We will be supporting Do Make Say Think next Tuesday the 27th of November at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, when they will apparently be playing the whole of their album 'Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord is Dead'. Very Excited. .
Tom made this video of our tour with Gravenhurst in October, incase you wondered what it was like. There's some shots of us playing and some other shots of us doing all the things in between, like driving and dancing and repeating each others names in to a casio keyboard.
We are excited to be playing The End festival in Crouch End which runs from the 16th to the 17th of November. Also playing are our friends Peggy Sue, Gravenhurst, Woodpecker Wooliams, Rachael Dadd and Ichi. It takes place over a series of venues, including these: MUSIC PALACE THE HABERDASHERY DOWNSTAIRS @ THE KING'S HEAD THE OLD SCHOOLHOUSE PAINTED BLACK LITTLE PARIS RILEYS FLASHBACK
If you get a ticket before the 19th October I think you get an 'early bird' discount, (£12.50 as opposed to £20).
More news soon. Also, our show for Oxjam is on this Thursday, at The Victoria in Dalston.
And this is Becca playing some cello with Rozi Plain on her amazing song 'Humans':
Thanks loads to Gravenhurst and everyone who came down to shows this last week. We had an amazing time playing every night and watching their set afterwards. These are some videos of us playing in the main hall of Cecil Sharp House, which is something I've wanted to do ever since I first went there:
This is what I looked like in Newcastle:
And all of us in Leeds:
And Tom with a purse and some merch:
We were all keeping photographic records in our own ways, so more of that soon. .
Nick, Rachael and Claire of Gravenhurst are lovely, and are off on European adventures for three weeks. This is them in Colchester, the last gig we played together:
Cross-processing is where you use film like slide film, and then process it as if it were ordinary photographic film, and as a consequence you get these weird distorted colours. Sometimes it turns out great and sometimes it's just odd.
This is from 'Tales of Ordinary Madness' by Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is one of my favourite authors.
'Christ, there were women everywhere and over 1/2 of them looked good enough to fuck, and there was nothing you could do, just look at them. Who'd ever devise such an awful trick? Yet they all looked pretty much alike - overlooking a roll of fat here, no ass there - just so many poppies in a field. Which one did you pick? Which one picked you? It didn't matter, and it was all so sad. And when the picks were made, it never worked, it never worked for anybody, no matter what they said.'
The thing I like about Bukowski is, even though we're different in a few ways, he's just straightforwardly honest in the way that he writes, and his style is about getting rid of pretension and artifice, a bit like Hemingway, who I think he admired a lot. And you can feel his disdain for the pretentious and the powerful running through his books, next to the low hard life, and these occasional confessions of awe or these sudden overviews which widen the focus right out, from the drinking and the gambling and stuff to the whole wonderful and sorry mess of everything.
So, on the 18th of October we are headlining an Oxjam show at the Victoria in Dalston, (headlining is exciting/scary/good), and on the 22nd November we are supporting Fanfarlo at the Union Chapel. This is a video of them singing:
Also, tonight we are supporting Woodpecker Wooliams at the Vortex Jazz bar in Dalston. Should be grand, this is her new single, 'Sparrow':
Also, I read this a while ago, it's amazing. Kurt Vonnegut was an eminently sane and wonderful author and general good bloke.
So, we are off on tour with Gravenhurst next month, these here are the dates:
22nd Sep - The Adelphi, HULL 23rd Sep - The Cluny, NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE 24th Sep - Brudenell Social Club, LEEDS 25th Sep - Bodega, NOTTINGHAM 26th Sep - Cecil Sharp House, LONDON 27th Sep - Blind Tiger Club, BRIGHTON 28th Sep - Arts Centre, COLCHESTER Find out more about Gravenhurst here: http://gravenhurstmusic.com/
This is a song from their most recent album:
Very exciting . .
Tuesday, 7 August 2012
Thanks to everyone who came to our shows at Dalston Roof Park and the Wilmington Arms, both very good fun. The Roof Park was especially idyllic in the evening sun. I confess I had forgotten how long 'Paris, Texas' was, but still awesome.
We've been recording some live videos, of which more news soon.
This is another amazing sequence of noises from Mount Eerie:
. .Where we will be playing and then showing 'Paris, Texas' by Wim Wenders. I can't guarantee it won't rain, but I watched Rozi Plain the other week in between torrential downpours, and under the big inflatable cover everything was dry and cosy. We're hoping to include a couple of new songs, both still a little bit under construction. In the meantime I've mostly been listening to the new Dirty Projectors album, and discovering Mount Eerie. This is a song from the album 'Wind's Poem', which is a weird and awesome mixture of quiet acoustic strummery and interludes of black metal noises:
No Direction Home festival was great fun, personal highlights were Austra, Other Lives and David Thomas Broughton. These are some photos from our set on Friday night, by Laura Lewis (www.lauralewisphotography.co.uk):
So our next London show is on July the 25th, at Dalston Roof Park. After we play we're showing 'Paris, Texas' by Wim Wenders, which is an awesome film. This is what it looks like:
Slightly closer is our set at No Direction Home festival, which has an amazing line-up, and should be great.
We are also playing on a stage organised by Neighbourhood at the Great Escape Festival in Brighton this Friday, at the Fishbowl. Loads of other great people are playing the same stage on the same day, including Woodpecker Wooliams, Rozi Plain, Sam Brookes, Emma Gatrill, and Ben from Mariner's Children performing a solo set.
The day afterwards we are headed up to Derby bright and early in order to start off the Saturday proceedings of the Lets Get Lost Weekender. Incidentally, I think we are taking the place of a band called Papier Tigre, who couldn't play, but are great.
We are very excited to be playing No Direction Home Festival which runs from the 8th to the 10th of June
on the Welbeck Estate near Sheffield. We are playing on the Friday evening. The line-up is awesome, and if it's anything like it's companion festival, End of the Road, it's going to be amazing.
Watching this basically solidified this suspicion that I had harboured for a long time, which is that the Doors are one of my favourite bands ever. I don't know about totally favourite, but they've got a solid place in the top five. Picking favourites is impossible, and kind of a stupid activity.
Anyway, having made that assertion I feel slightly obliged to justify it a bit. Obviously the Doors are pretty established in the canon of great rock bands of the sixties. But I feel like there are some elements of what they were about that might grate on people these days, or make them cringe a bit. In particular, Jim Morrison's status as as one of the central 'rock stars' of the era, and everything that comes with it. I'm already embarrassed by using the phrase 'rock star', so that every time I write it I have to put it in quotation marks.
Some of that might be the fault of the punk movement of a decade or so later, where one of the central tenants was the possibility that anyone could be in a band, and which aimed to break down the barriers between the audience and the performers (supposedly). This attitude culminates in stuff like the label 'Kill Rock Stars' (http://www.killrockstars.com/), at one time home to Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill, which is a deliberately provocative statement of support for DIY punk values, and basically about getting rid of 'experts' and empowering people to make their own music, driven mainly by passion and inventiveness rather than technical ability. Which is good.
That kind of inspiration for people to do stuff themselves, and to create their own structures, venues, labels and music is great, and I think leads to a lot of interesting and amazing music, that exists outside of bigger, safer labels and media outlets. It's also good as a sort of guiding principle, an antidote to mediocrity, and also to the self-importance and egotism of 'rock stars'.
The original punk explosion could be seen as a reaction to bands like Led Zeppelin jetting around in huge private aircraft from one excessive guitar solo to another:
However, The Doors don't seem to me to fit into this sort of classic rock excess, so it's a bit wierd when cringe-worthy people cite them as an influence or whatever.
They have a wierdness and a darkness in them that isn't the cartoon darkness of classic rock: most famously the Freudian utterance half way through 'The End', which I think was often a bit more explicit live, but also in songs like 'Horse Latitudes' or the apocalyptic lyrics of 'Peace Frog' ('Blood will be born in the birth of a nation, Blood is the rose of mysterious union').
I realise as I write this that there aren't any simple or universally applicable answers to this, because it isn't really possible to counter-poise two opposite ways of making music and say that one is the right way and the other is wrong. So rather than the mind-blowingly incisive conclusion I was hoping to reach, I'll have to settle for a slow grind to a halt, and the assertion that The Doors are really great, (you probably already knew that, or else you don't care). This is the first song I remember hearing by them, in a film called 'The Dreamers':
And this is my favourite poem by Jim Morrison (that's right, favourite poem):
Today I got back from work and played Neutral Milk Hotel covers in my room then sat in a park for a bit, staring into space. Both these things were enjoyable.
Decided to start a series of little posts about music that I've been listening to and why I like it, focusing on the slightly less expected ends of things. To that end, these are some words about Fugazi:
Fugazi seem to one of those bands that people normally discover quite early on. I only got into them properly in the past year or so. Prior to listening to them I had been aware of Minor Threat for much longer, but whilst I do like them, their music compared to that of Fugazi is a lot simpler and more direct, less complex. Fugazi are a band that I feel I almost feel 'motivated' to like, for a number of reasons. I guess those reasons are mainly to do with their combination of intelligence and integrity, which got manifested in all sorts of ways: the high number of benefit shows they would play, insisting on keeping a low entry fee to all their gigs, starting their own label (Dischord) and running that side of things off their own backs rather than through a major label, their lyrics (obviously), talking openly to the fans at their shows, not acting like rock stars, not producing merchandise or advertising anything ever, etc. etc.
Beyond all this though, their music is really worth exploring for it's own sake. It's punk, and it has distorted guitars and some shout-along choruses, but the way it's arranged, and the way each part of it fits together has a lot more thought involved than other bands from the same sort of scene. So far I've been listening to their first album '13 Songs', a little bit of a couple of later albums called 'Red Medicine' and 'Steady Diet of Nothing' and their last album, called 'The Argument'. 'The Argument' is definitely my favourite, it's the most diverse and considered I think. '13 Songs' does include 'Waiting Room', which is probably their most famous song, and the one to listen to first.
I have an ambiguous relationship with a lot of the things Minor Threat and Fugazi have given birth to, like the straight edge movement, and hardcore in general. As someone who currently doesn't drink or smoke at present, (not permanently, hopefully) I appreciate the fact that there is a straight edge movement. This is the first part of a pretty cheesy American documentary about the whole thing:
However, what I don't like about the straight edge movement, and also about hardcore, is the rejection of mainstream rules and dogmas in favour of a new set of dogmas, which if transgressed lead to disapproval/ostracism. One of these seems to be that most hardcore bands sound (to my ears anyway) very similar.
Fugazi, on the other hand, are constantly inventive with the way they arrange songs, with the noises their guitars make, and with the way they phrase things lyrically. They seem to ally integrity and genuine feeling with originality.
This is Ian Mackaye, formerly of Fugazi and Minor Threat, talking about how he feels when he plays music:
And finally, this is my current favourite Fugazi song:
Thanks to everyone who made it down to shows at the Lexington on the 29th December and our first London Communion night at Notting Hill Arts Club on the 8th January. The Lexington in particular felt really good to play, and we've been nervously test running a new song, provisionally titled 'Breathe In'. It's still a little bit scary, but when it works it feels great.
Just finished two books that are related to each other. The first was 'The Book of Imaginary Beings' by Jorge Luis Borges, which is more or less what it says; a bestiary of made-up creatures from all over the world and from different time periods, from the Amphisbaena to the Zaratan. The second book is Haruki Murakami's 'Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World', which is split between modern Japan, and a fantasy city inside someone's subconcious, populated by both people and unicorns. If it sounds twee, it definitely isn't. It's wry and odd, and pretty good.
I'm very into things that combine contemporary reality with uncanny or fantastical elements, but sometimes it's hard to do that convincingly.
