B.Troop - Europeans

Recorded at Fairview Music, Hull

***
Rear sleeve notes:

These are excerpts from a proposed documentary about the life and times of a young computer programmer... The locale is a slightly caricatured version of contemporary Europe; the themes are direct and immediately accessible, forming a kind of compressed journey through the pop mythology of the late twentieth century. The film opens with a montage made up of travelogue footage of various European cities. Blue evening shadows fall across the avenues and boulevards of Paris; moonglow bleeds across the pallid walls of Zurich, Cologne, Berlin, London... This rapid overlay of images is intended to produce the same effect on the viewer as a lurid action painting.

The scene shifts to a bland air-conditioned room in a hi-rise office block. The room is, stark, cold, bare and clean, everything in its place, alien and brittle: desks, filing cabinets, a water cooler... Against one wall a young man is programming a computer. He is about 20, hair blond, flesh smooth, pale and waxy, eyes invisible behind violet-tinted glasses. His face is pleasant but curiously expressionless; his movements are quick, precise and economical.

Later we see the young man driving home through the gathering dusk. An area of tower blocks and well-ordered lawns. No vandalism, no muggings, no graffiti. The car pulls up in a car park adjacent to a hi-rise apartment building and the young man steps out into the cool evening air.

In his flat the young man takes a shower. A brief almost subliminal flash of his genitals as he turns to face the camera. As he steps out of the cubicle to dry himself a shaft of blue light falls across his torso and we see that he does not have a navel -

Clone.

Cut to a smoke-filled night spot where the young are watching a four-piece pop group in action. The musicians look like chic urban guerillas; khaki military fatigues; headbands; terse, tight-lipped expressions. Their music brings together human and mechanical elements to form a new and easily assimilable style. A plangent synth dominates the overall sound; bass and guitar add form and substance while a sax supplies the necessary colour. The result is a well-integrated group sound shot through with moments of fragile alien beauty. A drum machine (Roland --) adds a slightly incongruous edge, but otherwise the music is sharp and coherent. The songs are backing tracks to existence once removed in which the imagery of pulp science fiction is reinterpreted in lucid musical terms.

In the front row of the audience the young computer programmer is seen nodding his head appreciatively. His face in close-up, bland and curiously expressionless, his eyes invisible behind violet-tinted glasses. The camera focuses on his face for an uncomfortable length of time, scrutinising the inscrutable, then slowly pulls back.

All at once, we see that the two young men on either side of the computer programmer look exactly like him; same bland expressionless faces, same tinted glasses etc. As the camera continues to pull back, it becomes obvious that the audience is composed entirely of duplicate images of the young man, obviously replicas grown from the same cell cultures.

The scene ends with an extended shot of the group playing live on stage: an harmonious confluence of ideas, contrived and carefully controlled. Obviously entertaining no flashy 'superstar' pretensions, they maintain a relatively low group profile. Their movements are quick, precise and economical. As they play their corporate image is reflected back at them from the lenses of a hundred pairs of violent-tinted glasses...

Outside the streets are deserted. The night is not really dark; instead there is a kind of perpetual neon twilight... A burglar alarm trills in the distance with metallic insistence. Soft electric voices seem to whisper from every recess; "Have fun... Have fun... Have fun in Europe"

- Pete Scott ('The Writing Machine')