Picture sleeve for ‘Norman Bates’, Landscape’s second single of 1981, which reached the top 40. The elaborate, carefully storyboarded video was made by Brian Grant, who had directed the promo for ‘Einstein a Go-Go’. Due to a mistake made by a record company employee who failed to fill in the correct forms, the video was never shown on British TV.
RCA had not produced a picture sleeve for ‘Einstein a Go-Go’, but for this follow-up, the record company commissioned Clift Jones Associates, a design agency in Covent Garden, to design a sleeve using Paul Cox’s portrait and John Warwicker-Le Breton’s new version of the band logo. The ‘Norman Bates’ sheet music used a snap from the notorious Black & White video shoot, which featured Pamela Stephenson in a Janet Leigh-like role while the band threw avant-garde shapes in an old mansion.
The ‘Norman Bates’ video was an elaborate project, filmed on 35mm B&W stock with a Steadicam, catering, a ‘dowser’ (for the drenching ’rain’) and a seasoned crew who had come straight from filming An American Werewolf in London. The ultra-professional Pamela Stephenson took on the ‘Marion Crane’ role with great panache. The shoot took two very long nights, and we ended up with enough material on film to make a ten-minute short, though sadly that never got made. The video gained some cult appeal on the newly launched MTV channel later in 1981, but the single was never released in the United States.