Mad Hair

I often consider myself to have been rather fortunate and to have been the beneficiary of many happy accidents. A nocturnal meeting with Valentine Rose in Clerkenwell, reading about Dreamy records in London Time Out ten years ago, discovering a copy of Jung's "Memories, Dream and Reflections' in the carriage of a deserted train somewhere in West Wales and so on.

Another of these serendipitous events was receiving a letter one day from an animator called Alex Budovsky which sparked a friendship and a collaboration that has now gone on for several years and has produced some wonderful work. Alex also introduced us to Russia and to various extraordinary people there who we now work with too and some of whom have also become friends.

Amongst them are the amazing folk from the late, great Alexander Tatarsky's animation studio 'Pilot'. They have been engaged in an epic work to create two animated fairy stories for each of the ex states of the USSR - some of which I saw in progress and was duly blown away by. So, it was with great pleasure that i was invited to work on their latest project "Mad Hair'. This is a kind of trailer for a feature based on drawings and ideas left by Tatarsky before his untimely death last year and it truly is a gorgeous, eye-poppingly surreal tale of espionage, lunacy, baldness and sausages set in a re-imagined wartime London. You will rarely have seen anything like it and I look forward to being able to show more soon.

At a time when a kind of cultural (or at least Bureaucratic) Cold War has arisen between this country and Russia again, it feels rather happy to be engaged in such a cross-border collaboration.