My Beautiful Disgrace (Sadie Please Come Home)
A collaborative short film from the Lifehouse project exploring memory, perspective and cultural inheritance
Written and performed by Raven Hurste
Recorded and produced by Tom Collison
Concept and edit in collaboration with Matt Brownsett
Context
Created for the lecture-performance I Am Not OK: The Ordinary Life of an Everyday Incest Survivor – How Music, Sub and Pop Culture Saved My Life (Subcultures Network, University of East Anglia, April 2025), this music video sits at the intersection of lived memory and structured narrative enquiry.
Atmosphere & Cultural Landscape
The film weaves newly composed music with archival family footage, animated photographs, music videos, TV clips and social-political imagery from 1986–87, forming a shared pop-cultural landscape that shaped a generation.
Emotional Core
The film opens with fourteen-year-old Sadie, Raven’s teenage alter-ego, swimming toward the camera in the South of France, weeks before meeting Matt. An SOS tone signals underlying distress.
The song addresses a dissociated younger self through a repeated call to return. The refrain “Sadie, please come home” functions as both emotional invocation and narrative gesture toward integration.
Thirty seconds in, live footage shows Sadie looking directly into the camera before entering an 18+ gig - innocent, determined, vulnerable and nonchalant.
Structural Significance
Rather than staging conflict, the film gathers what was collectively held and demonstrates how music, image and cultural memory function as structural anchors within the wider Lifehouse ecosystem, and how collaboration can hold emotion within artistic form.
The Collaboration
Raven and Matt first met as teenagers in the mid-1980s, united by music and subculture. Decades later they reconnected and began exploring how memory, perspective and inherited experience shape narrative meaning.
Their collaboration forms the dual-perspective strand of the Lifehouse project. Drawing on lived history while maintaining structured creative enquiry, they examine how shared events can be remembered differently, and how music, image and cultural reference act as connective tissue across time.
In March 2025 they attended a concert by two formative influences at the Royal Albert Hall, a symbolic moment reinforcing music as archive and bridge. Their work transforms personal history into multi-perspective storytelling rooted in structure, reflection and mutual respect.
“Working with Raven has challenged me to re-examine memory, perspective and responsibility in ways I never expected. What began as shared history has become structured creative enquiry. The collaboration feels important, honest and musically and culturally rooted in the world that shaped us.””
Raven Hurste
Raven Hurste is a writer, performer and cross-media storyteller exploring intergenerational trauma, memory and multi-perspective narrative form. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and Publishing.
Alongside her writing practice, Raven has extensive experience as a live performer and lead singer in bands, presenting emotionally complex material with clarity and composure.
From 2016–2021 she ran a health and wellbeing centre with a £150k turnover, demonstrating the strong project management and strategic planning skills that underpin the Lifehouse ecosystem.
Matt Brownsett
Matt Brownsett is a teacher, filmmaker and former music promoter with experience in short film production, live event promotion and collaborative creative development.
In My Beautiful Disgrace, he collaborated on concept and edit, weaving archival material and cultural reference into a cohesive narrative.