Amelia’s Magazine | Climate Camp at Glastonbury 2010: Line up information

Glastonbury-June-2009-Climate Camp
Can it really be a year since the last Glastonbury? In 2009, try for the first time, for sale Climate Camp was given it’s very own space in the Dragon Field just above the Craft Field as you wend your way down to Shangri La. This year we’re back to once again educate and entertain festival goers at our beautiful site only a few minutes walk from the Old Railway Line.

Glastonbury-June-2009-Climate Camp workshop
Glastonbury-June-2009-Climate Camp paddling pool
Glastonbury-June-2009-First Aid Kit
Workshops, illness at play, and First Aid Kit playing at the Climate Camp Tripod Stage in 2009.

In 2010 Climate Camp is targeting the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has been bailed out with £50 billion of public money that is now being used to finance the extraction of fossil fuels across the world, with no regard for climate change or the destruction of communities that it causes. We will be camping near the RBS global headquarters in Edinburgh, Scotland, between 19th-25th August, but in the meantime to find out more about why we decided to focus on RBS this year come along and take a look at our exhibition at Glastonbury, then pick up a copy of our Never Mind The Bankers newspaper to peruse over a cup of tea or share with friends. We will be running DIY screenprinting workshops where you can learn how to screenprint your clothing with an anti RBS slogan. Simply bring your own or print onto one of our tshirts or bags. A great activity for kids! There will also be a chance to take part in Tripod Training: Tripods are used to blockade and secure a space on a direct action protest; come find out how to put them up and climb them safely. Good fun, and no previous experience or skills required.

Glastonbury-June-2009-tripod training
Glastonbury-June-2009-tripod training
Tripod Training.

Then of course there is our fabulous music, poetry and comedy line up, put together by yours truly. Read on to find out who will be gracing our Tripod Stage…. Pyramid Stage eat your heart out, this is where the real talent is.

Green-Kite-Midnight
Green Kite Midnight.

When I wrote up about the Climate Camp presence at Glastonbury in 2009 in my blog I talked about my hope that my band Green Kite Midnight would be able to play as the Climate Camp house band in 2010, so I’m very excited to report that we will be doing daily gigs this year. Five years ago I co-founded the barndance troupe Cutashine out of a desire to make traditional collective dancing more fun: after all, what’s better than a dance where you get to meet other people and really work up a sweat?

YouTube Preview Image

With Cutashine I played at gigs all over Glastonbury for several years, then left to start Green Kite Midnight through my contacts in Climate Camp; a band that supports and plays at direct action protests. Our first gig was at the Climate Camp in Bishopsgate during the G20 in April last year, we played to 800 people at the Blackheath Climate Camp in August 2009, and more recently we went on a 10 day solidarity bike ride together to play gigs to support the struggle against the Shell gas pipeline at Rossport in Ireland. With myself as emcee (I’m a gobby shite, so turn your mind away from those boring barn dances you might have attended as a child) we can teach anyone how to barn dance, so please come and join us.

And now for the rest of our fabulous line-up:

anna log
Anna Log
My Luminaries
My Luminaries, photography by James Dean White.

On Thursday we kick off four days of renewably powered music with a fabulous folky female. Anna Log – singer with pop folk band We Aeronauts – will be doing a solo set accompanied by her trusty uke. After our first ceilidh Glastonbury Emerging Talent winners My Luminaries round the evening off with a special semi-acoustic set of their epic indie rock.

Kirsty Almeida
Kirsty Almeida
Danny and the Champions of the World
Danny and the Champions of the World

On Friday Kirsty Almeida opens for us with her bass heavy soulful Bayou blues, then we’re pleased to welcome the epic musical dreamscapes of Newislands, described as Pink Floyd meets Depeche Mode. After that it’s time for some other Climate Camp regulars, Danny Chivers, Claire Fauset and Merrick, to grace the stage with their “triple-headed tag team political poetry extravaganza”. They’re all friends of mine that I’ve seen perform before so I highly recommend their set, which will be repeated on Sunday afternoon. As a closer we have the country-tinged big band folk of Danny and the Champions of the World.

kyla la grange
Kyla la Grange
Patch William
Patch William
The Federals
The Federals
Dry the River
Dry the River

To kick the day off on Saturday we welcome an exclusive Glastonbury appearance from a talented newcomer with a stunning voice; Kyla La Grange creates soaring melodies and is nearing completion of her debut album. Then comes Patch William – the dreamy lovechild of Nick Drake and Jimi Hendrix, who are followed by the scuzzy rock sound of York boys The Federals, described as a cross between the White Stripes and The Beatles. Then, time for a very special guest. Following my interview with Robin Ince a few weeks he very kindly promised to come by and do us a *special secret set* which will be a must see for all comedy fans at the festival. Tell all your friends! And come on by for a very intimate set from this well known comedian. Dry the River end the day with their beautiful melodic folk, singing songs of religion, history and community to rival those of Fleet Foxes and Mumford & Sons.

Pete the Temp
Pete the Temp
Pete Lawrie
Pete Lawrie
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.
Robinson
Robinson

On Sunday we’ve got another packed day to end the festival. Pete the Temp returns to wow us with his comedic eco-political music and spoken word, then we look forward to hearing the bittersweet gospel blues of latecomer Pete Lawrie, who confirmed just as our flyer had gone to print. I am particularly pleased to welcome Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. the official moniker of singer songwriter Sam Duckworth. He will be showcasing music from his new album due for release later this year, and I’ve got a soft spot for him because he appeared in the print version of Amelia’s Magazine. Robinson will play a gypsy cajun folk set before we round off the festival with our GRAND RAFFLE. If you see our outreach team out and about please give generously to support Climate Camp and come along to our grand prize giving, which will be hosted by the inimitable Danny Chivers.

Glastonbury-June-2009-Grand Raffle presented by Danny Chivers
The Grand Raffle presented by Danny Chivers in 2009.

Don’t forget to follow myself and Climate Camp on twitter to find out how the festival is going; we can always live in hope that 3G reception will be better than it was last year! But most of all, don’t forget to come and visit us… and bring your friends along with you. I will of course write up a full report on my return. For a reminder of what to expect read my blog from last year here.

For a map and full timing information for all bands and workshops see this listings page.

Categories ,Anna Log, ,blues, ,Climate Camp, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Danny Chivers, ,Depeche Mode, ,Direct Action, ,diy, ,Dry the River, ,Fleet Foxes, ,folk, ,g20, ,Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly., ,glastonbury, ,Green Fields, ,Green Kite Midnight, ,Jimi Hendrix, ,Kirsty Almeida, ,Kyla la Grange, ,Mumford and Sons, ,Newislands, ,Nick Cave, ,Patch William, ,Pete Lawrie, ,Pete the Temp, ,Pink Floyd, ,Pyramid Stage, ,RBS, ,Robin Ince, ,Robinson, ,Rossport, ,screenprinting, ,Shangri La, ,Shell, ,soul, ,the beatles, ,The Federals, ,Tripod Stage, ,Tripod Training, ,twitter, ,We Aeronauts, ,White Stripes

Similar Posts:






Amelia’s Magazine | Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Tripod Stage Review: Friday

KIRSTY-ALMEIDA-Lisa Stannard
Kirsty Almeida by Lisa Stannard.

On Friday we kicked off with Kirsty Almeida, who you can read more about in our interview here. My description of her music as bayou blues meets dub bass might suit her recorded material, but for this small show Kirsty ditched the big band that would later be accompanying her on the Avalon stage and instead took a more stripped back acoustic approach, dressed in a fetching stripy all-in-one pants suit.

KIRSTY-ALMEIDA-Lisa Stannard
Kirsty Almeida by Lisa Stannard.

A particularly creative course of action was required from all the percussionists who visited the Tripod Stage and, in between rattling and banging a wide variety of objects, Kirsty’s drummer once again stole the show… dancing and gurning in accompaniment to her song about the “wrong Mr Right” in a thoroughly endearing fashion.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Kirsty Almeida
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Kirsty Almeida
cheeky drummer!
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Kirsty Almeida

One of a breed of strong female musicians who have no desire to fit the normal pliable record label mould, Kirsty was relaxed and chatty during her songs: an absolute delight. Her album Pure Blue Green comes out on Decca on 31st August, and she finished painting the album artwork just last night!

Kirsty on the Tripod Stage: I loved how creative yet peaceful the area was. The stage was so beautifully bonkers it brought our bonkersness out of us and gave us a licence to be cheeky too.
Kirsty’s favourite part of Glastonbury: Definitely all the street entertainers. I loved The Dead Weather too but for us as performers the highlight was definitely the chance to entertain and share our music.

Following Kirsty we had a session from Newislands, who despite worries that they would not be able to make a big enough noise managed to wow a small but perfectly formed mid afternoon crowd with their melodic post rock.

Abi Daker - Newislands -Glastonbury
Newislands by Abigail Daker.

It was only after the gig that I discovered they were missing their bassist Bogart…. we are mutual friends of the Mystery Jets and met many years ago at a small festival called Blissfields that we all went to together. Later that night Bogart called on me in my tent with Marina Pepper. I was fast asleep and woke with the fear of God in me…. it wasn’t the best way to be reintroduced but apparently he insisted on seeing me “the nicest person he knows” – I look forward to meeting Bogart again one day when I am wide awake.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp newislands
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp newislands
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp newislands

Lead singer David’s best bit about playing the Tripod Stage: Well apart from the lovely stage itself, complete with the best speaker system I’ve ever seen, receiving a cup of tea from yourselves midway through the set, was pretty special.
David’s Glastonbury highlight: Apart from playing two amazing gigs, (one for you and one for BBC Introducing), seeing Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood on stage together was ace… “For a minute there I lost myself…”
 
Newislands are playing at Napa Live in Cyprus and then return to the UK to play the Farm Festival. A new single, followed by their debut album, will be released soon. You can watch their other Glastonbury performance here.

We then had our first session from Climate Camp poets Danny Chivers, Claire Fauset and Merrick – all of whom deliver brilliant spoken word commentaries on the state of the world. Danny and Claire have a way of making the environmental/political mess we are in make complete and simple sense, and Merrick takes on the whole system. Why do we work? If you’ve heard Merrick speak you’ll question the sense in ever getting a job.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny Chivers
Danny Chivers.
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Claire Fauset
Claire Fauset by Gareth Hopkins
Claire Fauset by Gareth Hopkins.
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Merrick
Merrick.
Natasha-Thompson-Bristling-Badger
Merrick by Natasha Thompson.

After a somewhat more subdued ceilidh we were then treated to the most extraordinary live set from Danny and the Champions of the World, who decided to ditch most of the electrical amplification and instead sprawl towards their audience in a great acoustic morass.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny and the Champions of the World
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny and the Champions of the World

This band was made for live gigs…. myself and Dom, the banjo player in Green Kite Midnight, were so enthralled by the set that we dusted ourselves down after dinner and set off to hear them once more at the Croissant Neuf bandstand. Danny is a massively confident and skilled musician who has clearly been playing for years: talents like his ought to be better celebrated.

donna.mckenzie.dannyandchampions
Danny and the Champions of the World by Donna McKenzie.

Danny liked playing the Tripod Stage because: the audience was really great and there was an atmosphere that seemed very ‘other’ to the mad hustle and bustle of the rest of the festival – like a haven of good vibes and togetherness, like a family or maybe like what my minds eye would conjure up when I think of festivals in the 60′s. We really just love playing and it’s always great to pass the instruments around, have fun with friends and sing a bunch of songs, and it felt like the perfect time for that – we could’ve played for hours. The lentil dal [for supper] was a treat too!  

Danny’s favourite part of Glastonbury this year: I guess the best part of it was getting to play music with friends to loads of folks. We were lucky enough to play on a bunch of different types of stages so we got a pretty broad experience of it all – we played about seven times which was amazing… but my feet still ache! It’s what we live to do: drink a few ciders and pass the guitar around. 

Danny and the Champions of the World on the road: Our band really lives and breathes on the road, meeting good people and having a great time playing tunes. We’re doing… Maverick, Cornbury, Lounge on the Farm, Deershed, Secret Garden Party, Port Elliot, Truck Festival, Summer Sundae and Greenbelt – and maybe a couple more that I’ve forgotten. We’ll probably start to record a new record at the end of the year.

But, it didn’t end there…. like a magic jack-in-the-box, there were more surprises in store. Out of the band popped a duo who’s music I have loved since the very moment their album plopped onto my doormat. Like a butterfly emerging (from a particularly sexy and gorgeous caterpillar) Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou shed the rest of the musicians to perform a few gorgeous tunes of their own. I was beaming like a motherfucker by this point.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou
A surprise performance from Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou.

And then… I discovered that the band line up also features the delightful brothers who run Truck Festival, a great independent music festival near Oxford. They also run the smaller and folkier Wood Festival which takes place at the gorgeous Braziers Park, a sustainable community where I have camped on many an occasion. I really hope I can hook up with them some more. A nicer and more talented bunch of folk I have seldom met.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny and the Champions of the World
This man runs Truck Festival.

Moving on, my next blog tackles a very busy Saturday on the Tripod Stage – read it here.

Categories ,Abigail Daker, ,Avalon, ,BBC Introducing, ,Blissfields, ,blues, ,Brazier’s Park, ,Climate Camp, ,Cornbury, ,Croissant Neuf bandstand, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Deershed, ,Donna Mckensie, ,Farm Festival, ,folk, ,Gareth Hopkins, ,glastonbury, ,Greenbelt, ,Kirsty Almeida, ,Lisa Stannard, ,Lounge on the Farm, ,Marina Pepper, ,Maverick, ,Mystery Jets, ,Napa Live, ,Natasha Thompson, ,Newislands, ,Port Elliot, ,Prog Rock, ,Secret Garden Party, ,Summer Sundae, ,The Dead Weather, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Wood Festival

Similar Posts:






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

Similar Posts:






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

Similar Posts:






Amelia’s Magazine | Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Tripod Stage Review: Friday

Deviating from the subject of Climate Change, viagra 100mg unhealthy Amelia’s Magazine finds ourselves mesmerised by Design Interaction Student, stuff Kjen Wilkens’ Weather Camera.

What is the impact on our relationship with the environment – when existing in a world where sensor monitors constantly interpret our daily surroundings, prescription producing endless streams of data? Are we moving into the final phrase of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction?

The Weather Camera is Kjen Wilkens response to her search for a human presence within this deluge of electronic readings. Instead of taking a photograph to a record a special moment, the user of The Weather Camera can record the atmospheric conditions, weaving these into autobiographical memory. In time encouraging new methods of narration, titled by the designer as “Sensor Poetics.”

Described as “object of empowerment”, Becky Pilditch‘s prothestics showcase how functional pieces of designs can be both a thing of beauty and an extension of the wearer’s personality. Becky worked and developed the project with Holly Franklin .

Hand 8 the final part of the project, played with ideas of gesture and personality by creating numerous arms that related to Holly’s actions as she spoke or moved around a space. A fantastic aspect of the website is the blog, which can be used by other prosthetic limb users to feed back directly to the project.

In the Animation section of the exhibition Lauri Warsta’s Traumdeutung awaited. A wonderful animation baring the hallmarks (whatever that may mean…) of a “documentary,” the calming, not too dissimilar to the 1940′s DONT PANIC! voiceover narrated the data currently available on the subject matter: The Global Reserves of Dreams. The beauty in this short is it bared the possibility that it was itself entirely a dream.

The subtle block coloring of the animation maintained a ‘warmth’ more similar to hand drawn animation, that can sometimes be lost in 3D animation. An outcome of the animator’s experiments in combining ” two extremes (3D and Handmade) clash and merge. For example; bringing the uncontrollable movement of real hand-held footage to an otherwise sterile computer animation”

Adnan Lalani‘s experiment with augmented reality catches the attention, through being something the viewer can interact with. The action of turning the Pop Up Book’s pages is suplimented by additional narration appearing on the screen placed directly behind the book and inline with the viewers eye.

Below is a video documenting the Pop Up Book’s Prototype. Earlier this week Adnan kindly took a few moments to explain the idea behind combining the narrative structure of a Pop Up Book with Augmented reality: “The pop-up book felt like a natural compliment to augmented reality. I was hoping to see how AR could be used in a more tactile, playful context… i.e. take something we already know and play with, and allow it to be enhanced with animation and digital interactivity.”

RCA Work In Progress Show – Pop Up Book Prototype Documentation from adnan lalani on Vimeo.

Eventually Adnan hopes that as we grow more comfortable with the idea of Augmented Reality, ideas like the Pop Up book ” can allow a progression from the magical, novelty nature of AR, into more of a direct tool by which to communicate narratives and story telling”

The eye catching work of Design Interaction Graduate Louise O’Conner; used experimental dance to convey the movement of the smallest particles, for example: Atoms, in an attempt to connect us to movements that are beyond our physical awareness. Visit the exhibition to watch the film!

A particular lovely idea was the mapping out of the distances of the solar system along Kingsland High Street leading up to Stamford Hill. Eight Shopkeepers were asked if their shop would host one of the planets…

Photography by Mark Henderson

You can find the map and information about the project here:

Katrin Baumgarten’s Aesthetics of Disgust explores humans’ relationship and our reactions; both emotional and physical to the things or materials which disgust us. Using inanimate objects all too often taken for granted, (i.e. Light Switches) Kartin added disturbing features such as goo or hair that moved as the light switch is pressed. By ‘touching’ us back, the presence of these inanimate objects is brought back to the forefront of our attention.

In the installation at the Royal College of Art a screen documents the level of the reaction of each user.

Another subject explored by Katrina is Intimate touch or sexual disgust and how these feelings can be created “merely by inappropriate behaviours in society, such as touching another person in an intimate or sexual way in public, even though that might comfort the two persons involved and is a part of our human nature.” The outcome of which is the Intimate Touch Object, an item which enables you to touch another person secretly…

FINALLY on my second trip (yes second, it’s that big and really worth the time) I came across the brilliant work of Sivaprakash Shanmugam’s Expressive Scribble. Children draw onto the projector screen (this could be the kitchen floor, wall etc…) and an bring their drawings to life by clicking the ‘movie’ button. The idea being to “enrich their visual vocabulary,” sense of narrative and most importantly encourage children’s creativity.

Part two of the RCA show continues until 4th July 2010. It’s open from 11-8 daily at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU. Admission is free.

Images Courtesy of the Students and addition photographs by Sally Mumby-Croft

KIRSTY-ALMEIDA-Lisa Stannard
Kirsty Almeida by Lisa Stannard.

On Friday we kicked off with Kirsty Almeida, generic who you can read more about in our interview here. My description of her music as bayou blues meets dub bass might suit her recorded material, but for this small show Kirsty ditched the big band that would later be accompanying her on the Avalon stage and instead took a more stripped back acoustic approach, dressed in a fetching stripy all-in-one pants suit.

KIRSTY-ALMEIDA-Lisa Stannard
Kirsty Almeida by Lisa Stannard.

A particularly creative course of action was required from all the percussionists who visited the Tripod Stage and, in between rattling and banging a wide variety of objects, Kirsty’s drummer once again stole the show… dancing and gurning in accompaniment to her song about the “wrong Mr Right” in a thoroughly endearing fashion.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Kirsty Almeida
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Kirsty Almeida
cheeky drummer!
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Kirsty Almeida

One of a breed of strong female musicians who have no desire to fit the normal pliable record label mould, Kirsty was relaxed and chatty during her songs: an absolute delight. Her album Pure Blue Green comes out on Decca on 31st August, and she finished painting the album artwork just last night!

Kirsty on the Tripod Stage: I loved how creative yet peaceful the area was. The stage was so beautifully bonkers it brought our bonkersness out of us and gave us a licence to be cheeky too.
Kirsty’s favourite part of Glastonbury: Definitely all the street entertainers. I loved The Dead Weather too but for us as performers the highlight was definitely the chance to entertain and share our music.

Following Kirsty we had a session from Newislands, who despite worries that they would not be able to make a big enough noise managed to wow a small but perfectly formed mid afternoon crowd with their melodic post rock.

Abi Daker - Newislands -Glastonbury
Newislands by Abigail Daker.

It was only after the gig that I discovered they were missing their bassist Bogart…. we are mutual friends of the Mystery Jets and met many years ago at a small festival called Blissfields that we all went to together. Later that night Bogart called on me in my tent with Marina Pepper. I was fast asleep and woke with the fear of God in me…. it wasn’t the best way to be reintroduced but apparently he insisted on seeing me “the nicest person he knows” – I look forward to meeting Bogart again one day when I am wide awake.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp newislands
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp newislands
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp newislands

Lead singer David’s best bit about playing the Tripod Stage: Well apart from the lovely stage itself, complete with the best speaker system I’ve ever seen, receiving a cup of tea from yourselves midway through the set, was pretty special.
David’s Glastonbury highlight: Apart from playing two amazing gigs, (one for you and one for BBC Introducing), seeing Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood on stage together was ace… “For a minute there I lost myself…”
 
Newislands are playing at Napa Live in Cyprus and then return to the UK to play the Farm Festival. A new single, followed by their debut album, will be released soon. You can watch their other Glastonbury performance here.

We then had our first session from Climate Camp poets Danny Chivers, Claire Fauset and Merrick – all of whom deliver brilliant spoken word commentaries on the state of the world. Danny and Claire have a way of making the environmental/political mess we are in make complete and simple sense, and Merrick takes on the whole system. Why do we work? If you’ve heard Merrick speak you’ll question the sense in ever getting a job.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny Chivers
Danny Chivers.
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Claire Fauset
Claire Fauset by Gareth Hopkins
Claire Fauset by Gareth Hopkins.
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Merrick
Merrick.
Natasha-Thompson-Bristling-Badger
Merrick by Natasha Thompson.

After a somewhat more subdued ceilidh we were then treated to the most extraordinary live set from Danny and the Champions of the World, who decided to ditch most of the electrical amplification and instead sprawl towards their audience in a great acoustic morass.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny and the Champions of the World
Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny and the Champions of the World

This band was made for live gigs…. myself and Dom, the banjo player in Green Kite Midnight, were so enthralled by the set that we dusted ourselves down after dinner and set off to hear them once more at the Croissant Neuf bandstand. Danny is a massively confident and skilled musician who has clearly been playing for years: talents like his ought to be better celebrated.

donna.mckenzie.dannyandchampions
Danny and the Champions of the World by Donna McKenzie.

Danny liked playing the Tripod Stage because: the audience was really great and there was an atmosphere that seemed very ‘other’ to the mad hustle and bustle of the rest of the festival – like a haven of good vibes and togetherness, like a family or maybe like what my minds eye would conjure up when I think of festivals in the 60′s. We really just love playing and it’s always great to pass the instruments around, have fun with friends and sing a bunch of songs, and it felt like the perfect time for that – we could’ve played for hours. The lentil dal [for supper] was a treat too!  

Danny’s favourite part of Glastonbury this year: I guess the best part of it was getting to play music with friends to loads of folks. We were lucky enough to play on a bunch of different types of stages so we got a pretty broad experience of it all – we played about seven times which was amazing… but my feet still ache! It’s what we live to do: drink a few ciders and pass the guitar around. 

Danny and the Champions of the World on the road: Our band really lives and breathes on the road, meeting good people and having a great time playing tunes. We’re doing… Maverick, Cornbury, Lounge on the Farm, Deershed, Secret Garden Party, Port Elliot, Truck Festival, Summer Sundae and Greenbelt – and maybe a couple more that I’ve forgotten. We’ll probably start to record a new record at the end of the year.

But, it didn’t end there…. like a magic jack-in-the-box, there were more surprises in store. Out of the band popped a duo who’s music I have loved since the very moment their album plopped onto my doormat. Like a butterfly emerging (from a particularly sexy and gorgeous caterpillar) Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou shed the rest of the musicians to perform a few gorgeous tunes of their own. I was beaming like a motherfucker by this point.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Trevor Moss & Hannah Lou
A surprise performance from Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou.

And then… I discovered that the band line up also features the delightful brothers who run Truck Festival, a great independent music festival near Oxford. They also run the smaller and folkier Wood Festival which takes place at the gorgeous Braziers Park, a sustainable community where I have camped on many an occasion. I really hope I can hook up with them some more. A nicer and more talented bunch of folk I have seldom met.

Glastonbury 2010 Climate Camp Danny and the Champions of the World
This man runs Truck Festival.

Moving on, my next blog tackles a very busy Saturday on the Tripod Stage – read it here.

Categories ,Abigail Daker, ,Avalon, ,BBC Introducing, ,Blissfields, ,blues, ,Brazier’s Park, ,Climate Camp, ,Cornbury, ,Croissant Neuf bandstand, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Deershed, ,Donna Mckensie, ,Farm Festival, ,folk, ,Gareth Hopkins, ,glastonbury, ,Greenbelt, ,Kirsty Almeida, ,Lisa Stannard, ,Lounge on the Farm, ,Marina Pepper, ,Maverick, ,Mystery Jets, ,Napa Live, ,Natasha Thompson, ,Newislands, ,Port Elliot, ,Prog Rock, ,Secret Garden Party, ,Summer Sundae, ,The Dead Weather, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Tripod Stage, ,Truck Festival, ,Wood Festival

Similar Posts:






Amelia’s Magazine | Festival Review: Truck 2010

aeon festival
AEON Fest by Faye West
Illustration by Faye West.

This will be my third year at Aeon, stomach and for me it’s been a wonderful, nurse stress-free experience, cialis 40mg no queues, suffocating crowds or over-priced disgusting burgers. It describes itself as a ‘Shoestring Boutique festival’ and is set in the beautiful surroundings in mid Devon. A grassy amphitheatre precedes the main stage which sits on the edge of a lake, you are able to camp under the trees and gather around wood burners with friends and strangers. There is no sponsorship or big branding so it’s one of the most naturally visually pleasing festivals around and there’s something about this festival which has a very simplistic charm which embodies what a music festival only really needs to be – friends, music and fresh air.

There are lots of sweet put-together events that take place throughout the day. Last year I was very tempted by the Speed Date plus free meal for a fiver, a hair fascination workshop and a wood cutting class so that you can whittle down your very own wooden spoon from a branch, but of course was too busy frequenting the bar and resting on the grass whilst soaking up the surrounds. I was however encouraged to take part in the bubble wrap race. Once I was wrapped head to toe in bubble wrap, I thought as we all lay there like grubs that I was in for some kind of relaxing spa treatment. Unfortunately we were asked to try and get to our feet, and race each other round a tree and back. I was just left slumped on the floor, immobile from laughter.

Bubble Wrap Racing Aeon Faye West
Bubble wrap racing at Aeon. Photography by Faye West.

I managed to catch the super busy founder of the fest, Niki Portus for a few words whilst the count down for Aeon is on.

Aeon is in it’s 5th year this August, and I know that festivals tend to change quite a bit every year as crowds get bigger and organisers think up new ways to run an efficient festival. Sometimes this is for the worst! What were your goals for organising this year’s Aeon, and was there much you wanted to change or improve on from last year?

I’m a great believer in if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! I think we have a pretty good formula that seems to work and people really like the laid back feel of it all. We had to put the ticket price up this year which was really hard to get my head round but we’ve expanded on production and line up to reflect that – I think it has been more important though to improve on areas where we know we had problems.

We had a big debrief meeting straight after last year and the main area I wanted to get right was the camping as it filled up very quickly last year and was pretty rowdy. So this year we have added an extra area for noisy camping right next to the main site and kept family camping in the old area away from the rowdy bunch. Some of the programming needed adapting a bit but mostly it’s about us wanting to put on a good show and keep it fun for everyone as well as the element of a few surprises. I guess it’s about being realistic about accommodating natural growth as the word spreads, such as having more loos, better fencing and more security but not so it’s in your face. Little background things that cost more money but can make a big difference to the experience for people.

The main thing about Aeon for me is that it has always been about independent artists and strictly no sponsorship or outside funding – the first year was me taking out a small bank loan and maxing the credit cards but I’ve paid the loan off now *lol* and one day I might actually pay off the credit cards! The festival has sustained itself though for the past 4 years on ticket income and by running our own bar on site so it seems to work. I think people like the fact that we’re home grown – it’s very much like a big family now.

Aeon Ampitheatre Faye West

What do you think it is about Aeon that makes it so special and magical? And are you still achieving what you set out to do?

I have no idea! But we have an amazing crew who come up with all sorts of great ideas and are very creative. I think whilst I never thought it would get this far when I first set out on this journey I do feel its stuck to it’s original goal – that’s something I feel very strongly inside but it’s hard to explain! For me personally it’s definitely a love affair – I’ve don’t draw a salary or wage and if I manage to pay myself back for even something like my phone bill it’s a small miracle.

We’re pretty low key with our publicity as I’m always scared of over hyping things. It’s like ‘wow this is the best festival in the world ever’ well no actually it’s one of over 500 festivals in the country and everyone has their favourites for different reasons – you can’t please all the people all the time and there will always be one or two who think it’s crap, that’s just human nature. You see it all over the forums and I always think ‘god please don’t let that be us’ but you can’t control it. Freedom of speech and all that. This is the first year we will possibly have some ‘proper’ festival press on site – I’m terrified they’ll be rude!

Girls Aeon by Faye West
Illustration by Faye West.

Aeon is a wonderfully afordable festival compared to many others. Is it difficult keeping the cost down, and if so do you think the big festies such as Glastonbury are overpriced?

To the first question – in a word – yes – it’s very difficult keeping costs down! Just the little things like having a full time accountant now all adds up behind the scenes. But I don’t think you can compare it to the likes of Glastonbury – the production that goes in to that one is awe inspiring – in fact The History of Glastonbury is like my bible *lol* I find the stories from behind the scenes really heart warming and you know as an organisation they have set the bench mark for all events – their management structure and Health & Safety awareness is amazing. I like the concept of ’boutique festivals’ though – hence our tongue in cheek ‘shoestring boutique’ moniker.

Equally though there is only so much one person can do in a day and for most people special times involve having a laugh with a group of friends not standing in queues for toilets or over priced warm beers, or spending hours hunting for your friends because you went off on a drunken ramble. That said there are two sorts of people – those who go to festivals and those who work at festivals. All my friends who work at festivals prefer it when they’re behind the scenes making stuff happen.

I do really feel as well that just throwing money at something doesn’t make a party and personally I get a kick from doing things on a tight budget. The crew know I’m tight as a gnat’s arse! We’ve got some awesome artists this year for a really good price and I think part of the reason is the agents know we’re doing it all for the right reasons. It’s not about the big headliners for us – it’s about showcasing the underground well regarded stuff that if you know your music makes you go ‘wow that’s cool’ and if you don’t you know you can take a chance and see something you wouldn’t normally see and it’ll be really good. I did contact a couple of agents about some bigger acts this year out of curiosity to see how much it would be and they were like ‘Aeon who?’

Keeping the balance between family friendly and cool party is in the top 5 of my list of requirements for definite. As a single parent I want to know my son is safe.

Shobrook Park Aeon
Shobrooke Park Estate, Crediton – where Aeon is held.

Aeon takes place in a beautiful part of Devon. It appears to be a very eco-friendly event, is this something important to you, and if so has this been an easy practice to take on?

Honestly? I think it can be easy to over hype being ‘Green’ and in fact not take into account how important it is to support the local economy. I live in a little village on Dartmoor and work at the local preschool there – my family have been there over 30 years so we see firsthand how rural economies struggle and last year I joined a committee to build and start up a village shop after our one was closed down.

At the festival it’s therefore important we use local traders and cafes and encourage them to source locally. There are various community groups from Crediton who run things and fund raise on site as well. We struggled with our recycling last year but this year we have a proper green team on board to take the pressure off us on site and the company we use for our skips has their own processing plant just up the road from the festival site that recycles 85% of stuff. The policies behind landfill are actually really strict these days. We dish out bin bags to everyone and encourage them to take care of the park but in reality we live in a disposable culture that drives me up the wall. I think this isn’t helped by festivals being very fashionable at the moment and companies doing cheap deals on tents and welly boots means that many punters still feel they can leave stuff behind even at small festivals like ours. It’s definitely getting worse for events and certainly puts costs up. We encourage car sharing as well and this year are trying out Festival Coaches to see if a shuttle service from Exeter works too.

*********

Last year I spent a ridiculous amount of money on a larger festival, ensuring I got to see some bands I had always wanted to see. I’m not sure if I am just getting old, or maybe not so rock and roll, but I certainly didn’t enjoy this experience as much as I used to. I got angry at the shear masses kicking up dust, mile long queues to simply refill bottles of water and spending stupid money on horrible food (apart from the tea and toast van, which became my staple). Because others had let us all down by creating fires and explosions with gas canisters, gas stoves had been banned and it was impossible to do any proper camp cooking.

So, when Aeon swung round towards the end of last summer – just as most people were getting over festie camping and portoloos – I surprised myself again with how much I enjoyed the weekend as a whole. There was just no effort or stress involved and it felt like a massive garden party. Although there wasn’t any particular headlining act I had travelled miles to see, the bands were all so easy going and cheerful that everyone danced with the same enthusiam as if hearing their favourite ever song. In fact I shredded my new wellies from all the hopping and jumping. So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I might do a way with shoes this year and hop about on the grass underfoot instead. Fancy joining me?

The facebook group for Aeon can be found here.

I am standing on a crowded tube on my way to Ladbroke Grove and boy do I want to bust a move. I want to glide along the carriage, sickness wind it up, approved shake my bootie (even though I don’t have much of one), do the robot, shimmy back and forth – but I don’t. Instead I repress all of my disco dancing energy into a few gentle taps on the pole I’m meant to be holding onto with my fingers; my inner Tony Manero bound and gagged.

Summer has arrived in full bloom as I listen to Ali Love’s latest single ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ on my hot pink ipod and find myself plodding along Portobello Road to meet the man himself. If truth be told, the first time I heard of Ali was only a few weeks ago when I was invited to a one-off exclusive show at new East London art venue, CAMP. Although initially weary of the next ‘hottest new act’ on the electro-pop scene label, on seeing him perform and hearing his latest material, I was genuinely struck by his commercial appeal.


Photography courtesy of Pietro Pravettoni.

Storming onto the stage dressed head-to-toe in black with a cloak, studded vest and, oddly enough, what appeared to resemble a tassled curtain tie-back around his neck, Ali worked the stage with his two slinky backing singers dressed in rubber black cat suits, stitched with fluorescent electric blue tubing, like a veteran pop-maestro. As the girls writhed behind him in synchrony with lashings of mascara and kohled eyes, Ali delivered his anabolic steroid pumped disco tunes, filled with dirty bass lines, swirling-synths and throbbing melodies, to an adoring party audience with his Prince-esque vocals providing the perfect dusting.


Photography courtesy of Pietro Pravettoni.

Bursting with 80s electro rhythms, Ali’s sound is fun, upbeat, catchy and infectious, and his set was filled with plenty of tracks, such as ‘Do the Dirty’ and ‘Dark Star’ which deserve to be hit singles. I started the evening cynical, propped up against a wall but by the end of the night, my feet had taken on a funked-up life of their own.


Photography courtesy of Pietro Pravettoni.

Today, there is no cloak and I arrive at Ali’s early to find myself loitering outside his flat, waiting for him to return from picking up his DMX drum machine. I spot him approaching me in distinctively 80s attire; a bright green t-shirt, blue skinny jeans, white Nike high tops with a fluorescent orange tick and a gold vintage bling watch. Ali towers over me, greeting me with a hug and a Sarf London accented: “Hey babe”.

On stage, Ali appeared extroverted, flamboyant and massively confident but on a one-to-one, he was more reserved than I had imagined, often flitting between intense and evasive, lucid and incoherent, and making little eye contact as he spoke. Over the course of the interview and a nice strong brew, however, as Ali began to loosen up, a cheekier and more spiritual side emerged…

I loved the cosmic theme of your stage set of your gig at CAMP. How did this idea come about?
In colour, the music I’ve created is black and electric blue. When I visualise the sound, I can picture things like arpeggiators and my DMX drum machine (Ali points to the electric blue lines on his Oberheim DMX drum machine). On the cosmic theme, well I like cosmic music coz I’m a cosmic guy.

How do you go about composing your records? Do lyrics or a tune come to you first?
Most of the time, it’s the melody that comes to you first. Then I’ll just pick up my guitar and try to re-create it. Other times, it’s being struck by a word that someone says; something that you instantly pick up on and connect with. A good word can just spark off an idea. Songs write themselves most of the time. It’s like a flame; you have to keep feeding it with your creative energy.

How would you describe your new album, Love Harder, in three words?
Electric love music.

What has been the general response from the audience who you have played to so far?
What I’ve done has been well-received by the gay community and all over Europe. They’re mainly my kind of people; slightly left of centre, so not mainstream. I don’t really make music for closed-minded people; I make music for open-minded people and cosmic party people. I don’t know if that sounds snobby but those are the kind of people I want to impress. When musicians like Aeroplane say they love my music, it’s a really great feeling because that’s the kind of audience I’m trying to reach out to. It means a lot to gain respect from the people that I respect.

There’s a track on the album where you collaborate with Teenagers in Tokyo. How do you think they complement your sound?
Well the opportunity arose to work with Sam (Lim) who has a lovely voice so I just grabbed it. I told her to sing like a space siren and she nailed it. She really went for it on the record and to me, she sounds like an angel singing. I think it’s a great track to end the album on.

Your sound is distinctively 80s – is this an era that you look to for inspiration?
I don’t see myself as a retro artist. The palette was slightly electro and analogue so that lends itself to sounding 80s. The machines that I used are all 30 years old. I don’t care whether something is retro or not, it’s about whether you can hold a tune or whether it’s good to listen to. We live in a post-modern world and it’s hard to create new ground.

What has your career highlight been so far?
I’ve been to lots of different places in the world and have experienced a lot of stuff and that’s all because of the music – that aspect has been good. I’m pretty even minded about most things in a Buddhist middle way; I try to stay emotionally consistent, whether things are good or bad. My most blissful musical times aren’t when I’m doing gigs – they’re when I’m in the studio, recording material. That’s what I love doing the most.

It’s interesting you should say that as most people tend to enjoy the gigging aspect.
The last gig was really good and I felt really confident and happy that people were there, which felt like a breakthrough. I’d like to be like Harry Nilsson, he never played live, he just made beautiful amazing songs in the studio. Same with Georgio Moroder, he gave up playing live. I’m more interested in being a recording artist.

What does making music mean to you?
If I didn’t do music I’d have to do meditation or something to stop me from going mad. Music for me is meditative. I need to concentrate on something and it’s been the one thing I can concentrate on. I was terrible at school. My dad died when I was 13 and it stopped me from caring too much about things. I became quite spiritual as I was suddenly hit by the question of death. My whole mind started to move in a different direction. It has given me a lot more empathy for feeling things in the world and enhances your musical palette which happens to a lot of musicians. You need to find a place to visit to write songs. If everything in your life was normal, it would be quite difficult to find inspiration to write. Having said that I do still really like boner jams about sex; they’re all fine.

How have you changed as a person since you started out in the music industry?
When I started out I was living above a club on Kingsland Road in East London and high all the time. I was living on the dole but passionate about my music; just the classic clichéd punk rock vibe. But somehow I managed to get a big record deal. So because I’d been on the dole for six years beforehand, it all went to my head a bit. I went a bit crazy and the partying outweighed the music-making even before it all started. But luckily I had the hit with the Chemical Brothers which kept me financially afloat for ages. I wouldn’t change anything; it was a good journey. Now I’d love to have a guru or teacher and learn kung-fu in the hills; get more in touch with my spiritual side.

Who interests you most on the music scene at the moment and why?
I’m mostly drawn to disco people like Aeroplane and the guy who did my remix, Bottin. I really like the work that Prince Thomas does and the Lindstrom stuff. Pop wise, I like Empire of the Sun.

Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’d like to collaborate with rappers, some kind of US stuff. I think it’s because I’ve just moved to West London and there’s a bit more rap around where I live and that’s starting to soak into me.

So do you find that where you live influences your sound?
Well I was living in East London before which is why I made a totally gay disco record!

And finally – what random piece of advice can you offer readers of Amelia’s Magazine?
Be nice to each other and always look right twice when you cross the road.

Ali Love’s new album Love Harder is out on 9th August on Back Yard Recordings.

I am standing on a crowded tube on my way to Ladbroke Grove and boy do I want to bust a move. I want to glide along the carriage, online wind it up, price shake my bootie (even though I don’t have much of one), medical do the robot, shimmy back and forth – but I don’t. Instead I repress all of my disco dancing energy into a few gentle taps on the pole I’m meant to be holding onto with my fingers; my inner Tony Manero bound and gagged.

Summer has arrived in full bloom as I listen to Ali Love’s latest single ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ on my hot pink ipod and find myself plodding along Portobello Road to meet the man himself. If truth be told, the first time I heard of Ali was only a few weeks ago when I was invited to a one-off exclusive show at new East London art venue, CAMP. Although initially weary of the next ‘hottest new act’ on the electro-pop scene label, on seeing him perform and hearing his latest material, I was genuinely struck by his commercial appeal.


Photography courtesy of Pietro Pravettoni.

Storming onto the stage dressed head-to-toe in black with a cloak, studded vest and, oddly enough, what appeared to resemble a tassled curtain tie-back around his neck, Ali worked the stage with his two slinky backing singers dressed in rubber black cat suits, stitched with fluorescent electric blue tubing, like a veteran pop-maestro. As the girls writhed behind him in synchrony with lashings of mascara and kohled eyes, Ali delivered his anabolic steroid pumped disco tunes, filled with dirty bass lines, swirling-synths and throbbing melodies, to an adoring party audience with his Prince-esque vocals providing the perfect dusting.

Ali’s sound is fun, upbeat, catchy and infectious, and his set was filled with plenty of tracks, such as ‘Do the Dirty’ and ‘Show Me’ which deserve to be hit singles. I started the evening cynical, propped up against a wall but by the end of the night, my feet had taken on a funked-up life of their own.


Photography courtesy of Pietro Pravettoni.

Today, there is no cloak and I arrive at Ali’s early to find myself loitering outside his flat, waiting for him to return from picking up his DMX drum machine. I spot him approaching me in distinctively 80s attire; a bright green t-shirt, blue skinny jeans, white Nike high tops with a fluorescent orange tick and a gold vintage bling watch. Ali towers over me, greeting me with a hug and a Sarf London accented: “Hey babe”.

On stage, Ali appeared extroverted, flamboyant and massively confident but on a one-to-one, he was more reserved than I had imagined, often flitting between intense and evasive, lucid and incoherent, and making little eye contact as he spoke. Over the course of the interview and a nice strong brew, however, as Ali began to loosen up, a cheekier and more spiritual side emerged…

I loved the cosmic theme of your stage set of your gig at CAMP. How did this idea come about?
In colour, the music I’ve created is black and electric blue. When I visualise the sound, I can picture things like arpeggiators and my DMX drum machine (Ali points to the electric blue lines on his Oberheim DMX drum machine). On the cosmic theme, well I like cosmic music coz I’m a cosmic guy.

How do you go about composing your records? Do lyrics or a tune come to you first?
Most of the time, it’s the melody that comes to you first. Then I’ll just pick up my guitar and try to re-create it. Other times, it’s being struck by a word that someone says; something that you instantly pick up on and connect with. A good word can just spark off an idea. Songs write themselves most of the time. It’s like a flame; you have to keep feeding it with your creative energy.

How would you describe your new album, Love Harder, in three words?
Electric love music.

What has been the general response from the audience who you have played to so far?
What I’ve done has been well-received by the gay community and all over Europe. They’re mainly my kind of people; slightly left of centre, so not mainstream. I don’t really make music for closed-minded people; I make music for open-minded people and cosmic party people. I don’t know if that sounds snobby but those are the kind of people I want to impress. When musicians like Aeroplane say they love my music, it’s a really great feeling because that’s the kind of audience I’m trying to reach out to. It means a lot to gain respect from the people that I respect.

There’s a track on the album where you collaborate with Teenagers in Tokyo. How do you think they complement your sound?
Well the opportunity arose to work with Sam (Lim) who has a lovely voice so I just grabbed it. I told her to sing like a space siren and she nailed it. She really went for it on the record and to me, she sounds like an angel singing. I think it’s a great track to end the album on.


Photography courtesy of Pietro Pravettoni.

Your sound is distinctively 80s – is this an era that you look to for inspiration?
I don’t see myself as a retro artist. The palette was slightly electro and analogue so that lends itself to sounding 80s. The machines that I used are all 30 years old. I don’t care whether something is retro or not, it’s about whether you can hold a tune or whether it’s good to listen to. We live in a post-modern world and it’s hard to create new ground.

What has your career highlight been so far?
I’ve been to lots of different places in the world and have experienced a lot of stuff and that’s all because of the music – that aspect has been good. I’m pretty even minded about most things in a Buddhist middle way; I try to stay emotionally consistent, whether things are good or bad. My most blissful musical times aren’t when I’m doing gigs – they’re when I’m in the studio, recording material. That’s what I love doing the most.

It’s interesting you should say that as most people tend to enjoy the gigging aspect.
The last gig was really good and I felt really confident and happy that people were there, which felt like a breakthrough. I’d like to be like Harry Nilsson, he never played live, he just made beautiful amazing songs in the studio. Same with Georgio Moroder, he gave up playing live. I’m more interested in being a recording artist.

What does making music mean to you?
If I didn’t do music I’d have to do meditation or something to stop me from going mad. Music for me is meditative. I need to concentrate on something and it’s been the one thing I can concentrate on. I was terrible at school. My dad died when I was 13 and it stopped me from caring too much about things. I became quite spiritual as I was suddenly hit by the question of death. My whole mind started to move in a different direction. It has given me a lot more empathy for feeling things in the world and enhances your musical palette which happens to a lot of musicians. You need to find a place to visit to write songs. If everything in your life was normal, it would be quite difficult to find inspiration to write. Having said that I do still really like boner jams about sex; they’re all fine.

How have you changed as a person since you started out in the music industry?
When I started out I was living above a club on Kingsland Road in East London and high all the time. I was living on the dole but passionate about my music; just the classic clichéd punk rock vibe. But somehow I managed to get a big record deal. So because I’d been on the dole for six years beforehand, it all went to my head a bit. I went a bit crazy and the partying outweighed the music-making even before it all started. But luckily I had the hit with the Chemical Brothers which kept me financially afloat for ages. I wouldn’t change anything; it was a good journey. Now I’d love to have a guru or teacher and learn kung-fu in the hills; get more in touch with my spiritual side.

Who interests you most on the music scene at the moment and why?
I’m mostly drawn to disco people like Aeroplane and the guy who did my remix, Bottin. I really like the work that Prince Thomas does and the Lindstrom stuff. Pop wise, I like Empire of the Sun.

Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’d like to collaborate with rappers, some kind of US stuff. I think it’s because I’ve just moved to West London and there’s a bit more rap around where I live and that’s starting to soak into me.

So do you find that where you live influences your sound?
Well I was living in East London before which is why I made a totally gay disco record!

And finally – what random piece of advice can you offer readers of Amelia’s Magazine?
Be nice to each other and always look right twice when you cross the road.

Ali Love’s new album Love Harder is out on 9th August on Back Yard Recordings.


Darwin Deez at Truck Festival. Photograph by Sabrina Morrison

It was only a matter of time before Amelia’s Magazine and Truck Festival became the firmest of friends. With circles overlapping so far and wide, information pills we might as well be kith and kin, our relationship was cemented and documented by Amelia at the Climate Camp gathering in Glastonbury (understand that Truck is kind of a generic description – the creators of Truck – the brothers Joe and Robin Bennett also play in the utterly fab Danny and The Champions Of The World) in a memorable performance where Joe played part of the gig on his back. ‘Cause that’s how he rolls.


Photographs by Sabrina Morrison


Pulled Apart By Horses perform. Photograph by Caitlin Mogridge

Truck is known for being somewhat of an anomaly; it’s a thoroughly strange hybrid of a bucolic Oxfordshire village fete, complete with a rotary club flipping burgers, a vicar serving ale and – no village fete is complete without this quintessentially English phenomena – cross dressers behind the bar, all of which serve as the surroundings to a musical line-up that is so hip, cutting edge and au courant that it makes SXSW look tame. The place was teeming with journo’s from every major publication, all of whom professed a long standing love for Truck. I had pitched up with a little crew of fellow Amelia’s Magazine colleagues and friends of mine from the band Amber States. By the time we arrived at 1pm on Saturday afternoon, the weather was glorious, the sun beating down on the 5,000 revelers who had already assumed the position of the day; lying flat on their backs (clearly taking a cue from the founder Joe). We quickly discovered that the festival was pleasingly manageable in size. Taking up no more that roughly three fields, the onus was on being able to bounce (I mean amble) from one stage to the next with the minimum of fuss.


Is Tropical in session. Photograph by Sabrina Morrison

So we quickly settled into a routine. Fuel up with a drink, and go find some music. From an extremely horizontal position I watched ex- Beta Band singer Steve Mason do a rousing Beta Band-esque set, followed by Stornoway who actually got me standing up (high praise). Although at some point I realised that that the hottest spot at Truck was by far and away The Barn, which receives the accolade from me as being The Hottest Music Venue In The World Which Also Smells Of Manure. It seemed that the rest of the festival agreed with me, and due to it’s cult like status, and the fact that the bands playing inside were off the charts, there was a constant queue to get into this converted cowshed. But I would stand in line all over again just to see this man play again.


Darwin Deez auditions for So You Think You Can Dance. Photographs by Sabrina Morrison

Mr Darwin Deez, New York hipster, sporter of the finest curls in the contemporary music scene, and creator of mid-song dance routines that even have their own narrative. My favourite bit was the dance that finished Radar Detector where his band mates engaged in what can only be described as a homage to West Side Story and the unfortunate Darwin was pushed to the floor (don’t worry, it was all part of the routine) but heroically sprang back to complete the rest of the dance/mime show. Why don’t more bands do this?
YouTube Preview Image
YouTube Video courtesy of John Pullman


Mew headlining, photograph by Sabrina Morrison

The evening was given over to watch Mew headlining. I had high hopes about this Danish group because the previous week I had been fortunate to have a long chat with Sune from The Raveonettes and he was in raptures over them. Truthfully, they were technically very impressive, but I wasn’t hooked. I think I was spoilt by watching smaller bands whilst scraping hay off of my converse in the cow shed, so this stadium-esque performance left me a little cold. Actually, I think I may have just simply been cold – it was 11pm by this point and the temperature had dropped. I wandered off to find my friends playing table football in the techno tent and concluded this very pleasant evening by not scoring a goal. Story of my life!


I got to meet the strange Truck monster; he was a bit monosyllabic but gave good hugs.

The next day was given over to more of the same thing. Naturally some lazing around had to be done. (We are not lazing in this picture, we are trying to figure out how to play the game where you lift someone up using two fingers, we didn’t succeed.)

Amber States do a collective i-phone check to find out how it’s done. Test study remains rooted to the ground.


Blood Red Shoes perform. Great live set, but inbetween song banter needs be improved; “We love sharks!” yells Laura-Mary. Photo by Caitlin Mogridge


Los Campesinos! Photograph by Caitlin Mogridge


Teenage Fanclub close Truck 13. Photograph by Caitlin Mogridge

Everyone found a band that we had previously not heard off but now had to IMMEDIATELY rush off and buy their tracks. A friend of mine was delighted by A Silent Film, which reminded her a little of The National. I really enjoyed the synth pop of Miaoux Miaoux, Sabrina discovered the joys of Egyptian Hip Hop, another mate stuck to the front of the stage while Blood Red Shoes performed and we all had a bit of a rousing moment to Los Campesinos! and Teenage Fanclub. Personally, Sunday afternoon was all about Danny and the Champions of The World. I’m not just saying that because of the aforementioned connections but simply because they put on a blinding performance. Plus you never know who you are going to get when Danny plays; later he performed a set in the little acoustic tent to a full house of little kids and was joined by the lovely Trevor Moss and Hannah Lou. Everyone clapped along to the songs – one toddler in the front helpfully kept time with the aide of his drum sticks and to me, this summed up Truck entirely; the ethos is collective, without pretension, kid friendly and all about the music, even when the music consists of two acoustic guitars, no mics and a two year old with drum sticks. Thanks again to Truck, for reminding us that this is what life is about.


Danny and Trevor Moss perform
Photograph by Rishi Mullett-Sadones

With thanks to Sabrina Morrison, Caitlin Mogridge and Rishi Mullett-Sadones for the photos.

Categories ,Amber States, ,Blood Red Shoes, ,Climate Camp, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Darwin Deez, ,Egyptian Hip Hop, ,festivals, ,glastonbury, ,Is Tropical, ,Los Campesinos, ,mew, ,Oxford, ,Pulled Apart By Horses, ,Rishi Mullett Sadones, ,sxsw, ,Teenage Fanclub, ,Trever Moss and Hannah Lou, ,Truck Festival

Similar Posts:






Amelia’s Magazine | My Best Albums of 2010


Image courtesy of Rogue

Initiating a relationship over the Internet is an age-old tale and I have friends who have successfully trodden this path, viagra dosage no rx but not without some initial trepidation. There’s always the joke about boys being deluded about their height, unhealthy often adding an inch or four to their profiles (or being axe-murderers), and girls uploading old photos when they were a good few pounds lighter (or being bunny boilers). But beyond the aesthetics, how much do you really know about your online confidante? And on the flipside, how far are you willing to stretch the truth to ensure that you are presenting yourself in the best light?

Produced by filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, who directed the brilliant docufilm “Capturing the Friedmans” in 2003, Catfish is the directorial feature film debut of Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, who explore these themes, human psychology and the modern technological landscape as a medium for communication, closely following a ‘virtual’ relationship as it unfolds over Facebook and phone calls. Made with a budget of only around $30,000, the film was an unlikely hit at the Sundance Film Festival last year, which had audience members and critics alike hyperventilating with excitement.


Illustration courtesy of Avril Kelly

When I received my invite to the press screening, I was urged to read as little about Catfish as possible to avoid spoiling my experience of the film. As I would urge you to do the same, I can tell you that writing this review is going to prove difficult but here goes…

Filmed using a grainy handheld camera, the story revolves around the film’s protagonist, Nev Schulman, a young, charismatic, sleepy-eyed New-York based photographer who becomes involved, via Facebook, with an eight-year-old art prodigy named Abby in Michigan. Abby approaches Nev to ask for his permission to use a photograph for a painting and a fraternal relationship ensues between Nev and Abby, which becomes increasingly complex as Nev becomes involved with the rest of her family: Abby’s mother, Angela, and Abby’s attractive horse-riding, guitar-playing, party-loving 19-year-old sister, Megan, along with Megan’s intricate network of friends.  Needless to say, a less fraternal relationship develops between Nev and Megan and before we know it, they are “sexting”, amalgamating naked photos of themselves and speaking every night via the plethora of the networking tools that we have at our disposal today. Nothing, however, is quite as it seems as the film takes several unexpected twists and turns to reach a not entirely surprising yet poignant conclusion. 


Illustration courtesy of Avril Kelly

One of the film’s key strengths lies in Nev’s engaging hopeless romantic, drawing empathy from his viewers as we are taken on a journey of his evolving feelings for Megan and her family. Throughout the course of the film, we see Nev experience infatuation, doubt, anger, disappointment, betrayal and then sympathy – feelings of which are all doubtless familiar to us, whether in the virtual or real world. The way in which the film is shot, where Nev talks about his thoughts and feelings directly to the camera as if we were talking to a family member or a close friend (fitting really seeing as Schulman is Nev’s brother and Joost is one of his best friends), makes us feel as if we are sharing a very private experience with Nev, helping us to bond and identify with his character.

Where David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’sThe Social Network” is about the creation of Facebook, Catfish is a film about the consequences of such creations, which may explain why its subject matter has resonated so strongly with audiences, seeing as approximately 5 billion of us across the globe are subscribed to a mobile phone contract and 500 million of us are active users of Facebook (although I exclude myself from the latter).


Illustration courtesy of Avril Kelly

At the risk of revealing too much, “Catfish” goes far deeper than simply being “another film about Facebook”. It throws up moral questions such as to what extent one can indulge in what superficially appears to be harmless innocent fantasies before we start to infringe on the wellbeing of others. This issue, however, is not strictly confined to the realms of an online environment, although it can be argued that modern technological advances, especially social networking, has made this deception somewhat easier to play out and sustain.

There has been much debate about the authenticity of “Catfish” and I for one am not completely convinced that we are not being taken for a ride, however, regardless of whether the movie is a hoax, Catfish is an absorbing, thought-provoking and affecting indie about hope, crushed dreams and the society that we live in where social media and modern technology provides a platform for our inner-narcissist, potential to deceive or desire to escape reality to a fictional world where life is more kind. In Joost’s own words, “Our profiles are a chance to present ourselves to the world in a way we can completely control – unlike face-to-face interaction”.

Read our exclusive interview with the director of Catfish, Henry Joost, here.

Catfish is currently showing at selected cinemas across the UK and available on DVD from today.  

Ariel “Rel” Schulman (left) and Henry Joost (right); illustration courtesy of Matilde Sazio

The co-directors of Sundance favourite Catfish, for sale   Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, page met in high school and have been filmmaking partners since 2006. Together they founded the New York City production company Supermarché and have produced award-winning advertisements and documentaries for well-known companies and institutions, this including Nike, American Express, Harvard Business School, Pitchfork Media and The National Scrabble Association. As an acknowledgement of their talent, the duo’s web short “What’s the Big Idea“, starring Danny DeVito, was nominated for a Webby in 2008.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Joost spent most of his childhood travelling the world with his mother, a photographer, and his father, an international banker. He is still an avid traveller and collector of cameras, which he uses to capture both film and still.

To celebrate the release of Catfish, Joost talks exclusively to Amelia’s Magazine about the inspiration behind the film, his views on social networking and the emotional rocky road he shared with the Schulman brothers (Nev, the film’s protagonist and Ariel, co-director), from the moment the cameras started rolling…


Illustration courtesy of Matilde Sazio

How was the initial idea for ‘Catfish’ conceived? What made you start filming Nev in the first place?
From my perspective the film began as one of Rel’s pet projects that I became increasingly interested in. When Nev and Abby’s story became like a living soap opera I joined in, filming Nev as well. We have a deal with each other and with our friends that it’s ok to film all the time. We keep a personal record of our lives with these little HD cameras we keep in our pockets. Sometimes it turns into something but more often than not the footage lives on a hard-drive, unwatched.

Did you have any expectations when you started filming?
Rel had an instinct that he was shooting what could become a charming short film about two artists meeting on the internet and inspiring each other. Or just another strange episode in his brother’s life. That’s enough for us to go on. It was only after 8 months of filming sporadically in the midst of our busy lives, that we realized that true nature of the story we were telling.

What makes Nev compelling as a protagonist? Why should we care what happens to him?
Nev is compelling to me because he’s one of my best friends and plays a huge part in my life. I think he has a natural charisma that people connect with.  He wears his heart on his sleeve and he’s not afraid to expose himself, which people respect. In Catfish he’s an everyman. We’re all looking for connections online, hoping to find love, friendship, or inspiration.

How did you find your directorial relationship with Ariel evolve over the course of filming? Were there any debates at any stage in how you wanted to approach things?
Rel and I have been working together for about 6 years now, so we have a natural and largely unspoken dynamic. I think our personalities complement each other and we rarely disagree. My role was often to keep the peace between the two brothers.


Illustration courtesy of Matilde Sazio

What was the most challenging thing about filming ‘Catfish’?
The most difficult thing for me was balancing making the film with fear for my personal safety, although that fear turned out to be unfounded. There is a moment in the film that was the scariest of my life, but I felt emboldened by the camera and knowing that we were on a quest for truth.

Has Nev’s experience made you more cautious of social networking?
I was cautious about social networking to start with, so this has only confirmed my suspicions. Although the contradictory effect of the film is that I’m also much more open to people I meet online now, because those people could turn out to be real friends or collaborators.

Do you think social networking has served to strengthen or weaken the depth of the relationships that we build with people?
I don’t think it’s possible to have more than a few close friends with or without Facebook.  Social networking has allowed us to maintain more superficial relationships than ever before with incredible speed and ease, but I don’t think it particularly affects our few real relationships.

I don’t have a Facebook account – can you give me one fool-proof reason why I should join?
Wouldn’t you like to know what your boyfriend from 8th grade looks like now?

SPOILER ALERT!! READ ON ONLY IF YOU HAVE SEEN THE FILM…


Illustration courtesy of Aysim Genc

Prior to the revelatory moment where Nev discovers that ‘Megan’ has uploaded Suzanna Choffel’s version of Tennessee Stud as her own, did you at any point have any suspicions about Megan and her family? Did anything seem odd to you?
We did have suspicions at first. It seemed strange that this artist was giving her valuable paintings away for free. But suspicions about a potential financial scam were assuaged when Angela sent Nev a check for $500 – half of the winnings from an art contest Abby won with a painting of one of Nev’s photos. Suspicions were always addressed in a clever way or buried under a mountain of contradictory evidence.


Illustration courtesy of Aysim Genc

What were you most surprised about when you first met Angela?
I was completely surprised by Angela. We imagined a lot of scenarios, but in my wildest imagination I don’t think I could have ever conjured up Angela in all of her complexity. More surprising still was how well we all got along so well.

What were your own feelings towards Angela initially and did they change as you got to know her better?
I expected to meet some kind of villain behind all of this deception, so it was a relief to meet Angela. We found her to be fun, smart, and engaging and were happy that she and Vince really welcomed us into their lives.


Illustration courtesy of Aysim Genc

Is there a message you’d like viewers to go away with after having seen ‘Catfish’?
I think one of the great things about the film is that everyone brings their own experiences into the theater with them, and walks away with a different message. I would hate to color that in any way with my own personal opinion.

Do you think there is an element of Angela in all of us in how we go about presenting ourselves in the ‘virtual world’?
I think we all curate our online personae and what Angela did is incredibly relatable. Who among us has not de-tagged a photo, or agonized about our “interests” or “relationship status” on Facebook? Our profiles are a chance to present ourselves to the world in a way we can completely control – unlike face-to-face interaction.

Read our review of Catfish here.

Catfish is out at selected cinemas across the UK now and available on DVD from Monday 10th January.  
Best Albums of 2010 by LJG Art & Illustration
Best Albums of 2010 by LJG Art & Illustration.

Last year I discovered a whole slew of marvellous new albums. So I thought I would round them up before we got too far into 2011 – some I have already reviewed, approved and some I meant to review but didn’t get around to it, sildenafil thereby giving me the perfect opportunity to do so now. Without further ado here are my picks of 2010.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Abigail Nottingham
Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou by Abigail Nottingham.

Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou – England
Loose Music
We’ve been championing this duo in various musical guises over the years… and their current husband and wife incarnation perfectly suits the harmonic beauty of their unique song-writing. England is a beautiful folk album that brings a modern flavour to age old tales of “peas, mash and pie” and “the catch of the day.” They have been working on a new album over the past few months and they start their extensive Tin Tabernacle tour soon, full listing here. Last summer they blew me away when they played an impromptu gig with Danny and the Champions of the World at our Climate Camp stage at Glastonbury. Make sure you catch up with them.

YouTube Preview Image

I Like Trains – He Who Saw The Deep
self-released
I first fell in love with the historical tales of iliketrains many years ago when I featured them in the print version of Amelia’s Magazine. Since then they have become I Like Trains (small but crucial difference), parted with their label and lost cornet player Ashley Dean – who has since created a fab video for Our Broken Garden which you can read about here. The crowd funded new album He Who Saw The Deep retains the gravelly baritone voice of lead singer David Martin but ditches the historical references in favour of a stirring elegy to the perils of an uncertain future “as Europe slips into the sea”. They go on tour at the start of February. Full listing info here.

the golden filter by daria h
The Golden Filter by Daria Hlazatova.

The Golden Filter – Voluspa
Brille Records
This album didn’t register on my radar until I saw The Golden Filter play live at Secret Garden Party in 2010. But here lies a clear case of an impressive live performance translating equally well into a recorded version – thereafter I’ve listened to Voluspa on a regular basis. It is impossible to find any information about The Golden Filter on the internet because they have done their best to maintain an aura of mystery around them akin to the swirling atmosphere that surrounds singer Penelope Trappes during their live performances. Other reviews have not been so kind about the hazy noodlings of the album experience but I love listening to it as a whole.

YouTube Preview Image

The Pipettes – Earth Vs The Pipettes
Fortuna Pop
In 2010 The Pipettes staged a come back with a very different flavour to their last studio album, (read our interview with them here). This time the line up features sisters Gwenno and Ani, and they’ve taken a distinctly dancey turn away from their 50′s doo-wap inspired songs… whilst still retaining their deliciously girly harmonies. This should be a good year for this truly independent pop band, starting with their DJing spot for their irresistibly bouncy tunes at my launch party for ACOFI at the end of January. After which they will be guesting on the new Does it Offend You Yeah? album. You wouldn’t find the Sugababes doing that now would you?

Our Broken Garden by Faye West
Our Broken Garden by Faye West.

Our Broken Garden – Golden Sea
Bella Union
Bella Union rarely puts a foot wrong, and Golden Sea by Our Broken Garden is no exception… an absolutely stunning album that I have listened to over and over and over again. If you get a chance to see Anna Bronsted perform live TAKE IT immediately. Her gig at St. Giles-in-the-Fields was one of the most magical performances I have ever seen. You can read my review here.

6 Day Riot by Jenny Lloyd
6 Day Riot by Jenny Lloyd.

6 Day Riot – On This Island
Tantrum
Self released on their own label, 6 Day Riot are a prime example of an uber talented band doing it for themselves. As singer Tamara candidly writes on their blog it’s hard work to get yourself heard when you are up against the promotional purchasing powers of the major labels, a fact which as an independent publisher I know only too well. On This Island is an incredibly rich and rewarding album and 6 Day Riot are just as much fun live. I can’t wait for them to play at my launch party for Amelia’s Compendium of Fashion Illustration.

Motorifik secret things

Motorifik – Secret Things
Moto
Despite a pretty terrible name – calling to mind, perhaps, Jeremy Clarkson loving rockers – Anglo-french twosome Motorifik won me over towards the end of 2010 with their 90s influenced shoegaze crossed with dance beats. Well worth checking out if you like your indie music lushly melodic.

Peggy Sue – Fossils and Other Phantoms
Wichita Recordings
Combining indie, folk, doo-wop and blues, this was my stand out favourite album at the start of 2010. The two girls in this three piece line up take turns on lead vocals, singing of complex love lives with heart rending passion. You can read my review here.

Napoleon IIIrd by illustratin grain
Napoleon IIIrd by Kiran Patel at Illustrating Rain

Napoleon IIIrd – Christiania
Brainlove Records
Starting with an intense splash of impassioned vocals yelped against a backdrop of reverberating beats, Christiania means business from the get go. Previous album In Debt To gained Napoleon IIIrd a coveted profile in the printed version of Amelia’s Magazine and this latest release does not disappoint, taking on board influences from genres as diverse as balearic beats, woozy cosmic pop and big bands. It comes out on the Brainlove label, home of all things eclectic and wonderful. Excitingly you can see both Napoleon IIIrd and I Like Trains together when they go on tour this February.

YouTube Preview Image

Malachai – Ugly Side of Love
Flying the flag for totally out there psychedelia is Bristol based Malachai. Ugly Side of Love is a wonderful stoner concoction recently given the blessing of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. Malachai mash up stomping rock riffs, crashing moogs and sampled loops – it’s totally mental and I bloody love it. You can read our review here.

Laura Marling by Yelena Bryksenkova
Laura Marling by Yelena Bryksenkova.

Other albums that I loved probably need no further promoting as they will have done well on more mainstream “best of” lists but I will give them a brief mention here. Following a storming tour of the festival circuit Villagers‘ Becoming a Jackal did incredibly well and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Read my review here. Perhaps inevitably Laura Marling‘s I Speak Because I Can has also done brilliantly…. because it is brilliant. What can I say? Laura is amazing. And of course you could read about her many years ago in Amelia’s Magazine, which ran one of her first interviews in print. Read our review here. The Irrepressibles finally released their incredible album Mirror Mirror, which I was lucky enough to discover several years ago when I put them in the print issue of the magazine. Read our review here.

Sea of Bees by Gemma Birss
Sea of Bees by Gemma Birss.

Helen Martin has already mentioned Mountain Man, Sea of Bees (tour listing here) and This Is The Kit albums in her excellent round up… and I loved them all too. She has great taste so I’m sure her other nominations are fabulous too, but I must confess that I haven’t heard them all for myself. Which is just as well because it left me space for this little round up.

I do hope you’ll support these incredibly talented musicians by splashing out on one or two of these releases, most of which have come out on tiny labels for the love of music. As for what to look out for in the coming year? I’ll be giving you my low down shortly… watch this space.

Categories ,6 Day Riot, ,Abigail Nottingham, ,album, ,Anna Brønsted, ,Becoming a Jackal, ,Bella Union, ,Brainlove Records, ,Brille Records, ,Christiania, ,Climate Camp, ,Danny and the Champions of the World, ,Daria Hlazatova, ,David Martin, ,Does it Offend You Yeah?, ,Earth vs The Pipettes, ,England, ,Faye West, ,Fortuna Pop, ,Fossils and Other Phantoms, ,Gemma Birss, ,Geoff Barrow, ,glastonbury, ,Golden Sea, ,He Who Saw The Deep, ,Helen Martin, ,I Like Trains, ,iliketrains, ,Illustrating Rain, ,Indigo Moss, ,Jenny Lloyd, ,Jeremy Clarkson, ,Kiran Patel, ,Laura Marling, ,LJG Art & Illustration, ,Loose Music, ,Malachai, ,Moto, ,Motorifik, ,Mountain Man, ,Napoleon IIIrd, ,On This Island, ,Our Broken Garden, ,Peggy Sue, ,Portishead, ,review, ,Sea of Bees, ,Secret Things, ,Tantrum, ,The Golden Filter, ,the irrepressibles, ,The Pipettes, ,This Is The Kit, ,Tin Tabernacle Tour, ,Trevor Moss and Hannah-Lou, ,Ugly Side Of Love, ,Villagers, ,Voluspa, ,Wichita Recordings, ,Yelena Bryksenkova

Similar Posts: