Mash-up time. If the Gonch complains, I’ll take it down…

Clickety on this for music

(Mixed in relatively rapid fashion by Tanuja Amarasuriya and yours truly for a DJ set at T’s brother’s wedding. Just dug it up whilst sorting through old angel tech demos…)

Meantime: all my dreams on VHS, wot I wrote / directed, soon to be in all good shops, virtual and otherwise. Hooray!

Short Fuses was performed in the round (with yours truly surrounded ON ALL SIDES by an audience hungry for TASTY STORY and FINE THEATRE.) I haven’t done a show in that configuration for a while, and never as a solo performer. Lessons? Even though it’s just you, sole focus of attention, alone on stage, you don’t necessarily need to turn constantly, like a pig on a spit. Freelance Magdalene is performed in conversational mode, acknowledging the spectators rather than shoving an imaginary fourth wall (or, indeed, a fifth wall in this case) up between stage and audience. The resulting instinct for the actor is to try and make ‘contact’ with as many people as possible, all the time, and you just ain’t gonna do it.

I imagine if I were an owl, able to rotate my neck 360 degrees at whim, then director Tanuja Amarasuriya and I wouldn’t have had to carefully choreograph every step I took whilst telling my weirdy tale. But, let’s face facts - I’m not an owl. So we had to. And we did.

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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:

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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- 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.

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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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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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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“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.

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

Ornithology FAIL.

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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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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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