Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with Dry the River

Dry the River by Avril Kelly
Dry the River by Avril Kelly.

I first encountered Dry the River when they offered to do a gig for the Climate Camp stage at Glastonbury this summer. On record they are fabulous, but live I was absolutely blown away by this talented five some. Over the past six weeks they have been on tour up and down the country: I find out how life has been treating them in my intimate interview with Norwegian lead singer and chief songwriter Peter Liddle.

How did the band get together?
I’d like to say it was an epic tale of overcoming obstacles and triumph in the face of adversity but it was actually a pretty run-of-the-mill thing, haha. I had taken some time out of music to do some other stuff but before I knew it I’d kind of unconsciously started writing a record. One weekend I recruited some musicians I knew from old bands etc. and we spent a weekend recording. The day after we finished recording I went off on an acoustic UK tour and the band was kind of built out of that.

Dry The River by Karina Yarv
Dry The River by Karina Yarv.

How do you describe your music to people who have never heard it?
Actually it’s changed a lot – at the start it was very lo-fi folky stuff because the songs grew out some acoustic bedroom recordings, but now that we all live together and are all involved in the writing process we’ve opened the door to a lot of different influences. I think the songs still resemble folk music thematically – I write a lot about family, relationships, the things that a lot of us deal with day to day – but in the practice room we all get the chance to pull the arrangements in different directions. I guess the short answer is that it’s folky gospel music played by a post-punk band.

Dry The River by Mags James
Dry The River by Mags James.

You share a home in Stratford – is this ever hard work? Who does the most washing up (and the least)?
I think living in a confined space with other people is always a tricky business. At least in our case we have a mutual understanding of each other’s situation. That said, some days are obviously harder than others. We’ve been on tour for six weeks now, mostly cooped up in a van – I think after our Nest show on Wednesday we’ll all go back to our respective family homes for some time apart. Jon (drums) does the most washing up, he likes to keep things tidy. I think I probably do the least, or Scott (bass)…

YouTube Preview Image

You are known for utterly lush harmonies… is it hard to get these right and how do they come about?
It’s funny, it was never our intention to be a band that feature prominent harmonies. We were in the studio working on a new recording and I asked Scott whether he could sing. He had a go at singing a third or a fifth on top of what Matt and I were singing and it seemed to work. It really was that haphazard – we rarely spend time crafting harmony parts, Matt and Scott just sing where it seems to make sense. Sometimes we get to recording a song and realise what we’ve been singing doesn’t even work, and have to sit at a piano working out what the lines should be!

dry the river by Gaarte
Peter Liddle by Gaarte.

Were you all musical children? Did you learn to play instruments from a young age?
Aside from Will, we’re all first generation musicians. None of us come from particularly musical families. I think we actually all grew up at a time when being in rock bands was just what kids did. Certainly in Newbury where I took up music in earnest, almost everyone tried their hand at it. That said, I’m at the other extreme to Will – I never studied music formally at all and one day I’d like to. The other guys all have at least a pretty solid (if rudimentary) understanding of music theory.

Stephanie Thieullent-dry the river
Dry the River by Stephanie Thieullent.

Does Peter write all the lyrics, and where do you draw inspiration from?
Writing lyrics is a separate endeavour to writing songs, for me. I write chord progressions and vocal melodies and have a pretty formed idea of where a song is going, then I go away and spend a long time writing lyrics. I think experience informs the way everybody behaves – it’s the lens that everybody views the world through and music is no different. In my case the songs are rarely based on a specific event or a candid message that I desperately want to deliver. They’re more a collection of responses to environments I’ve found myself in – periods of time, people, places… So I guess in that respect they include images of my childhood in Norway and the UK, reflections on my time at University, and a whole load of other stuff that influences my worldview on any given day.

YouTube Preview Image

Your songs are very intense emotionally – is this intentional and why do you think they come across like this?
I think there are probably two reasons for that. Firstly, whether it’s an event or a feeling or a situation, something has to motivate an artist enough to write a song or paint or whatever. I think the vast majority of artworks are created as an emotional response, so the subject matter is always going to be emotional in nature. Secondly, though, we are grew up listening to post-punk and metal and so on, which is traditionally played in a very intense way. I think the way we play probably magnifies the emotional content in the lyrics.

We first met at Glastonbury when you played for Climate Camp this year… what was your highlight of this year’s festival?
Snooooooooooop!

You will be playing a lot more festivals next summer, can you tell us which ones they will be, and are there any in particular that you are looking forward to?
I think we’ve confirmed quite a few now but I’m not sure which we’re meant to reveal! The other day we were announced alongside Midlake and Wild Beasts in the first batch of names for End of the Road, which we’re super stoked about!

dry-the-river-gaarte
Dry the River by Gaarte.

You’ve decided to release your debut single on Transgressive Records – what made you decide to go with this label and what will the single be?
Tim and Toby at Transgressive really put their faith in the music at an early stage when everything was uncertain. A lot of people see a band with potential and sit in the wings, waiting to see how they’ll fare. Transgressive were the opposite – they met us straight away, told us they loved the music and believed in it, and set about moving mountains to help us become a full time band. Aside from all that, they’re a great label and we’re really proud to be adding to the discography. As for the song, you’ll have to wait and see!

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Your YouTube video for Bible Belt has gained more than 100,000 hits – why do you think it has proved so popular?
There are a variety of a reasons I suppose – firstly it was on the YouTube front page as part of a YouTube Music Tuesdays promotion, which I think put it in front of a lot of people who wouldn’t normally have seen it. Also Watch Listen Tell, who filmed that session, have a really loyal following, and maybe there was a word of mouth element too – I guess it’s quite memorable with Matt’s broken arm and so on!

YouTube Preview Image

You’ve just played the Forum, what was the highlight of the gig? What can the audience expect at your headline gig at the Nest in Dalston?
The Forum was our biggest show ever – there’s no substitute for experience on big stages in front of lots of people! That said, we love the more intimate settings where we can see familiar faces and talk to people. I hope The Nest will be a really special event – for us it’s our homecoming show after six weeks on the road, as well as our 100th show and a celebration of all that’s come about in the past year.

YouTube Preview Image

You can find the wonderful Dry the River on Myspace here, and at home on their website here where you can download three songs for free. You can also follow them on twitter here, and of course do not forget their headline show, which is on Wednesday 15th December at The Nest. Full listing info here. Read my review of their gig at Glastonbury here.

Categories ,dalston, ,Dry the River, ,folk, ,Harmonies, ,Indie, ,Midlake, ,Norway, ,Peter Liddle, ,Stéphanie Thieullent, ,Stornaway, ,The Forum, ,The Nest, ,Transgressive, ,Transgressive Records, ,Watch Listen Tell, ,Wild Beasts

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Amelia’s Magazine | A post Tin Tabernacle interview with Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, side effects the director of her recent videos, sildenafil to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, drug the director of her recent videos, hospital to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson.

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
TM AND HL-Jan 11-photography by Amelia Gregory
Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, viagra dosage all photography by Amelia Gregory.

Last week Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou held a preview screening for their Tin Tabernacle tour video, viagra sale titled 11 Nights Under Tin. I caught up with them at Bush Hall a few weeks ago to find out more about this talented couple.

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia GregoryTrevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

The Tin Tabernacle tour followed on from Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou’s Village Hall tour of last year. To pull it off they found approximately fifty churches through the Tin Tabernacles website, got details of about thirty of them and managed to stage concerts in eleven of them. The website often listed the nearest town or they enterprisingly zoomed in on the google street view: sometimes a contact number would be visible on a noticeboard, and at other times they phoned the local pub. Most people were really enthusiastic, but some were overwhelmed by the idea and worried by the commitment. “We wanted to get out into the community and play for people who don’t have much access to music,” they told me when I spoke to them at Bush Hall. “We went to those who were keen.” It seems to have been a successful venture: the audiences were mostly comprised of locals.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

The Tin Tabernacle churches all vary in size, though they have a few things in common. They are all made of corrugated iron, and were invented circa 1840, when the scattering of God fearing British citizens across the British Empire hastened the need for an easily transportable place of worship. Mining communities sprung up in all sorts of remote corners of the globe so the churches often had to be carried for long distances overland. “They warm up fast because they are wooden clad inside,” explained Trevor and Hannah, “but some had no electricity so we played by candlelight.” The smallest church held only about 40 people, all squashed into the pews, but the average capacity was between 70-120. What with Trevor, Hannah and their two support acts it was still quite a squish.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

I spotted a tin church on my visit to the Cornish village of Cadgwith earlier this year, but sadly this was not one that they managed to include on the tour, despite Trevor’s Cornish heritage. Many were nevertheless located in amazing locations, including on cliff tops.


11 Nights Under Tin, a film by Trevor Moss, can be watched in full above.

Why did they chose such an innovative way of touring? “We had toured the same venues for years and they are all the same, painted black inside.” Trevor and Hannah hope that with their Arts Council funded tours their audiences will experience an event, instead of just standing in the shadows. “It’s no wonder that so many bands’ later records are rubbish when they live in such a strange parallel reality.” So they have chosen places that will open their eyes to other communities. They always stay in independent B&Bs and sometimes with the local vicar – it’s also a carefully considered way for them to have an interesting time whilst peddling an album. “We get to play in places we would never have seen otherwise.”

Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day
Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day.

I can totally relate to this idea – half the reason I was so attracted to fashion photography as a creative medium was the possibility of visiting interesting locations to take photos. During my nascent fashion photography career I went to South Africa and America before I began to realise the environmental problems of excessive air travel.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews.

The *world* premiere of the resulting Tin Tabernacle film was shown at The Social on Wednesday 16th March. It was entirely shot on an old 80s Hi 8 camera in three seconds bursts three or four times an hour, so it is basically what they describe as “a collection of moving photos” with mostly in-camera sound.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou - Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen
Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen.

This interactive approach to playing and documenting music is a result of Hannah and Trevor’s art college career. They both met at Goldsmiths, where Trevor was studying fine art and Hannah was doing theatre studies. By the time they reached their third year they were signed as the band Indigo Moss, which we profiled on Amelia’s Magazine. By this point they were spending so much time immersed in music that Trevor had to enlist the rest of the band to help get his degree show up on time.

Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana
Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana.

The couple have now been writing songs together for 8 years and seem a lot older and wiser than their 25 years of age, a fact which they attribute to having lots of older friends. They met whilst living in halls but did not start going out together until Indigo Moss, and managed to keep their relationship secret from other band members for two months. They got married in 2008.


There’s Something Happening Somewhere, a film by Trevor Moss.

Indigo Moss eventually broke up because they didn’t enjoy it anymore, especially the way the label was pushing the band. Inevitably, they were pulling bigger audiences as a duet. At that point Tom from Lewis Music saw them and they signed a one album deal. After that Jeff of Heavenly saw a couple of shows and as they put it “it all happened quite naturally. We had a cup of tea and the Tin Tabernacle tour really caught his imagination.” Heavenly Recordings have parted ways with megalith EMI and are now part of the Universal funded Cooperative Music initiative which supports independent labels such as Transgressive, Moshi Moshi, Bella Union and Domino. It means they can share PR costs and everyone knows when the others are releasing records so they don’t step on toes, which seems to make brilliant sense. These are amongst my favourite labels and between them they host some fabulous musicians – why would they want to deliberately compete with each other?

Trevor-Moss-Hannah-Lou-by-LJG-Art-Illustration
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by LJG Art & Illustration.

Ever prolific, Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou aim to put out one album a year from now on. The next record will be out in May and then comes the festival season, starting at Wood Festival on 21st May, and moving onto Truck Festival, Port Eliot and of course Glastonbury – where they played on my Climate Camp stage last year alongside Danny and the Champions of the World.


Performing at Wood Festival in 2009.

What to expect from the upcoming record? “There will be drums and a much bigger sound.” But as always all guitar and voices will be recorded together. I can’t imagine there will be much room in their van for more band members, and they agree that it is perfectly sized for just them. Although Trevor jokes that Hannah gets on his nerves it’s clear that this is very much a twosome. What happens when a family enters the equation? “Trevor wants to be a house husband,” laughs Hannah. “It will be a nice quiet time to write!” For now what they really want is a pet whippet. “They are lovely; so skinny and frail,” says Trevor. “It could travel in a hammock in the van.” The main trouble would be taking a dog into festivals, but I’m sure they could find an interesting series of venues that would accept a canine companion. Did someone mention lighthouses?

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

Categories ,11 Nights Under Tin, ,Alison Day, ,Arts Council, ,Bella Union, ,British Empire, ,Bush Hall, ,Cadgwith, ,Climate Camp, ,Cooperative Music, ,Cornish village, ,Cornwall, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Domino Records, ,EMI, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Gilly Rochester, ,glastonbury, ,goldsmiths, ,Hannah Lou, ,Heavenly Recordings, ,Heavenly Social, ,Hi 8 camera, ,Indigo Moss, ,Lewis Music, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,mining, ,Moshi Moshi, ,Port Eliot, ,Port Elliot, ,Reena Makwana, ,Sarah Matthews, ,The Social, ,There’s Something Happening Somewhere, ,Tin Tabernacle, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Transgressive, ,Trevor Moss, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Universal, ,Village Hall, ,Whippet, ,Wood Festival

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Amelia’s Magazine | A post Tin Tabernacle interview with Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, side effects the director of her recent videos, sildenafil to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly
Jesca Hoop by Avril Kelly.

I love Jesca Hoop‘s new song City Bird and the accompanying video so much so that I decided to get in touch with both Jesca and Elia Petridis, drug the director of her recent videos, hospital to find out what makes them tick. Elia Petridis runs boutique production company Filmatics in Los Angeles, California. After making several award winning shorts and music videos he is about to start shooting his first full length feature The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez. I think his incredibly detailed answers throw an intriguing light on what goes into the creation of a very considered and beautiful music video.

Jesca-Hoop-by-Liam-McMahon
Jesca Hoop by Liam McMahon.

When did you start working with director Elia Petridis?

Jesca: Elia is an old friend. We met in Los Angeles at one of my shows. He would say that he forced me to be his friend, which is kind of true though I would say that he used his clever imagination to lure me in. I’m glad that he did. The Kingdom was our first video adventure together.

Elia: A producer I’m working closely with these days said to me recently that humans are “meaning making machines” (a soundbite from some career seminar) but that phrase really resonated with me. I’m infatuated with screenwriting and personal mythologies, sometimes to the detriment of my own mental health. I grew up in Dubai for 18 years before moving to LA for film school – although Dubai had a lot of its own magic it didn’t have a music scene to speak of so I’m always a little astonished by the talent I find in LA. When I saw Jesca perform live I really felt her music was very special and otherworldly, and tried to do my best to see if, as human planets, we could potentially orbit each other and become friends. 

Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson
Jesca Hoop by Rebecca Strickson.

I would venture to say that the first time I saw Jesca Hoop live was one of the most astonishing musical moments I have ever witnessed. It was the night before Halloween and she came out in a marionette outfit, complete with rosy cheeks, and stood motionless while her back up players wound her up to life. For a visualist like me, a storyteller, it really had an impact. The whole endeavour of courting a friendship with her was kind of a lark for me because I honestly thought she had better things to do. It was just a matter of pushing the boundary between fan and friend and seeing how much I could get away with. Suddenly, unexpectedly, as with most of life’s wonder, we had some mileage behind us and had transformed into friends. I will tell you that the first *official* conversation, the ice breaker, was when she was writing Tulip – from the Hunting my Dress album – and I was writing a screenplay dealing with Tulip Fever in Holland so I leant her my reference material. I knew I had two opportunities to wiggle my way in there – one to give her the book, and one to get it back!   

Hunting my Dress
The Hunting My Dress album cover.

Where was City Bird shot and where did the inspiration come from?

Jesca: It was shot in a miniature haunted house in downtown LA. We both wanted it to be a ghost story and Elia was the one to bring the children’s narrative into it.

Elia: FALSE! The video was shot in a garage in Riverside, Ca. The whole thing was fractal – an infinite amount of information in a finite space, as the garage is attached to an 18th century ‘Painted Lady’ Victorian house owned by my fiance. So in essence, it was shot in a miniature dollhouse inside a bigger dollhouse which made the shoot utterly magic. I think what Jesca is communicating is that the story takes place in a miniature dollhouse in downtown LA. The whole thing was lit using candles and christmas lights. 

Where did the idea for an animated video come from?

Jesca: It came out of limitation really. We had very very little money for this video so we just mused about what we could do with what time and money we did have. I set a pretty hard task considering the resources available and I am delighted with what Elia and his team came through with.

Elia: To me, the track is seance folk. That’s the sonic iconography that City Bird evokes – a ghostly seance. When it comes to music and music videos I am not a literal thinker so although my mind knows the song is about the fright and sadness associated with homelessness that’s not what my heart feels when I hear the song, and it’s not what the dream theatre in my mind projects over it either. But here Jesca’s mastery shines through, because the sonic landscape, right down to the very physical shape her mouth is making around the lyric is just as important as what she’s trying to say; the two are organically woven together. The magic of Jesca’s music lies in the alchemy that exists between form and content. All my artistic heroes do this, from Chabon, to Spielberg; they use genre to sugar coat the pill. So here she uses the disguise of seance music to coat the literal message of homelessness she’s trying to communicate. 

Now, narrative is something I am always running away from when directing a music video. Whenever I read a music video treatment from some kid that went to film school it makes me cringe and I think the best music videos come from documentary filmmakers who get a chance to put forward a psychology of form rather than one of narrative. But, having said that, my instincts on City Bird were narrative, perhaps because it’s a kind of lilting waltz so it felt right to have a narrative to pull you through it.  So, for the treatment, I sat down and wrote an entire ghost story from scratch, in the style of Poe or Hawthorne. I even wrote nursery rhymes about the ghost, because ghost stories are mostly aural traditions.

On The Kingdom video Jesca had a ton of input because I quickly realised that it would only reach its full potential if I pretended to be a paint brush and let her grab hold of the crew through me and paint. Once I took my ego out of the equation I realised there was something special there I was meant to service, and honestly, that’s the best method of working with an artist on a music video, that’s what you really cross your fingers for, isn’t it? You can see a little more of that process on the behind-the-scenes doc of the kingdom here:

But for City Bird Jesca was in Manchester and we were in LA shooting. Her schedule was tight, and I was really flattered that she had enough faith in me to let me just go and shoot because I know how much she loves her songs and how much faith it took for her to let go a little. I had originally submitted an entirely different treatment to her and had kind of resigned myself to the fact I wasn’t going to do it, which was cool enough for me because god only knows how many talented people Jesca comes across in her travels. Surely, I thought, she can find people in the UK to make amazing videos, and surely, as an artist, she wants to go and do cool stuff with other cool people. So I thought I would just give it a shot. I submitted this treatment about metaphorical ghosts, which dealt with mis-en-scene of places that had just been left and abandoned – an unmade bed, plates on a table after dinner, a toilet still running, stuff like that, where humans had vacated the frame only seconds ago and you’d just missed them – kind of pretentious honestly. Then I came across my fiancée’s childhood dollhouse and started taking video and snapping pictures and all of a sudden this whole new idea came to mind of the dollhouse and miniatures and stop motion and ghosts. I sent the examples to Jesca and she totally fell for it! 

City Bird house
City Bird house.

Ghost stories are tricky because they are incredibly emotional stories surrounded in gothic imagery. Ghost stories like The Others, The Orphanage, The Sixth Sense, are rite of passage stories – they’re about letting go. About the dead letting go of the living and the living letting go of the dead. They’re NOT about the living being punished for a sin like horror movies, but about forgiveness of that sin from all parties, the relinquishing of unfinished business. And I wanted to nail that, I really did. In City Bird it is the boy who is at the centre of the story and has the rite of passage: the ghost is a sort of Frankenstein or Edward Scissorhands character. 

The boy has nightmares and makes up ghastly stories that paint the ghost as a demon, then something happens to the boy on his bike and he dies. We get those silent movie inter-titles: his tower (the city) is turned to a tomb. Shadows loom over his white coffin and he becomes a ghost, set into the underworld where he is refused and becomes a refugee with nowhere to go. It’s scary out there for a little boy so he returns to the ghost’s house and we realise that’s her purpose – she is a host for waywardly spirits like the dead boy. But he has been so scared of her, will he change? Can he let go of his fear of her? Can he muster up the courage to enter as she beckons him in? The song ends unresolved sonically so I wanted to leave the audience there just as the music does. The theme is that of judging a book by its cover and misunderstanding something: just as we pass the homeless on the street and pretend they are invisible like ghosts when they all have a real inner life. Can we let go of our prejudices and see beyond the stereotypes to see that the issues that made them homeless are ones that could very well come to prey on and haunt us at any time? That’s kind of the metaphor I was trying to get at. 

City Bird ghost
The City Bird ghost.

Who made the puppets and how long did the video take to make?

Jesca: I’m not quite sure actually… I should ask.

Elia: Everyone who was involved in making the City Bird video knew there was a finite time of ten days in which to create this beautiful, creative thing so necessity was to be the mother of invention due to the time constraints, and everyone really fed on that and brought their best to the project. My fiancee, Maranatha Hay, is an Emmy award winning documentary filmmaker who is piped into the most creative, kind, and daring community of filmmakers and her best friend Natalie Apodaca is an artist with experience in installations. I showed her Metropolis and told her we were going to build a monotone city from cardboard and she just went for it. Cosmin Cosma was my left hand man who insisted we use the Dragon Stop Motion software, which honestly was the main reason we were able to get the shots we needed in the time we had. 

The crew never lost faith in my direction, even when I had no idea how we would do it just ten minutes before the shoot. In the opening shot of the video there is a city cardboard diorama, the dollhouse, the puppet of the ghost AND the moon projected over the city! All those elements came into play because we just broke down the shot we had in mind element by element: that’s real filmmaking in a pure form. 99% of this video was done IN-CAMERA, like The Lumière Brothers! Then it was given that incredible aged look by Dan Geis, our after effects genius.

Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson
Jesca Hoop by Emma Lucy Watson.

I can tell you how the puppets were made, but I urge you to remember that cinema is like a magic trick. The home made feel is part of the fun of the viewing experience, especially the joy in realising that things like hair are actually twine. The doll’s arms are made of tiny painted tree branches, her spine is metal wire and her dress is made of muslin. Her face is tracing paper and is removable so that we could change her expressions from shot to shot. The part where the fork floats across the table had to be done with tweezers! (nudged lovingly one frame at a time by Maranatha)

The house was a nightmare. It is three feet tall and it took us 3 days to put it together from a flat box. We painted every part, so we had to know what the end product would look like before we even started. Luckily an architect friend, Dannon Rampton, showed up just to check out what was going on and got so enamoured with the dolls house that he ended up putting it together which is just as well since Natalie and I were clueless as to how we were going to do it. We painted it and then we had to DILAPIDATE IT so it looked old and haunted! We scrubbed it with metal brush, we broke its steeple and we stuffed miniature moss in all its crevices so that the ghost story would feel real and lived in. 

My motto is: make movies that can only be movies! Make movies that need that final step of the medium to fully realise the vision, because it’s such an expensive, time consuming endeavour that the content had better deserve and earn the medium. If it can be a song, a book, a play, let it be that. But film, film is reserved for the special stories that need the seven arts to make them whole. SO don’t give away our secrets if you don’t have to. 
TM AND HL-Jan 11-photography by Amelia Gregory
Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, viagra dosage all photography by Amelia Gregory.

Last week Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou held a preview screening for their Tin Tabernacle tour video, viagra sale titled 11 Nights Under Tin. I caught up with them at Bush Hall a few weeks ago to find out more about this talented couple.

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia GregoryTrevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

The Tin Tabernacle tour followed on from Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou’s Village Hall tour of last year. To pull it off they found approximately fifty churches through the Tin Tabernacles website, got details of about thirty of them and managed to stage concerts in eleven of them. The website often listed the nearest town or they enterprisingly zoomed in on the google street view: sometimes a contact number would be visible on a noticeboard, and at other times they phoned the local pub. Most people were really enthusiastic, but some were overwhelmed by the idea and worried by the commitment. “We wanted to get out into the community and play for people who don’t have much access to music,” they told me when I spoke to them at Bush Hall. “We went to those who were keen.” It seems to have been a successful venture: the audiences were mostly comprised of locals.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

The Tin Tabernacle churches all vary in size, though they have a few things in common. They are all made of corrugated iron, and were invented circa 1840, when the scattering of God fearing British citizens across the British Empire hastened the need for an easily transportable place of worship. Mining communities sprung up in all sorts of remote corners of the globe so the churches often had to be carried for long distances overland. “They warm up fast because they are wooden clad inside,” explained Trevor and Hannah, “but some had no electricity so we played by candlelight.” The smallest church held only about 40 people, all squashed into the pews, but the average capacity was between 70-120. What with Trevor, Hannah and their two support acts it was still quite a squish.

Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester
Tin Tabernacle by Gilly Rochester.

I spotted a tin church on my visit to the Cornish village of Cadgwith earlier this year, but sadly this was not one that they managed to include on the tour, despite Trevor’s Cornish heritage. Many were nevertheless located in amazing locations, including on cliff tops.


11 Nights Under Tin, a film by Trevor Moss, can be watched in full above.

Why did they chose such an innovative way of touring? “We had toured the same venues for years and they are all the same, painted black inside.” Trevor and Hannah hope that with their Arts Council funded tours their audiences will experience an event, instead of just standing in the shadows. “It’s no wonder that so many bands’ later records are rubbish when they live in such a strange parallel reality.” So they have chosen places that will open their eyes to other communities. They always stay in independent B&Bs and sometimes with the local vicar – it’s also a carefully considered way for them to have an interesting time whilst peddling an album. “We get to play in places we would never have seen otherwise.”

Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day
Tin Tabernacle by Alison Day.

I can totally relate to this idea – half the reason I was so attracted to fashion photography as a creative medium was the possibility of visiting interesting locations to take photos. During my nascent fashion photography career I went to South Africa and America before I began to realise the environmental problems of excessive air travel.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Sarah Matthews.

The *world* premiere of the resulting Tin Tabernacle film was shown at The Social on Wednesday 16th March. It was entirely shot on an old 80s Hi 8 camera in three seconds bursts three or four times an hour, so it is basically what they describe as “a collection of moving photos” with mostly in-camera sound.

Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou - Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen
Tin Churches by Emmeline Pidgen.

This interactive approach to playing and documenting music is a result of Hannah and Trevor’s art college career. They both met at Goldsmiths, where Trevor was studying fine art and Hannah was doing theatre studies. By the time they reached their third year they were signed as the band Indigo Moss, which we profiled on Amelia’s Magazine. By this point they were spending so much time immersed in music that Trevor had to enlist the rest of the band to help get his degree show up on time.

Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana
Tin Tabernacles by Reena Makwana.

The couple have now been writing songs together for 8 years and seem a lot older and wiser than their 25 years of age, a fact which they attribute to having lots of older friends. They met whilst living in halls but did not start going out together until Indigo Moss, and managed to keep their relationship secret from other band members for two months. They got married in 2008.


There’s Something Happening Somewhere, a film by Trevor Moss.

Indigo Moss eventually broke up because they didn’t enjoy it anymore, especially the way the label was pushing the band. Inevitably, they were pulling bigger audiences as a duet. At that point Tom from Lewis Music saw them and they signed a one album deal. After that Jeff of Heavenly saw a couple of shows and as they put it “it all happened quite naturally. We had a cup of tea and the Tin Tabernacle tour really caught his imagination.” Heavenly Recordings have parted ways with megalith EMI and are now part of the Universal funded Cooperative Music initiative which supports independent labels such as Transgressive, Moshi Moshi, Bella Union and Domino. It means they can share PR costs and everyone knows when the others are releasing records so they don’t step on toes, which seems to make brilliant sense. These are amongst my favourite labels and between them they host some fabulous musicians – why would they want to deliberately compete with each other?

Trevor-Moss-Hannah-Lou-by-LJG-Art-Illustration
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by LJG Art & Illustration.

Ever prolific, Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou aim to put out one album a year from now on. The next record will be out in May and then comes the festival season, starting at Wood Festival on 21st May, and moving onto Truck Festival, Port Eliot and of course Glastonbury – where they played on my Climate Camp stage last year alongside Danny and the Champions of the World.


Performing at Wood Festival in 2009.

What to expect from the upcoming record? “There will be drums and a much bigger sound.” But as always all guitar and voices will be recorded together. I can’t imagine there will be much room in their van for more band members, and they agree that it is perfectly sized for just them. Although Trevor jokes that Hannah gets on his nerves it’s clear that this is very much a twosome. What happens when a family enters the equation? “Trevor wants to be a house husband,” laughs Hannah. “It will be a nice quiet time to write!” For now what they really want is a pet whippet. “They are lovely; so skinny and frail,” says Trevor. “It could travel in a hammock in the van.” The main trouble would be taking a dog into festivals, but I’m sure they could find an interesting series of venues that would accept a canine companion. Did someone mention lighthouses?

Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou, all photography by Amelia Gregory

Categories ,11 Nights Under Tin, ,Alison Day, ,Arts Council, ,Bella Union, ,British Empire, ,Bush Hall, ,Cadgwith, ,Climate Camp, ,Cooperative Music, ,Cornish village, ,Cornwall, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Domino Records, ,EMI, ,Emmeline Pidgen, ,Gilly Rochester, ,glastonbury, ,goldsmiths, ,Hannah Lou, ,Heavenly Recordings, ,Heavenly Social, ,Hi 8 camera, ,Indigo Moss, ,Lewis Music, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,mining, ,Moshi Moshi, ,Port Eliot, ,Port Elliot, ,Reena Makwana, ,Sarah Matthews, ,The Social, ,There’s Something Happening Somewhere, ,Tin Tabernacle, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Transgressive, ,Trevor Moss, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Universal, ,Village Hall, ,Whippet, ,Wood Festival

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Amelia’s Magazine | An interview with Dry the River

Charlie Coombes and the New Breed by Octavi Navarro

Familiar with a fair few live music venues across price help +UK&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Westminster, approved +London&gl=uk&ei=kdYETam3HY2ShAfs5NntBw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q8gEwAA”>London, I’ve been pretty up close and personal to a number of bands, both great and truly awful, and wondered how Charly Coombes and the New Breed would fair at the Monto Water Rats in Kings Cross, as the stage is particularly petite. Taking to said stage on Saturday December 11th for the last night of their Waves EP promotional UK tour to a familiar crowd, CCATNB stole the show headlining a night of indie and rock music as the band with the edge. Showing only a comical strain to the end of their tour, as with fellow Oxford-ites and Amelia’s Magazine pal Little Fish, the band set out with great energy getting the walls shaking to their distinct key led indie sound that is so easily digested.

Charly Coombes and the New Breed by Roderick Barker-Benfield

Opening with their current single and crowd pleaser Jungles and Tides, momentarily forget about the ear candy, which is delightful, with many members of the crowd of the fairer sex, the eye candy wasn’t bad either. Clearly comfortable and at home playing The Water Rats, which has housed many bands, both up and coming and established, there’s a definite intimate tone to the night, where the crowd are within inches of the band, in all their sweat and glory. Their sound and musical ability isn’t matched within the indie music scene at the moment, taking soulful strides above the rest and echoing late 90s British rock at its best, the fellow bands of the night are good but not in the same sphere as the New Breed.

Charly Coombes by Werner Fismer

That aside, stand out tracks of the night include the head swinging God Knows, the beautiful and eloquent Sub Rosa, off their current EP Waves, which signals the musical prowess of the New Breed led effortlessly by Coombes’ key skills, and closer Dress to Kill, a song that marks the New Breed stepping things up a notch on their quest to bring descent independent music back home. Full of confidence and an instant connection with their fans old and new, CCATNB are for anyone who like a solid punch to their indie pie, and these guys are on the up and up. With their set ending all too quickly, catch them while you can at these intimate venues, as I can only see a brighter and bigger future for Charly Coombes and his New Breed.

Charly Coombes and the New Breed Live by Willemÿn Barker-Benfield

Charlie Coombes and the New Breed by Octavi Navarro

Familiar with a fair few live music venues across check +UK&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Westminster, viagra 40mg +London&gl=uk&ei=kdYETam3HY2ShAfs5NntBw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q8gEwAA”>London, search I’ve been pretty up close and personal to a number of bands, both great and truly awful, and wondered how Charly Coombes and the New Breed would fair at the Monto Water Rats in Kings Cross, as the stage is particularly petite. Taking to said stage on Saturday December 11th for the last night of their Waves EP promotional UK tour to a familiar crowd, CCATNB stole the show headlining a night of indie and rock music as the band with the edge. Showing only a comical strain to the end of their tour, as with fellow Oxford-ites and Amelia’s Magazine pal Little Fish, the band set out with great energy getting the walls shaking to their distinct key led indie sound that is so easily digested.

Charly Coombes and the New Breed by Roderick Barker-Benfield

Opening with their current single and crowd pleaser Jungles and Tides, momentarily forget about the ear candy, which is delightful, with many members of the crowd of the fairer sex, the eye candy wasn’t bad either. Clearly comfortable and at home playing The Water Rats, which has housed many bands, both up and coming and established, there’s a definite intimate tone to the night, where the crowd are within inches of the band, in all their sweat and glory. Their sound and musical ability isn’t matched within the indie music scene at the moment, taking soulful strides above the rest and echoing late 90s British rock at its best, the fellow bands of the night are good but not in the same sphere as the New Breed.

Charly Coombes by Werner Fismer

That aside, stand out tracks of the night include the head swinging God Knows, the beautiful and eloquent Sub Rosa, off their current EP Waves, which signals the musical prowess of the New Breed led effortlessly by Coombes’ key skills, and closer Dress to Kill, a song that marks the New Breed stepping things up a notch on their quest to bring descent independent music back home. Full of confidence and an instant connection with their fans old and new, CCATNB are for anyone who like a solid punch to their indie pie, and these guys are on the up and up. With their set ending all too quickly, catch them while you can at these intimate venues, as I can only see a brighter and bigger future for Charly Coombes and his New Breed.

Charly Coombes and the New Breed Live by Willemÿn Barker-Benfield

Charlie Coombes and the New Breed by Octavi Navarro
Charlie Coombes and the New Breed by Octavi Navarro

Familiar with a fair few live music venues across case +UK&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Westminster, page +London&gl=uk&ei=kdYETam3HY2ShAfs5NntBw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CB0Q8gEwAA”>London, prostate I’ve been pretty up close and personal to a number of bands, both great and truly awful, and wondered how Charly Coombes and the New Breed would fair at the Monto Water Rats in Kings Cross, as the stage is particularly petite. Taking to said stage on Saturday December 11th for the last night of their Waves EP promotional UK tour to a familiar crowd, CCATNB stole the show headlining a night of indie and rock music as the band with the edge. Showing only a comical strain to the end of their tour, as with fellow Oxford-ites and Amelia’s Magazine pal Little Fish, the band set out with great energy getting the walls shaking to their distinct key led indie sound that is so easily digested.

Charly Coombes and the New Breed by Roderick Barker-Benfield
Charly Coombes and the New Breed by Roderick Barker-Benfield.

Opening with their current single and crowd pleaser Jungles and Tides, momentarily forget about the ear candy, which is delightful, with many members of the crowd of the fairer sex, the eye candy wasn’t bad either. Clearly comfortable and at home playing The Water Rats, which has housed many bands, both up and coming and established, there’s a definite intimate tone to the night, where the crowd are within inches of the band, in all their sweat and glory. Their sound and musical ability isn’t matched within the indie music scene at the moment, taking soulful strides above the rest and echoing late 90s British rock at its best, the fellow bands of the night are good but not in the same sphere as the New Breed.

Charly Coombes by Werner Fismer
Charly Coombes by Werner Fismer

That aside, stand out tracks of the night include the head swinging God Knows, the beautiful and eloquent Sub Rosa, off their current EP Waves, which signals the musical prowess of the New Breed led effortlessly by Coombes’ key skills, and closer Dress to Kill, a song that marks the New Breed stepping things up a notch on their quest to bring descent independent music back home. Full of confidence and an instant connection with their fans old and new, CCATNB are for anyone who like a solid punch to their indie pie, and these guys are on the up and up. With their set ending all too quickly, catch them while you can at these intimate venues, as I can only see a brighter and bigger future for Charly Coombes and his New Breed.

Charly Coombes and the New Breed Live by Willemÿn Barker-Benfield

Dry the River by Avril Kelly
Dry the River by Avril Kelly.

I first encountered Dry the River when they offered to do a gig for the Climate Camp stage at Glastonbury this summer. On record they are fabulous, symptoms but live I was absolutely blown away by this talented five some. Over the past six weeks they have been on tour up and down the country: I find out how life has been treating them in my intimate interview with Norwegian lead singer and chief songwriter Peter Liddle.

How did the band get together?
I’d like to say it was an epic tale of overcoming obstacles and triumph in the face of adversity but it was actually a pretty run-of-the-mill thing, ampoule haha. I had taken some time out of music to do some other stuff but before I knew it I’d kind of unconsciously started writing a record. One weekend I recruited some musicians I knew from old bands etc. and we spent a weekend recording. The day after we finished recording I went off on an acoustic UK tour and the band was kind of built out of that.

Dry The River by Karina Yarv
Dry The River by Karina Yarv.

How do you describe your music to people who have never heard it?
Actually it’s changed a lot – at the start it was very lo-fi folky stuff because the songs grew out some acoustic bedroom recordings, price but now that we all live together and are all involved in the writing process we’ve opened the door to a lot of different influences. I think the songs still resemble folk music thematically – I write a lot about family, relationships, the things that a lot of us deal with day to day – but in the practice room we all get the chance to pull the arrangements in different directions. I guess the short answer is that it’s folky gospel music played by a post-punk band.

Dry The River by Mags James
Dry The River by Mags James.

You share a home in Stratford – is this ever hard work? Who does the most washing up (and the least)?
I think living in a confined space with other people is always a tricky business. At least in our case we have a mutual understanding of each other’s situation. That said, some days are obviously harder than others. We’ve been on tour for six weeks now, mostly cooped up in a van – I think after our Nest show on Wednesday we’ll all go back to our respective family homes for some time apart. Jon (drums) does the most washing up, he likes to keep things tidy. I think I probably do the least, or Scott (bass)…

YouTube Preview Image

You are known for utterly lush harmonies… is it hard to get these right and how do they come about?
It’s funny, it was never our intention to be a band that feature prominent harmonies. We were in the studio working on a new recording and I asked Scott whether he could sing. He had a go at singing a third or a fifth on top of what Matt and I were singing and it seemed to work. It really was that haphazard – we rarely spend time crafting harmony parts, Matt and Scott just sing where it seems to make sense. Sometimes we get to recording a song and realise what we’ve been singing doesn’t even work, and have to sit at a piano working out what the lines should be!

dry the river by Gaarte
Peter Liddle by Gaarte.

Were you all musical children? Did you learn to play instruments from a young age?
Aside from Will, we’re all first generation musicians. None of us come from particularly musical families. I think we actually all grew up at a time when being in rock bands was just what kids did. Certainly in Newbury where I took up music in earnest, almost everyone tried their hand at it. That said, I’m at the other extreme to Will – I never studied music formally at all and one day I’d like to. The other guys all have at least a pretty solid (if rudimentary) understanding of music theory.

Stephanie Thieullent-dry the river
Dry the River by Stephanie Thieullent.

Does Peter write all the lyrics, and where do you draw inspiration from?
Writing lyrics is a separate endeavour to writing songs, for me. I write chord progressions and vocal melodies and have a pretty formed idea of where a song is going, then I go away and spend a long time writing lyrics. I think experience informs the way everybody behaves – it’s the lens that everybody views the world through and music is no different. In my case the songs are rarely based on a specific event or a candid message that I desperately want to deliver. They’re more a collection of responses to environments I’ve found myself in – periods of time, people, places… So I guess in that respect they include images of my childhood in Norway and the UK, reflections on my time at University, and a whole load of other stuff that influences my worldview on any given day.

YouTube Preview Image

Your songs are very intense emotionally – is this intentional and why do you think they come across like this?
I think there are probably two reasons for that. Firstly, whether it’s an event or a feeling or a situation, something has to motivate an artist enough to write a song or paint or whatever. I think the vast majority of artworks are created as an emotional response, so the subject matter is always going to be emotional in nature. Secondly, though, we are grew up listening to post-punk and metal and so on, which is traditionally played in a very intense way. I think the way we play probably magnifies the emotional content in the lyrics.

We first met at Glastonbury when you played for Climate Camp this year… what was your highlight of this year’s festival?
Snooooooooooop!

You will be playing a lot more festivals next summer, can you tell us which ones they will be, and are there any in particular that you are looking forward to?
I think we’ve confirmed quite a few now but I’m not sure which we’re meant to reveal! The other day we were announced alongside Midlake and Wild Beasts in the first batch of names for End of the Road, which we’re super stoked about!

dry-the-river-gaarte
Dry the River by Gaarte.

You’ve decided to release your debut single on Transgressive Records – what made you decide to go with this label and what will the single be?
Tim and Toby at Transgressive really put their faith in the music at an early stage when everything was uncertain. A lot of people see a band with potential and sit in the wings, waiting to see how they’ll fare. Transgressive were the opposite – they met us straight away, told us they loved the music and believed in it, and set about moving mountains to help us become a full time band. Aside from all that, they’re a great label and we’re really proud to be adding to the discography. As for the song, you’ll have to wait and see!

YouTube Preview Image

Your YouTube video for Bible Belt has gained more than 100,000 hits – why do you think it has proved so popular?
There are a variety of a reasons I suppose – firstly it was on the YouTube front page as part of a YouTube Music Tuesdays promotion, which I think put it in front of a lot of people who wouldn’t normally have seen it. Also Watch Listen Tell, who filmed that session, have a really loyal following, and maybe there was a word of mouth element too – I guess it’s quite memorable with Matt’s broken arm and so on!

You’ve just played the Forum, what was the highlight of the gig? What can the audience expect at your headline gig at the Nest in Dalston?
The Forum was our biggest show ever – there’s no substitute for experience on big stages in front of lots of people! That said, we love the more intimate settings where we can see familiar faces and talk to people. I hope The Nest will be a really special event – for us it’s our homecoming show after six weeks on the road, as well as our 100th show and a celebration of all that’s come about in the past year.

You can find the wonderful Dry the River on Myspace here, and at home on their website here where you can download three songs for free. You can also follow them on twitter here, and of course do not forget their headline show, which is on Wednesday 15th December at The Nest. Full listing info here. Read my review of their gig at Glastonbury here.

Categories ,dalston, ,Dry the River, ,folk, ,Harmonies, ,Indie, ,Midlake, ,Norway, ,Peter Liddle, ,Stéphanie Thieullent, ,Stornaway, ,The Forum, ,The Nest, ,Transgressive, ,Transgressive Records, ,Watch Listen Tell, ,Wild Beasts

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