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The facial recognition tech that would be useless in an ideal world

Alasdair Field dropped out of uni to work as a ‘tea boy’ at Trilion Television, now he’s the head of Reveal, a leading bodycam company. He speaks to Andy Martin

Sunday 18 July 2021 15:48 BST
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<p>Field saw the first bodycams in 2006. ‘I had the right imagination to see that this would be a game-changer’</p>

Field saw the first bodycams in 2006. ‘I had the right imagination to see that this would be a game-changer’

Alasdair Field was supposed to be studying psychology. The reality was that he was the front man for a band that was on a stage at Glastonbury in 1984. Which, by a curious chain of circumstances, is what ultimately led him to set up Reveal, makers of bodycams, as worn by the Met Police and emergency workers around the country.

Glastonbury may have been his band’s “single claim to fame”, he says, but the experience left Field with an abiding love of the technology. Not just the guitars – of which he has several adorning his studio – but the amplifiers and mixers and recording equipment. It was a short step from there to dropping out of university and joining Trilion Television at the age of 19. “I became a techie,” says Field. “I didn’t really want to be a psychologist, anyway.”

He started out, he says, as “tea-boy”, but he was fully obsessed with perfecting audio and within a few years he was working alongside the biggest names in the music business. “It was the height of artists releasing live videos,” says Field. His job was in post-production, making the best possible sound out of the recordings they had made. He collaborated with the likes of Paul McCartney (“nice guy”), UB40 (“naughty boys”), Brian Ferry (“that suit needed a good iron”) and Tina Turner (“it was like an angel had walked into the room”).

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