed rhythmically and made some sort of narrative sense, like streams of consciousness where ideas merged into each other. The end result was a bit like a DJ mix tape, only instead of mixing music we were mixing jokes and ideas into each other, to create something that flowed with no obvious seams. We'd love to do something like that with video. At the moment, we've only really done stand alone sketches like The Bloody Apprentice, but our work is much richer when we can spread ourselves over a longer time period and mix things together. Basically what I'm saying is, let us on the telly.

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What made you shift from editing audio to editing video?
After three albums we felt they had kind of run their course, certainly financially, but also creatively. We approached each one differently—The Parker Tapes was our debut where we didn't know what we were doing, Dead Horse was our pop album and Carry On Breathing was always conceived as a rather bloated concept album. So we'd followed the career trajectory of most bands, and needed a new challenge. I guess a proper band might have done an acoustic album or a collection of cover versions, but that wasn't really an option for us. So moving to video was a way of reinvigorating ourselves creatively. It turns out it was also a way of reaching far more people, although that didn't really occur to us until it started happening.

How many hours of TV do you have to watch to get, say, a six minute clip?
The only piece we've ever done that's six minutes long is The Bloody Apprentice, and that contains material from around 46 episodes of The Apprentice. Which is a lot. One of the main reasons that our videos are successful is that we really put the work in. I think we probably spend longer collecting our material than most other people who do cut and paste stuff.

Your Jamie Oliver piece is a particular favourite of mine. Do you ever get any feedback as to what the celebrities think about your edits?
We've never been contacted directly by any of our victims, but thanks to Twitter, we have had some indirect feedback. For example, apparently, The Hairy Bikers thought our take on their show was funny. We've not heard anything from Joliver. The only negative response we've ever had was when our Nigella Lawson video was removed from YouTube, but whether that was her production company or Nigella herself objecting, we don't know.

Sir Lord Alan Sugar has been asked about our video in several interviews and has always responded positively. We're very grateful that he didn't ask YouTube to take The Bloody Apprentice down, as we feel he set the benchmark for having a sense of humour about yourself. Certainly none of the videos we've released since that one have been removed, possibly because the celebrities feel that if Lord Alan can take a joke, they should be able to as well.

Your stuff is both satirical and scathing. Reminiscent, I think, of the Chris Morris subversive side of British comedy. Who would you cite as your influences/heroes?
Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci are definitely our main influences. When we started off making compilation tapes with snippets of speech between the music, many of those snippets were taken from On The Hour, the radio precursor to The Day Today. Morris and Iannucci are both masters of cut and paste—in fact, if you re-edit an actual news bulletin it ends up sounding like The Day Today, because of Morris's style of delivery.

Your material is always deftly edited. Where did you learn or how did you develop these skills?
Thanks very much. We taught ourselves, and if we're any good it's just because we've been doing it for years and years.