Billy Sloan: When the Trash Can Sinatras put the finishing touches on their latest album "A Happy Pocket", instead of making a pop video, they decided to go one better. They hooked up with director John MacFarlane and produced a short film called "Spooktime". Set in and around a Glasgow pub, the movie is based on characters which can be found in the vivid lyrics of the Trash Can Sinatras songs.
Billy Sloan: John, how did the idea of "Spooktime" come about?"
John Douglas: It came from our songs, basically cuz we're kind of story tellers and there's characters involved in the songs, and we didn't want to do the normal videos that we do because they're very expensive and from our own experience they don't get shown very much; so we wanted to come across...put a different slant on it, and basically what we said to them, the ground rules are, okay, make a short film and we'll be the band playing in the bar. If you can set a story around a bar and we'll be the band playing our songs and they said they would write a tale around the characters; their slant on the characters that are involved in our songs. So it sounded...it was quite an interesting idea, so we went with it.
I believe it's going to be shown like a B-movie for movies going around to cinemas just now. I've been told it's going to be a B-movie for "Twelve Monkeys" and maybe in some places it will be a B-movie for "Trainspotting". Our thoughts behind that was, cuz we don't get played on the radio very much, we thought it was a good avenue to get our songs heard...get songs heard in the cinema where people have paid there money and sort of...sit and listen to us, cuz we don't get much air play and we believe we deserve to be heard.
Billy Sloan: "Spooktime" deals with fairly adult themes - language, violence, sex, drugs...that's going to limit your audience somewhat. We're you cutting off your nose to spite your face to an extent do you think?
Francis Reader: It's no skin off my nose you know, it's like...there are so few people that get to hear our music because of radio, whatever...the rules of radio, whatever, that as far as I was concerned, anybody that could get to see it that wouldn't normally get to see it was fine by me, you know. I don't sort of think that this (limits?) our selective audience considering how selective our audience was in the first place.
Billy Sloan: What do you hope "Spooktime" will do for the band?
Francis Reader: Make our records available to people, make people more aware of what we do, make people recognize that the Trash Can Sinatras is a band that exists. The same as supporting a band.
Thanks to Jim Nisbet for the tape of this interview.
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