Orlando - A Popumentary (1995)

Orlando never made a demo tape or played any gigs, as you're supposed to do when you form a band. The truth is we couldn't afford to make a demo and couldn't get any gigs without one.
But I had occasional work at BBC Elstree so was able to pull some favours and make this absurdly pretentious documentary about our ambitions for the band. It features short clips of us playing early versions of our second single Don't Kill My Rage and Something To Write Home About, which ended up as the b-side to our first single.

We only made about 5 copies of this video and accompanied it with an A4 manifesto. Then we gave copies to Suede's management, Smash Hits and Simon Price at Melody Maker.

After Simon's extraordinary review of our first gig, representatives of pretty much every record label in the country started phoning my house asking for a demo tape. And of course, we didn't have one. Just this stupid video.
I thought we'd blown it. But the lack of availability and the fact you can barely hear any music worked in our favour. It made it seem like we were playing hard to get and a major label bidding war began, without any of them even hearing us. I was told of one label exec being caught trying to nick a copy of our tape off the desk of a rival label exec.
Oh the 90s.