Everybody was on the tape.
Honey Tree had been selected for an Africa compilation in Johannesburg. I made a roughly 24-hour trip from London and performed the song there.
I had a camcorder with me and recorded the other artists. The camera captured them.
Then came my introduction.
“And now all the way from London, England, Paul Cruse…”
END OF TAPE.
The performance itself happened. The recording of it didn't.
Everyone else: recorded.
Me: introduced.
There wasn't enough.
Some of the Johannesburg footage was destined for the original Honey Tree video. Much later, while editing, I discovered the obvious problem: I simply didn't have enough footage of myself.
There was another small complication.
I'd already sold the camcorder.
The camera, tripod and Lowe bag had gone on eBay. The buyer was already making his way towards a pub near me to collect them.
So the remaining useful life of the camera was now measured in minutes.
One last shoot.
I took the equipment into the woods beside Moor Park station, near my home, and filmed the missing material for Honey Tree.
Some of that emergency footage became part of the original video. Later I put a “rain” visual effect over some of it.
Then I cleaned the mud off the tripod feet and headed for the pub.
The buyer was coming.
The camera was a Canon XM1, a 3CCD digital video camcorder. A surviving photograph shows me with it mounted on its Velbon tripod.
That makes the equipment itself another surviving piece of the story, rather than something remembered only in words.
Beer. Coffee. Cash. Camera.
It was something like a Wednesday afternoon. We met at the pub. He had a beer. I had a coffee.
He gave me the cash. I gave him the camcorder, tripod and Lowe bag.
I remember him as some sort of documentary maker — the exact description has gone — and I gave him a hand carrying everything out to his car.
It was an old Escort.
He opened the boot.
And there it was.
“What's that?”
“What?”
“THAT.”
“What?”
“That!”
“…oh, that's a camel saddle.”
And that is where the story ends.
The strange bit isn't the important bit.
The Johannesburg trip and performance belong to the history of Honey Tree. The later Moor Park footage exists because the tape ran out before my performance was recorded, and because I discovered the shortage while the camera's new owner was already on his way.
The woods footage therefore isn't random filler. It is the last-minute solution to a missing piece of the Johannesburg story — and among the last footage I shot with that camcorder before handing the equipment over.
Why the buyer had a camel saddle in the boot of an old Escort is not part of the archive.
And perhaps it is better that way.