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2010: Move ‘em out

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Curtis Eller at the Cube

I’ve loved Curtis Eller since I heard his lament for old-school Hollywood, “Buster Keaton,” at the sadly missed Seymour’s Family Club, way back in the day. So it’s tip-top-notch to be supporting the mustachioed one come mid-March. I might even try to dredge up a new song of my own. An album by The Heath Robinson is hopefully not too far off; I’ve certainly got the songs, but I’ve also got a madman’s dream of recording particular tunes on particular pianos that “suit them”… which, in some cases, requires travelling to stupid places like Bishop Middleham in County Durham. Or being really nice to bearded troubadour Stanton Delaplane and asking to make use of his beautiful Knight upright piano for an afternoon. Am I boring you by talking about pianos? Really? Oh, right. I hate you. Go away.

Speaking of El Orchestro Dos Hombres Beardo, here’s me assisting Stanton with some serious “Old Men In Pub Singing” action at St George’s in Bristol, mid-January:

Stanton Delaplane at St Georges

You can see I’m barely using the mic. That’s because St George’s has an acoustic you could practically ride out of the room and down the hill on. I’ve never played there before, but once up on stage I understood in seconds why musi-people drone on and on about the gorgeous reflections and tones you get in the place. Am I boring you, talking about acoustics? Yeah? Yeah, well. Shut up. Shut up, wake up and SMELL THE RESONANCE.

So, if we’re not going to talk about lovely pianos, or acoustics, what ARE we going to discuss, you and I? I dunno. What do you like? Do you like sitting in the dark and looking at things? You DO? Oh, marvellous. So do I. We have so much in common.
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TOTP: RIP

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Comrade Rick

- TOTALLY OUT OF ORDER, THAT’S WHAT I SAID, COMPLETELY OUT OF ORDER, HE SHOULD WATCH HIS - oh, sorry, hello! Didn’t see you there. How are you? Mmm? Jolly good.

Yes, I’ve been a stranger. It’s been two solid months of writing outlines, pitches, applications and synopses round my neck of the woods. I’m emerging from the clammy darkness with some new work at the end of January, but in the meantime, come with me down memory lane…

In 2004 I embarked on one of my weirder projects, a square-eyed marathon where I resolved (for reasons still unclear) to watch one episode of Top Of The Pops for each year it’s held in the BBC archives, in a single sitting. I dug up bagfuls of VHS off-air recordings from Auntie Beeb’s vaults (one random date per annum) and chained myself to the gogglebox for a whole day. I took notes throughout, writing up the dubious results in brief installments for the really rather wonderful Choke Zine in Bristol. Unfortunately the zine quietly expired (probably for tax reasons) before the full story had seen the light of day; but many years later I chiseled apart a dusty hard drive and recovered my running commentary from the original exploit. Why not finish it, I asked myself? Why not end it all?

And, lo and behold, you can read about the sorry mess, in full, right here: TOTP: RIP

I hope it might bring you some small comfort in these dark times. Happy New Year.

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Buzzard: wake

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Call for Buzzard

Here’s a thing. You know what the collective noun for buzzards is? A wake. Yep. That’s right. A wake of buzzards. Appropriate, don’t you think?

Beats the crap out of owls, at any rate. A “parliament”? Oooh, get you. Laa dee dah. Yeeeaahh, let’s get together and form a “parliament”! Typical bloody owls. Admittedly, ravens and crows have got pretty awesome-sounding congregational nouns (”unkindness” and “murder”, respectively, it’s like an episode of Prime Suspect up in that gaff) but “wake” is the coolest, no? A wake of Buzzards. Trumps it for me. Who else comes close? A bevy of quail? A tidings of magpies? Come on. Useless. And what about rooks? A “building”? A BUILDING? A “building of rooks?” Fuck off, that’s just silly.

Enough of this avian gainsaying.

So. Now that BUZZARD has finished its first run, and the snarling beaky head is temporarily at rest, hung up on a claw-like coat peg somewhere deep in the recesses of Bristol Old Vic, the questions remain: what just happened? Was it any good? Where next? What have I learned? What have I, alternatively, not? And if not, why not? All this and more shall be mulled over unsatisfactorily in the following post.

A few observational snippets first:

1. Number of people who have said “You know, that costume isn’t what I’d call a buzzard, it’s more like a vulture”: 5 million.

2. This production’s preferred song for vocal warm-up, appearing, as usual, from out of nowhere: You Still Believe In Me by The Beach Boys.

3. Stars out of 5 granted Buzzard by The Guardian in their lovely review: 3. Not bad for a rookie solo show. (Remarkably, I agree with almmmmmooooost everything that the Grauniad’s reviewer wrote, and even intend to act upon a cooooouuuple of the points she raises. Proper truth. So, you see, criticism works. Thanks, Elisabeth!)

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Buzzard: backstage

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Buzzard fitting

You might be interested to know that the first ever rehearsal room was designed by an obscure character named Tarquin The Rotational in approximately 420 BC. Sure, the ancient Greeks had developed something resembling a rehearsal space (including basic coffee making facilities and a bad piano) but it was open air, and not nearly dirty enough. So ultimately it was the Romans - and specifically Tarquin - who landed upon the idea of putting random right-angled markings all over the floor in electrical tape of different colours, and installing low-hanging piping upon which taller actors could repeatedly smash their foreheads.

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Buzzard: yak yak yak

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Boring picture of script

Luckily, summer has been awful so far. I say that because even if the isobars had smiled upon the South West, bringing sunshine, picnics and gambols in the hay, I’d have spent the entire time stuck indoors with a laptop, channelling an incorrigible curmudgeon of a protagonist whilst the birds sang and the rest of the world stuffed its fat face with ice-cream and cider. Bollocks to that. Let it rain whilst I draft.

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Buzzard: out and about

Thursday, August 13, 2009

So I’m 15 years old and drawing a birthday card for my best friend. I decide it will feature a grumpy cartoon Buzzard, berating the recipient for his advanced years (16 of them in all. Just imagine.) My friend is called Chung.

“Where does the time go, eh, Chung?” asks the frowning bird, at the end of a long, bitter tirade jammed into a page-long speech bubble, “Where does it go? Eh Chung? Eh? EH CHUNG? You old bastard.”

Twenty years later and I’m walking down the street in a Birthday Buzzard outfit.

Buzzard Crossing

Some yuppy on a mobile says: “A big chicken just walked past me.”

Ornithology FAIL.

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VHS: diary four, the post-production

Saturday, August 1, 2009

AMDOVHS_music

So it seems that film production is a sandwich. A flavoursome all-action filling (the shoot) with two hefty slices of staring at computer screens slapped either side of it: the writing, and the cut. The mac-bashing bit goes double for yours truly on all my dreams on VHS, as I co-write the soundtrack with angel tech.

I’ve got this pet theory about film music, holding that it has to sound as if it’s in the same ’space’ as the images. This isn’t to say it literally has to sound as if it’s being bugled from the toilet bowl… but I feel a huge orchestral score, strings, horns and sodding harpsichords, is not really going to suit a drama which barely moves beyond the living room. “VHS” is a light-hearted, uncomplicated sort of film. Never really a work of intense depth. So laying a cooly abstract electronic score around the action would be a bit like constructing something with tact and rigour, then putting an enormously silly hat on top.

Bottom line? When it comes to the music, I’m picky as hell.

Creatively, this translates as: deliberately avoiding the issue for as long as possible. Whilst pulling together various cuts of VHS, editor Stuart Davies and I drop different pieces of music in as placeholders. It helps Mr Davies no end in terms of rhythm and dynamic, but I constantly ask to watch the edit back without the temp tracks. It distracts me too much.

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VHS: diary three, the shoot

Saturday, August 1, 2009

VHS_greenaway

All my dreams on VHS is eventually shot in two 12-hour working days, although most people get onto set earlier and leave considerably later. I’m still vacuuming our location’s living room floor at 10 am the day after we’ve wrapped, whilst the line producer washes up in the kitchen. The budget we’re working to means that we find ourselves scuttling around Tesco the day before the shoot, buying crisps and biscuits. The costumes for our actors are a combination of clothes borrowed from friends of appropriate dimensions, supermarket own-brand special offers and “model’s own.” So as not to blow the electrics of the location provided by White Rabbit Media we knock on the neighbour’s door and they kindly allow us to siphon mains power away to a big ol’ light rigged outside the house: they give us the sun. The 1,600 VHS tapes (cast-offs from a famous Broadcasting Corporation) have been hand-labeled in a marathon session two weekends prior to the shoot. Production designer Jodie Harris has rushed around her own home, nicking off with boyfriend’s socks and wilting pot plants, to dress the set in convincing bachelor-pad mode. She’s also been to the printers to run off a few copies of a major prop: a mocked-up manual for the imaginary, unseen device which records all our protagonist’s dreams. Jodie has spent hours on the faux-tech diagrams, I’ve spent the best part of an afternoon writing impenetrable jargon for the thing (read it here) and ultimately it’s going to be on screen for 3 seconds.

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SIFF: Seattle

Saturday, July 11, 2009

seattle_sunset_web.jpg

No photoshop trickery in the above picture. That’s a genuine Seattle sunset, making like a mile-wide CGI graphic across Puget Sound. You can tell the tourists in and around the city at a glance: they’re the ones craning their necks up at the sky with mouths wide open, whilst regular Seattle townfolk just stroll around, going about their business as if this sort of shit is normal. You might not believe a sky should get like that. Apparently it’s something to do with science.

We were in the US to watch my short film all my dreams on VHS taking its first tentative steps in the New World. SIFF is a multi-limbed monster of a film fest, showing more flicks over its length than seems humanly possible… and trying to see it all would be like, oooh, I dunno, trying to snog the entirety of China in one go: most likely doomed to failure, even if planned in advance.

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Unwanted water: lazy wizards

Thursday, June 25, 2009

atlgd_BAC1

Hey hey. Above, a photo from the production of and the line goes dead at Battersea Arts Centre. Apologies if you were in the audience either night, and were unlucky enough to get ‘rained’ on. The NY-based artist Ann Liv Young was taking a post-show shower upstairs, and… what can I say? — apparently the sealant wasn’t up to much.

A shame, as I got the feeling that much like Astronaut, my show last year at Burst Festival, this was a story which you had to watch uninterrupted. It’s a quiet, ominous sort of piece and I can’t imagine that the pitter patter of someone’s ill-sluiced ablutions did much for the atmosphere. Given that rehearsals had been extensive and emotionally draining, I spent a few hours immediately after the show feeling pissed off and / or upset in a sort of see-saw motion. Then I went back to Bristol and calmed the fuck down. Hooray!

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