MY YAH

Nick will have a lot more to discuss, but I thought I’d write up my involvement in You Are Here this year.

Firstly, we had to cancel the debut of L’Assassiner de Faux Faux Amis – as I wrote before, we found ourselves a cast member short with three weeks to go.  It became apparent that even if we found someone on short notice, we weren’t in a position to commit to the extra rehearsal time it would take to get us ready. It’s a bummer, but we’ll survive. At this point, the show is in a state of flux – You Are Here has offered to put it on later in the year, but wrangling everyone for rehearsal as the year progresses is already proving hard. I’m torn between seeing it through, or harvesting it for songs/ideas and moving on (I might also post the script online – rule no. 12).

I was delighted to be involved in Gillian Carruthers: Girl Reporter, written by and starring stand-up comics Nick Smith and Chris Ryan (Chris was one of the leads in my sitcom The Real). Gillian Carruthers is a re-enactment of a fictitious 1930s radio play, performed in front of a live audience. I bumped into Nick and Chris having one of their early production meetings – they mentioned the show involved interviewing You Are Here artists. I offered to be interviewed and then didn’t think about it again. It wasn’t until the week before the festival they got in touch – not only was I being interviewed, but I now had one of three main parts! Clearly written with my talents in mind, the role required a ridiculous accent (which you can hear in the snippet below – also look out for Sam King who stole the show as the ‘sound engineer’).

You Are Here also kindly asked me to curate thirty minutes of video content to be played as part of the overnight event Ill Advised Night Out. There were no other stipulations – all I knew was that it would play around 3am. Thinking of a theme to hang some clips on after midnight, vampires came to mind. Like Batman, they can be anything you want – serious, campy, funny, romantic, kid’s TV or arthouse cinema. I decided to create a mélange of vampire content including short scenes from favourite movies like Near Dark and What We Do In The Shadows and video clips like Gnarls Barkley’s brilliant Who Cares?.  However, the project took on its own life when I started creating mash-ups, re-scoring movie scenes and trailers. It’s a simple enough idea, but there is something beautiful and subversive about scoring a Twilight fight scene with The Birthday Party’s Release The Bats. I did about six of these – another deserving of mention is the intro to Count Duckula scored with Wesley Willis’ Vampire Bat; a perfect mix of style and content. When I tried I to put the whole thing online, I got seven copyright infringements from Youtube – you’ll just have to take my word that it was awesome.  Fangs to You Are Here for the opportunity.