Back in March of 2015 I wrote about the Broomway on the Essex coast, and the very peculiar day I had there the previous summer with the band and the video directors, making a pop video. And about a year and a half later the record has now been released. I ended up making four drawings for the gatefold sleeve, adapted from photographs taken during filming.
There have been only 333 copies of the record pressed, and they’re all numbered. If you want to know more, or buy one, or see the fucking bizarre pop video (in which I appear as a hare-headed person) then click through to the Cariad Records website…
One of the reasons that the Broomway was chosen as a location was that Robert Macfarlane had written about walking the path (said to be ‘the most dangerous path in Britain’…) in his book Silt. Researcher/explorer Bradley Garrett was similarly inspired to visit what he calls the ‘Doomway’ and you can read his highly entertaining account here. The photos are very good too.
The dangerous nature of the place does seem to concern people. Massive amounts of unexploded ordinance, deep quicksand-like mud that looks exactly the same as non-quicksand-like mud, tides that come in faster than you can run, a very disorienting flatness and a huge sky that fucks around with your head. So I should state unequivocally that making a pop video there is a very, very bad idea.