Erasure Interactive Press Kit: Transcript of Video

[The video begins by showing a Windows 98 virtual machine using the Erasure Cowboy Theme.]

Hello everyone! This is a video showing off the Erasure Interactive Press Kit (IPK). This press kit was put out in 1995 by Mute Records, which at the time was called Mute Liberation Technologies. And it was to promote the album Erasure (1995). But first, I wanted to show you how good the Erasure Cowboy Theme could look. This is a different virtual machine, and it's running Windows 98. And this virtual machine displays more than 16 colours! So you can really see how sharp that image is [points to the background image], and how much better these images look [points to the icons]. Like, Vince doesn't look like he has blood all over his face anymore, so it's fantastic!

Now, let's go and take a look at the IPK.

[Erasure Picnic creator opens the IPK.]

Here we go!

[A promotional image of Erasure fades in. A snippet of the song "Guess I'm Into Feeling" is playing. Then the cover art for the album Erasure fades in. Finally, the program is loaded. It consists of an image of residential buildings, some of which have windows with lights in different colours. Clicking on each the windows reveals the various parts of the program.]

So this has a few things. We'll go through each of them and we'll talk a little bit about them. The first thing we have is the press release.

[The creator clicks the first window to reveal the press release. A snippet of the song "Rock Me Gently" starts playing.]

You can see right here if you look very closely that the cursor has changed, and it looks pretty cool. And it shows you what track is playing in the corner there. If you want, you can pause and read the press release for this. I just think this is really, really cool. And it gives you a lot of this information. Now, this wasn't originally intended for the public. This was intended for journalists and media people to take this information, take maybe a few of the pictures, and use it to write their own articles. But this was eventually published on the Mute website, and later on, on the Erasure's website. So any of their fans who had access to the Internet could view it if they wanted to, which I think is great.

[The creator clicks out of the press release to go back to the main page.]

Now, we're gonna go clockwise, so we're gonna click here.

[The creator clicks the second window to reveal the interview. A snippet of the song "Stay with Me" starts playing.]

This is the full interview that's just gonna be coming up, that Erasure did to promote this album. Now, a video version of this interview can be found on Unofficial Erasure Club's YouTube page. Again, you can always pause the video to read the text. It's really, really cool! And there's some stuff here that isn't on the video recordings. So you get a full sense of what the album was like, and what they had in mind when they were recording it.

[The creator clicks out of the press release to go back to the main page.]

Next, How to Find out More!

[The creator clicks the second window to reveal the How to Find Out More section. A snippet of the song "Rock me Gently" starts playing.]

[The text reads:

Dial up BBS
Telnet
FTP
Send email
World Wide Web URL]

So Erasure didn't actually have their own website at this time. They were still under Mute, and so, if you wanted to know more about Erasure, and were connected to the Internet, you had to go to Mute's official website. As far as I can tell, Erasure didn't have their own website until 2000. However, if you have any evidence to suggest that they had a website earlier, just let me know - I would love to know more. In the meantime, you can take a look at things that Mute were encouraging fans to look up. So you can see that you could dial up the BBS, you could Telnet to Mute, you could FTP to Mute, you could send an e-mail to Mute, or you could go to Mute's official website.

[The creator clicks out of the press release to go back to the main page.]

And let's just click this one right here.

[The creator clicks the last window to reveal the discography.]

And that gives you the last thing, which is a full discography. It gives you all of the singles and the albums.

[The creator clicks out of the press release to go back to the main page.]

That's it for the Erasure IPK. Thank you very much for watching!

[The creator clicks the Exit button. The images fade out, then show the Erasure album cover. The text reads:

The final image is of the Mute logo.]