Having its world premiere at The Showroom cinema last month, FUCKING SHEFFIELD, followed a brief few months in the lifes of four city citizens, each with their own agenda and goals. Now you may have noticed me in there! Photographing a bevy of local babes during the production of a book project I've been working on for the last few years. Personally I think I look a bit of a twat, but my character grows on me and I have to keep reminding myself that through the course of the filming my models and I were playing it for laughs (WE WERE ACTING!). Unfortunately if you've seen the film you may not have thought this the case as most of our dallying ended up on the cutting room floor (as seems usual ) and bits that should have been in, as far as I was concerned, failed to make the final cut but changed the mood of the scenes completely. There's a part where after copious amounts of red paint are splashed and poured in various places I hug the model at the end and then turn to camera to reveal two perfect bright crimson breast imprints on my black t-shirt. Sadly the turn to camera was cut, killing the comedy, and the scene finishes like a sticky grope. Later when the model requires a bath and demands bubbles, which I do not have but improvise with a bottle of Happy Shopper washing up liquid, while she's out the room and unaware of my actions, the camera films every moment of her total ignorance as the liquid is squirted into the bath and then as she slides into the "Lovely suds".  For the sake of two more seconds on the end of each scene, Stevlor's 'light comic relief' (as stated in one press review) would have been even lighter!

But, I suppose the hundred or so hours that the crew filmed with me was bound to end up with the majority of it left in the can. Andy Warhol once stated that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes, well I don't think I even managed twelve and a half! Most of the scenes last about thirty seconds and all of you will never get to see some fantastic pieces of celluloid history and over the top acting from yours truly. There's the girl who play pierces and sticks thirty hypodermic needles into her body, their ain't a limb without a pin! Once completed she lays back and gasps "God, I fucking love needles!". Apparently the piercing sets off the endorphines and you end up buzzing like you ain't buzzed before. A great bit of film that never got used. Then there's the girl creating the life of a coke addict for a College paper who snorts eight lines of cocaine until her nose bled. Obviously it wasn't real coke, she ended up sniffing eight lines of sherbert which surely must have been just as bad for her? But she did it very well. Her nose never actually bled either the blood was fake and purchased that day from the Party On joke shop on Division St. Two classic scenes, both lost!

Of course it wasn't all sex and drugs there was also a fair amount of rock'n'roll as the cameras followed my daily routine mixing with the high society of the Sheff music scene. Bands, DJs and various showbiz parties were all recorded and never used. This very magazine was featured three times and then became un-featured as the producers decided to concentrate on totally changing the plot of the film and aiming for a 'Gritty slice of Sheffield's underbelly!" But hey, it didn't work like that, the finished film though advertised as dark and brooding, actually is quite lightweight with none of the characters, whatever their personal circumstances and dependencies, coming across as sad or dysfunctional (apart from me of course). FUCKING SHEFFIELD will win an award, 'cos it's real and any film that features the actual extraction of three adult teeth deserves a gong somewhere along the line. When the DVD comes out I'm hoping the producers will have taken me up on the idea of slipping an extra disc in there of 'The Stevlor Cut'. There are at least twenty sessions that never made the final film and they're all bloody great...  some in more ways than others!