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room and behind me is my merch-box tower full of CDs and T-Shirts and you name it, rising up
behind me like a sheer cliff face. It’s a bit cramped. It’s an inspiration room. It’s where I spend
about 99% of my time.
BiTS: To change tack slightly, Andrew, it seems to me that you’ve also taught yourself to do other
things like animated film and that sort of thing in the lockdown period.
HDC: I’ve been teaching myself since I started doing all this by myself with everything, making
little videos, little films or whatever. A couple of years ago, I had a go at claymation for the “Dr
Bloodwort” promotion. I think it was only about a minute long and it took me seven weeks to do
that. I decided, in the end, it was too time-consuming because I actually wanted to just play guitar
and make music. I’m of the mindset that if I have something in my head, I will try my best to do it
myself because I like the feeling of accomplishment when I do something myself like the artwork
for albums and poster design and the little promotional videos and T-Shirt design and if there ever
comes a point when I cannot do something, then I’ll have to say enough is enough. I’ll pay somebody
to do it, but it’s more I’ve learnt so much over the last ten years of doing all this that I’ve learnt so
many skills that I never would have dreamt of doing. It’s all a learning experience all the time,
which is something that I thrive on really.
BiTS: It must be very satisfying and you must feel
that you’ve certainly achieved something, to say the
least.
HDC: Yes, that’s what it is. It’s borderline selfish
narcissism, really [chuckles]. It’s - I’ve done all that.
That’s all me, that is. But yes, in all seriousness, it’s a
case of say, as an example, the “Every Path Leads
Here” album that was very, very important to me
because that was a ten-year anniversary of something
extremely traumatic happening to me which I won’t
go into details but which started me on my solo music
career, 2010 and I’d had it in my mind for a couple of
years that at the ten-year anniversary of this event,
Every Path Leads Here that I wanted to do something special and I started
working on the songs and the music and I knew what I
wanted to do and I wanted it to be very personal but something that people could relate to if they
were going through similar or hard times, but I wanted the packaging to be the best that I possibly
could do and stupidly I had an idea to do 3D packaging. It took me five weeks to learn how to do
stuff that we could look at with 3D glasses and it stand out from the page. Most of that was trial and
error with actually printing because it’s okay on a computer screen. You can do it quite easily, but
as soon as you print something onto paper and then do it, it doesn’t translate. I spent five weeks
learning all about 3D images and all that type of stuff. Now I know it all, it’s great. I’ve got those
skills, but when I finally got “Every Path Leads Here” packaging and everything from the printers
and the CDs and all the rest of it and the presentation boxes came, the works and I put it all
together, I was choked up when I was looking at it with a sense of accomplishment and pride in
everything that I’d done, knowing the amount of work that it had taken to get there but knowing
that I’d done it all myself, it was a great feeling. Now, if I’d have had this idea, gone to a graphic