Derek Jarman 1989 tour program

Derek Jarman is best known as a film director. His films include Sabastiane, Jubilee, The Tempest, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, The Last of England and Requiem. He is director of the Pet Shop Boys' performance on stage and is responsible for the film footage projected behind then. Though this is the first time he has worked on a tour he has been involved with pop music on and off throughout his career.

"The nearest I came to working on something like this in the music world was back in 1973. I was taken on tour with Alice Cooper and they wanted me to stage him on Broadway. I planned and designed a whole concert. It was very much of the period - quite over-the-top. He was to arrive on an enormous mechanical spider that was to crawl down this web at the beginning. It was going to be very theatrical. It never happened. I don't know why."

"I started working with pop musicians again when I made Jubilee - there was Adam (Ant), The Slits and Siouxsie & The Banshees. The Sex Pistols used our studio on one or two occasions as a rehearsal place and I took some super 8 of them which is theThe Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. It was a very exciting moment, when music and film crossed over directly. After I finished The Tempest I was going to work with David Bowie on a film called Neutron, but in the end it was more experimental than he could afford to be at the time. In a way I think it became his 'Ashes To Ashes' video because many of the ideas we were discussing, particularly the apocalyptic landscape, turned up there."

"Ever since, during my film-making, music has been a mainstay - apart from anything else keeping me alive. The film I made with Marianne Faithful for 'Broken English' was actually one of the very first music videos of this new lot. I've done quite a few since then - Mark Almond ('Tenderness is a Weakness'), Brian Ferry ('Windswept'), Carmel, Jimmy the Hoover - but the ones I'm happiest with are the ones that get made into film. The next thing after 'Broken English' to get show in the cinema was the smiths film in 1985 'The Queen Is Dead' (representations of three songs, 'Panic', 'The Queen is Dead' and 'There is a Light'). I hope that some of the material that is a backdrop for these concerts will become a film, or at least a video."

"Sometimes, of course, musicians have worked on my films, like David Ball and Genesis P. Orridge, or Coil (The Angelic Conversation) or Brian Eno (Sabastiane). It's backwards and forwards, sometimes I'm working for musicians directly and putting images to their music, sometimes they're coming back and putting music to my films. It's reciprocal."

"The first thing I did with the Pet Shop Boys was the video for 'It's A Sin'. I just thought of it initially as another pop video - it always is until you meet the musicians. I'm always more interested in the people behind the music, and in this case I found two very nice people . I liked how straightforward they were. I didn't really know anything about them beforehand. I'm out of date on music. I'm pushing 50 now and I lived in my own world in Dungeness and every now and then I'm confronted by something."

"Of all the music people I've worked with they've put the most trust in me. Neil, and Chris too I think, has a knowledge of theatre and knows that having asked people to do something you have to leave them free to do what they want to do if you're going to get good results. They seem to understand this and they seem to stick by what's done. I often improvise and dressed up Chris in some old rags for the video of 'It's A Sin' and he still says it felt the most comfortable of all the costume he's worn."

"When I first did 'It's A Sin', not knowing them and knowing the limitations of the music video, it wasn't nearly as strong as the material for this show. The idea then was to conjure up the seven deadly sins - we've kept that for the new film but now they're much more evil - they played prisoner and jailer. Neil was sort of a religious prisoner being indicted and burnt at the stake. The other video I made for them was for 'Rent' . I just improvise these things. I just thought of someone immensely rich and this slightly overblown dinner party and a young woman played by Margi Clarke from Letter to Breznhev escaping back to her roots. Margi was a good person to choose because people associated her with Liverpool. It worked quite well in it own quiet way."

"I don't have any lip sync in the film I've made which is huge advantage - you can't do that in a pop video unless, like Morrissey or Marianne, they don't want to appear in it. The best ones I've done are the ones where the people involved make only a bow in appearance so that I'm left a very free hand."

"I first heard about this tour in April when Neil asked me whether I'd like to get involved and I decided that yes, I would. I hadn't got anything sorted out to do this summer and I though it would be rather fun. Then I thought 'Oh god, what am I letting myself in for?' but now I'm quite excited by it. In terms of the film it turns out that we've actually managed to come up with the best super 8 imagesry I've ever done. The film is often brilliant, even thought I say it my self."

"The costumes we've designed quite often reflect the themes in the film. In 'Paninaro', for instance, the film includes dalmation dogs so the polka dot costumes tie up with that. The actual staging is quite difficult to arrange because unlike in a theatre there's no real bricks and mortar."

"They asked for a theatrical concert and that's we're doing. I suppose some people think pop music and theatre shouldn't mix but I think pop music is theatre and I don't see why it shouldn't be so. To my mind there's two ways of doing it - you either just sit there and sing on a stool and do it the simple way or you go for it."