Be All You Can Be - Ghost Hall (2019)

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For the fifth and final Ghost Hall album, I found a treasure trove of 1940s and 50s self improvement videos on Youtube, which covered a range of topics such as how to make friends, concentrate in school and use exercise to become more healthy. Just like the advice in the Protect and Survive film, some of these videos seemed to offer somewhat outdated views on how to manage your time and improve yourself generally.

Having found a video talking about joining the army, and the qualities needed in order to join the army, I found that many of the topics covered in the previous videos were almost perfectly aligned with the attributes mentioned in the recruitment video, and so ended the album with a plot twist, in that all of the advice from the previous tracks was geared towards making the listener join the army, and how exploitative some of these videos could have been, if that was their initial goal.

For the album cover I commissioned long time collaborator Jonathan Wentworth to paint expressions onto canvases and headed to the Leake Street Arches (Graffiti Tunnel) near Waterloo in order to get the perfect shot. The canvas expressions feature heavily in the ‘Why?’ track video, and represent the emotions of someone trying to follow the sometimes conflicting advice of these self improvement videos.