• Stand By For Tape Back-Up: The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove, Saturday, April 4

A COUPLE of years ago poet and performer Ross Sutherland lost every record of his life pre-2010 after a huge hard-drive crash.

But despite losing all his old music, photographs and writing he discovered a new link to his past – through an old much-used videotape of his grandfather’s he found in his loft.

“It’s funny how fast technology has moved on,” he says. “Some kids have never even seen a videotape before.”

The tape itself is a “patchwork quilt” of popular television shows the Peterborough-based performer used to watch with his granddad in his Edinburgh home.

“It feels like a home movie that belongs to everyone,” he says. “Most people in the audience will be familiar with things like the opening credits to The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air.”

He has used these repeated, rewound and slowed down televisual elements to build up what he describes as his most personal piece of writing so far.

Stand By For Tape Back-Up is the story of Sutherland’s relationship with his late granddad – using the images from the three-hour tape to inspire his writing.

“I come from a background of not being a very personal writer,” he says. “I tend to talk about anything but myself. But one of the nice ways of using this approach of old bits of stock footage is it provided a path into personal writing.

“A lot of anxiety was taken away from me, because the method of writing was so precise. I had to find something to say which exactly matched the piece of footage playing behind me. I had to write more from the subconscious rather than the conscious as I had to solve this other problem I had set myself.”

The analogue copy of the videotape is manipulated live on stage, adding elements of chance to the show.

“There’s always this part of me, this angst, that it would be terrible to put the tape in and hear that noise as it chews up,” says Sutherland. “We are kind of protected against that though.

“The tape is always slightly different; I have to be on my toes. It will come in and out of sync, so I have to work with the material.”

The randomness of the tape links in with Sutherland’s own memories.

“The way we remember isn’t chronological,” he says. “We remember things in a weird mixed-up way.

“Everything is out of order. I’m drawing stories out of this tape by using it as a replacement memory.”

The show draws both on shared memories of television and the way the brain likes to make patterns to understand things.

“I remember from my first year at university taking The Wizard Of Oz and syncing it up with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon,” says Sutherland. “Watching and hearing both at the same time you begin to notice these little moments where the two seem to synchronise.

“The brain is looking for patterns and similarities, pulling different readings out of both pieces of art.

“In the show I’m not always directly referencing how the two fit together – the audience is taking in the two channels and start to see what is happening on screen is happening in my story. The show has been written hopefully to enable that feeling.”

As for the future Sutherland has a long-running science fiction project he is developing with the British Film Institute.

And he is penning a palindromic play – which starts and ends with the same lines with the second half of the play exactly mirroring the first half.

Stand By For Tape Back-Up will live on in a new film version, being premiered at a Toronto documentary festival at the end of May.

“It’s a nice way to bring the show to an end,” says Sutherland. “I find myself charting the grieving process over the course of the show. The thing I’m most proud about is the conversations with people afterwards. It came in quite late in the writing of the show, but I realised I was communicating with my granddad through the recordings.”

Essential info: Starts 8pm, tickets £12/£10. Call 01273 201801.