Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll
Jon Hare's account of a historical monument to over-ambition.
Between 1999 and 2004, Richard and I came up with the idea for the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll concept album. I had managed to keep the music rights for all of the Sensible games from the sale of Sensible Software to Codemasters, and we realised that we could tell the SDR story this way. By hacking together the existing music tracks into some order and linking them with dialogue and then overlaying that with sound effects, we could set the scene.
The biggest problem was that quite a lot of the speech was yet to be recorded and we could not afford actors - so we decided to do it ourselves. Most of the male voices you hear on the CD are three people: professional actor Gavin Robertson, Richard Joseph (who did an excellent BBC voice) and me.
This turned out to be a fantastic project for us to work on, on and off over a few years and eventually we had hashed together a tenuous plot, by calling in a handful of female friends to do the female voices when we needed them and improvising everything else ourselves. This was really winging it now. Making it all up on the fly most of the time. In the end, the plot kind of wrote itself. The CD diverges from the game plot as soon a Nigel's baby is born and from that point onwards it was all about thinking on the spot when recording and then leaving it to Richard's production and arrangement genius to do the rest.
The timing of the sound effects and speech is totally immaculate throughout (listen to when Nigel makes a cup of tea, or when the BBC radio announcer introduces the orchestra). Richard sculpted the sound arrangement of the soundtrack for many years to perfect it as best he could with the material he had to play with. The album that we have ended up with is the embodiment of my working relationship with Richard - the humour, the music, the anarchic, homegrown production style. It is definitely not to everyone's taste, and I anticipate loads of people not liking the soundtrack at all, or thinking it is amateurish or simply just not getting it at all.
But be that as it may, we loved it in all it's cobbled-together glory, and every now and then either of us would listen to it and phone up the other and say, you know, it really is pretty good.
Commercially we really didn't know what to do with the soundtrack. We thought it was worth something to somebody and so we decided to sit on it and wait for the right time. In 2005 Richard and I decided to manufacture a bunch of Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll CDs with the 52-minute soundtrack on them. We even sold a few at a games fair in Kenilworth, Warwickshire and had the music videos (there are seven videos in all) running on a big TV in the corner.
However, in March 2007, my dear friend Richard Joseph died unexpectedly of a cancer-related illness at just 52 years old
So that brings us up to date, with a Eurogamer TV Show, featuring a recorded interview with me, a bunch of the SDR music videos, and the 52-minute soundtrack. This is all that is left of Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll except for a few more promotional videos and the pilot cartoon that was rejected by Hewland.
These days the videos act as little more than museum pieces. Some of these videos were started in 1995 and all of them would have been cut into the game as reward sequences for finishing the previous stage of the adventure game. Each video features a song that was to have been played by Nigel's band Magic in the game. Personally, I love the style of hand-drawn cardboard cutouts that you see featured in all of the videos and the anarchic, anything-goes energy that they radiate.
In conclusion, SDR was always an art project made by artists. It is also a project which had a time and a place in 1997,1998 - but that time has long gone. Nowadays our cultural sensibilities are different and our technical expectations are much higher. Quite often people talk to me about the chance of reviving the game and putting it out on some new machine, but in my mind the chance for this game has gone. I have put a considerable amount of work and thought into this project over the 20 years that it mutated from a Spectrum game about a drug addict on benefits into a 52-minute concept album story book, and this is where I am happy to leave it.
Finally, the decision to give away this soundtrack has been made in honour of Richard's death, so that people can appreciate some of the great work that he was doing behind closed doors. To this end, we would invite you to download the first half of the Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll soundtrack now (tracks should be played continuously without pauses in between) and to make a donation to the Cancer Charity as a mark of respect to my dear and very much missed friend Richard Joseph.
Eurogamer would like to thank Jon Hare for sharing his experience developing Sex 'n' Drugs 'n' Rock 'n' Roll and providing the soundtrack for our readers.