So the last couple days I took part in a two-day workshop and then a development performance of a show called From This. From This is the new show by Chenoeh Miller, artistic director of Little Dove theatre art, and the ‘cast’ for this first version were myself and a very talented performer named Erica. I never caught Erica’s last name, in fact in the two days we worked together we weren’t allowed to talk to, make eye contact with or overtly acknowledge each other.
For me it was a steep step into the Contemporary Movement/Buto end of the theatre world and it pushed me well out of my comfort zone. I have a good grounding in a lot of physical pursuits but this went to some very specific areas and forced me to think in different ways about the use of my body.
The show was about human connection, the barriers we throw up in the way of it and the potential to traverse those barriers. The non-relationship that Erica and I developed then played out to an audience who were then invited to intercede. It was one of those shows that relied heavily on the audience and we had a terrific one. There were lots of warm, confronting, fun and properly human moments between myself and the crowd. All the while Erica and I were aware of each other but unable to interact. It was a very unusual feeling and a big relief when we finally got to ‘meet’ each other after the show.
You’d have to ask Chenoeh why she asked me to do it but for me it’s been an interesting companion experience with Bomb Collar, another recent project that’s pushed me to the limits as a performer.
Oh, and the show involved me doing 600 squats. I’m a little sore today.Photos by Martin Ollman
So Bomb Collar is a 45-minute one-man theatre show built around 8 songs. It’s set in a future world where humankind has colonized the deep ocean but has also begun to recede on a genetic level. The ability to sing and keep rhythm are just two of the traits that have almost disappeared completely. War has become a fashion/nostalgia movement in which revolutionary armies supplant each other with the frequency of clothing or music trends.
In one of the dingier corners of the Deep Sea, a man who bills himself as the last singer alive gives a concert/pep rally for one such revolutionary army. He wields a folk songbook that descends from the pop music of today, and plays what may be the last musical instrument in existence. He has a bomb strapped to his neck, a legacy of his violent past that could go off any minute. But within that already-complex set-up, there’s something else going on.
So. Why?
About 18 months ago I came across this:
There’s a longer version online but I haven’t watched it, I don’t want any more context. Just that character, defeated and funny and bitter. For a long time I’d wanted a mechanism to write a set of incredibly sad, big singing ballads, and I thought this character could be it.
I also wanted a project that forced me to step up my acting and audience-connection chops in a major way (I have a very crude approach to getting better at things- I write a project that requires new skills and then just try to have them by the time it’s time to perform. As a strategy I’d say it’s usually about 75% successful).
I also wanted just one show I could do without having to organize anyone else.
I didn’t want to do a ‘period’ show of vintage-style songs, so the obvious other way to go was to set it in the future (meaning in it’s own way it is very much a period show). The initial idea was a sort of King Kong riff, the last singer alive held prisoner and forced to perform as a human curiosity, singing his grief and loss to a callous audience. The final show has changed a lot , in a way that’s opened it up to be about quite a lot of things- perhaps too many things, but that’s for an audience to judge and I’ll refrain from further spoilers in the hopes that you’ll come see it.So I don’t know how it works for most one-man shows, but this one took a pretty big team to put together. I started by shooting the shit about it with my friend Dave Finnigan, who asked me a dozen astute questions about the story world and told me that I’d have to write a lot of stuff before I got this right (Dave, I promise that I kind-of mostly followed that advice). I then took it to professional dramaturg and renowned e-mail poet (that’s an in-joke) Peter Matheson, who as always cared about one thing, who was the character and why should we care. Pete was rightly dubious about me leaping from done-a-bit-of-acting into holding down a whole show by myself, but he gallantly assisted me in beating out the basic structure.
I pitched it to Crack Theatre festival, a festival of new and experimental work, without having written a word or a note. I figured it was a long shot to be accepted, but I didn’t account for the fact that it was a pop-up festival producers dream- a show specifically designed to be done in a dingy bare space in which all the tech is provided by the artist.
Oh yeah, that’s the other thing. Somewhere along the way I decided that all the music, sound and lighting affects would be generated by an aggressively lo-fi device incorporated into my costume. It fit in with my idea of a super-portable show, it fits metaphorically with the predicament of both the character and the story world, and it felt like an approach which mirrored the lack of resources I was bringing to the table as a performer (can sing pretty well, limited as an actor, think I can dance better then I can).
The ‘last instrument on earth’ was created by sound artist Paul Heslin, and is a little clip control triggering sound files from a Rasberry Pi computer strapped to my chest. Getting Paul to make something like this was the equivalent of making him work with one hand behind his back, he could have made something much more involved and ‘playable’ but I was determined to have the most idiot-proof (read: Nick-proof) system possible, at least for these first shows.
ACT Hackerspace supremo Adam Thomas (who also took these lovely photos of the sneaky preview run-through I did at Gorman House) designed and made the collar and the lights, and he and Paul ended up working closely together so that the whole thing ran off of the Pi as a single rig. They made something that just worked 100% of the time and that a techno-imbecile lie myself could operate easily, the show couldn’t have worked otherwise.
I asked a couple of people who they thought I should approach about directing and they both suggested Emma MacManus. If you don’t know Emma through her work with Applespiel then that is a loop you should be in. Emma was unbelievably patient with me, she’s used to working with proper actors as well as being one herself. On a 6-week turnaround, she helped me get the script and songs in shape, then with just one week of face-to-face rehearsals took me from a twitching bundle of nerves pacing around the rehearsal space to a mostly-coherent 45 minutes of show. The fact that any of my intended themes and story points got across to the audience at all is down to Emma’s hard work, and I’ve learned tons from her about tone, pacing and clarity. She also got me to make some small practical concessions to my ‘no external tech’ rule (a spotlight and a microphone. The mic ended up being completely essential when I got sick the week of the shows and had to battle some voice stuff)
The final member of Team Bomb Collar is my go-to music producer Sam King. I made him build the tracks with me in the most annoying way possible- first as vocals over basic beats with some notes picked out on a bass to indicate the changes, then we built up the ‘middle’ of the tracks while attempting to stick to a rule of no more than three sounds per track (not including the vocal). There was a common thread in this project of me forcing super-talented artists to do stuff in a dumb-down, long-way-round fashion. We mostly used electronic noises, with a few deliberately weird exceptions.
Once I was servicing the needs of the story the idea of all the songs being sad ballads went out the window. The eight songs I range a fair bit in style and tone, and I feel like every one of them has a solid narrative purpose in the show (if you’ve seen it and you disagree let me know!) Melodically and musically they aren’t a big departure from my normal peacock-pop style but as far as the lyric and production I’d say that they are, if not the weirdest, then certainly the most weirdly specific tracks I’ve ever made.
Crack was the perfect place to debut the show and I was well looked after by the production team. They put me in store-room full of empty boxes, with actual pigeon feathers on the ground. The audience had to cram in and sit on the floor. It was exactly what I had wanted, and of course I’d left myself no place to hide, I had to try and keep people engaged for the full run time.
I knew the weakest part would be my performance. Over the three shows (counting the preview show in Canberra) I improved significantly, but there’s still a lot of improvement to be made in terms of inhabiting the character, making the tonal shifts, getting story points across in a way that properly lands and keeping my legs from shaking nervously all the time. There were odd bits that I did quite well, which was nice, and the Crack audience was savvy and generous, they did a lot of the heavy lifting for me and gave me the space to have a lot of fun with it.
I made some tiny tweaks to the script across the performance but on the whole I’d say that part was working pretty well. The tech worked like a charm and I’d like to let Paul and Adam off the leash to add a couple more ideas to it for next time.
I feel like I’ve made something purpose built for fringe-y pop-up festivals so I’m gonna look around for the next place to stage it.
Thanks also to all of the friends who came to see it and provided absolutely vital feedback, you have made the world better for future audiences!
Okay, the preview showing of Bomb Collar was last night (I ran it through in front of 30 good friends as a way to get past my nerves and see where it’s at). It debuts 9.30 this Saturday night as part of Crack Theatre festival. So I guess it’s time to reveal what the hell it is!
Bomb Collar is, for want of a better term, a one-man science fiction cabaret show. It stars yours truly as The Last Singer On The Face Of The Earth, in a dystopian future where mankind is genetically recessive and traits like musical ability have eroded away. He is giving a concert for the revolutionary army who keeps and protects him, but he still bears the legacy of a violent tragic past in the form of an explosive that’s stuck around his neck. He could, in fact, explode at any time..
I’ll get in-deep about the whole show and my process on the other side of Crack, but suffice to say that a one man show is above and beyond any challenge I’ve previously set for myself. It’s been super-daunting, and last night’s performance showed up a bunch of stuff that still needs work (thanks to my savvy and generous preview audience!) but it was also a lot of fun to do and I’m raring to see how it goes over with an experimental theatre crowd.
If this comes off it’ll be down to the amazing efforts of director/dramaturg Emma MacManus, music producer/arranger Sam King, and the incredible team of Paul Heslin and Adam Thomas who have built the very unique sound and light rig for the show.
Above photo by my friend Ali Goward. Come see me this weekend if you can, otherwise I’ll see you back here!
This is a piece of my costume from Bomb Collar, my one-man show which debuts in two weeks at Crack Theatre Festival in Newcastle. This piece was made and photographed by Adam Thomas, who as I write this is a couple of blocks away at our friend Paul Heslin’s house integrating the stuff he’s made with other materials that Paul has purpose-built for the show. I’ll be going round there in a moment to pretend I can follow the technological aspect of anything that they’re doing.
I promise answers will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime I welcome your guesses and conjecture!
Nick: So I went to Luke’s place for dinner last night and pretty much as soon as I got in the door he surprised me with this, the final of five videos for my EPINADAY. I’d pitched the basic approach for this one (and written the ‘dialogue’ and ‘where-are-they-nows’) but Luke took it above and beyond. It’s easily my favourite of the five.
This was another song that I used to play with Big Score, and the arrangement owes a lot to Big Score’s Beth Monzo in particular and Nick Peddle. They were the ones who first turned it from an indie chord-chugger to the afrobeat-ish shuffle it is now, so having Nick drum on this take felt like a nice tribute to all those sweaty pub gigs we’d shared.
I don’t know if this is one of my better songs or not but it’s definitely one of my favourites. I wrote it in my early 20s, I used to write a lot of songs from the perspective of an old man back then. Probably a perverse desire to avoid the normal young-person concerns, or maybe just an attempt to ape all the Old Fogeys Of Song that I love so much.
I had a strong hunch that I’d be personally very satisfied by this project, but I’ve been humbled by the positive response I’ve gotten from those that have watched the vids. Thanks again to the Rogues Gallery who helped me achieve this: Sam King, Julia Johnson, Matt Lustri, Nick Peddle, Shane Parsons, Adam Thomas, Leon Twardy, Adelaide Rief and Luke ‘Beyond Rebuke’ McGrath!
Luke: Huzzah, the final EPINADAY video!
To begin with, I cut together a performance of the song as per the previous videos. With that as a base, I layered the collateral footage over the top – with the exception of a couple of brief moments, it completely subsumed the actual performance.
We wanted to impart this last video with a ‘behind the scenes’ vibe. I consciously left in the bits I would normally edit around – camera wobbles, refocussing and the like – as well as the less guarded moments from the musicians. Combined with the warm film look, it feels like a home movie, perfectly suiting the wistful tone of the song.
Overall, the five videos totalled around 20+ hours of editing. As with nearly everything I do, it became a larger task than I anticipated (my skills at gauging time and effort are severely underdeveloped – the silver lining being I jump blindly into a lot of ultimately rewarding endeavours). Having space between each editing session was a bonus – it allowed me to consider each edit independently, to experiment and choose something that suited the individual songs.
Very chuffed to link to this post- http://messandnoise.com/news/4671517- from Mess and Noise about Hollywood, the second single form the forthcoming Cracked Actor record.
Cracked Actor is the only band I’m in that I don’t write or Frontman (I play bass) for so I kind of feel like as much a fan of the band as a member.CA’s illustrious singer/writer Seb has always been a widescreen-vision type of guy but he’s outdone himself on this new album. I’ve never worked with anyone who’s been able to contain such a complex and specific (and excellent) vision across all the metrics of recording (song, arrangement, performance, production) and keep it so close to what he wants. He and our drummer/sonic know-it-all Graham have been sweating the details of this one for almost a couple of years now (ably abetted by Producer-To-The-ACT-Stars Sam King) and unlike a lot of records that take this long I feel like you’ll hear every moment of care on the finished article. These guys are also the most ruthless song editors I’ve ever worked with, which has had a big influence on my own writing.
The link has all the info about our little single tour that;s happening over the next six weeks. If we’re playing close-by to you please drop in and say hello!
Nick: The other three EPinaday songs have all had previous lives in bands that I’ve played them with. This track, whilst it’s been kicking around for a couple years, had never been performed live or even rehearsed by a band before. For that reason it feels like the most honest expression of the arrange-and-record-in-a-day concept.
In writing terms it’s pretty straight-up Nashville country in the Cash and Carter tradition. Boxing matches are a metaphor I seem to keep coming back to, probably because of all the great terminology that exists in the sport (plenty of my trademark apocalyptic imagery sneaks in too). Musically there’s a certain gleeful dumbness to the chunka-chunk chorus that we all leaned into. There’s a 7th chord in there among the usual major chords, which makes it practically jazz by my standards.
Luke: After the multi-cam extravaganza of World Of Hurt, and the demure black and white of Lake George, I was at a loss for how to approach Seeing Stars. Quick edits? Lots of inserts? More of the same?
Nick provided me with the key – he said (and I’m paraphrasing), “It’s a country song, innit? So go punk with it. Blank Generation. Them bleedin’ squares won’t know what hit ’em”. Blank Generation is a touchstone between us – 16mm unsynched black and white reels of bands playing CBGBs in the late 70s. It’s essentially home movies, some of bands that became the biggest in world – Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Ramones, and others that became cult favourites – Television, Wayne County, Tuff Darts, to name a few. Put simply, it’s the coolest footage ever filmed.
I didn’t go Blank Generation on Seeing Stars. But the suggestion freed me to not be so precious with the footage. I wanted to do something similar to this video of PROM, to recast it as a long-lost VHS nasty. With that as a starting point, I put together the ‘interrupted transmission’ intro, to indicate a clean break from the slicker videos that came before (the dubbed Spanish sitcom dialogue was a perverse piece of whimsy).
There is a veneer of TV static over the footage (though not as extreme as Nothing But Flowers), and then from there, things get… weird. The doubled footage, the squiggly black lines, and the day-glo colours were the result of a fun morning of experimentation (which also yielded hideous Rubber Johnnies like this):
To me, it’s come out quite psychedelic, and I like the idea of both Nick and Julia seemingly singing this duet not to each other, but to mirrored versions of themselves.
My favourite moment though is when Sam King’s head disappears – it’s like there’s an invisible lake in the middle of the frame – his topknot bobs above a moment before sinking completely. Beautiful.
We’re about 5 weeks out from Bomb Collar, the show that I’m writing and performing for Crack Theatre Festival. I’m not quite ready to spill the beans on this one, but suffice to say that I’ve had to generate a fair bit of story world material which won’t end up featuring in the story itself. The following is a historical timeline that I wrote leading up to the first moment of our show.
Bomb Collar Backstory Timeline
Curtain minus 105 Years– The song ‘Battle In Heaven’ by Adara Spread becomes the highest selling unit of entertainment in history. The song is heavily criticized for it’s glorification of armed conflict but is almost universally embraced by the dominant 8-20yr-old age bracket. Illegal re-interpretations of the song generate a cottage industry that effectively becomes the world’s 6th largest economy. 73% of all music heard in this, the last meaningful year of capitalism, is ‘Battle In Heaven’.
Curtain Minus 100 Years- Public panic over info-virus’s and artistic pollution lead to a resurgence in nationalism. Entire populations retreat into firewalled ‘thought reserves’ separate from the public internet. Cult political figures find themselves holding influence over tens of millions of people, most notably Fillip Despin and his ‘Golden List’ of acceptable and safe culture.
Curtain Minus 95 Years- The aggressive decentralization of knowledge has led to massive global interdependency, with many manufacturing practices only known in specific geographical locations. Mass shortages of sanitation gels and temperature control shakes lead to civil unrest among the Deep Ocean Colonies. Christian refugees from the Continents bring rumors of genocide. The thought reserves, once giant echo chambers of re-enforced opinion, splinter off into their own dissenting groups.
Curtain Minus 90 Years- 1.2 billion people are wiped out in the Golden March, executed for their cultural, artistic and religious beliefs. A vast Oceanic Alliance rises up in response, as if to fight one last great war, but it is too late. The global manufacturing chain fatally damaged, both sides of the conflict collapse under their own weight. The war over, local political and military leaders are forced to broker their own peace treaties, usually too late to avoid mass devastation.
Curtain Minus 80 Years- In the wake of the Failed War, an international movement of pilgrim technicians (‘Panners’) travel the earth, trying to piece together as much lost technical and practical knowledge as they can.Much of said knowledge is lost, but over a decade of effort the Panners are able to retain and restore basic living conditions in most of the Deep Ocean Colonies and the majority of the Continents. Most fast methods of Global Travel have become the preserve of the wealthy or powerful, making their job all the more painstaking.
Curtain Minus 60 Years- With most of the Firewalls negotiated away, the warped and skewed knowledge bases of the Thought Reserves become the basis for mainstream culture. The tenets of each Reserve sit in violent dissonance to the others, leading to bitter cultural conflicts and mass segregation along ideological lines. These warring ideologies eventually infect the Panner population as well, leading to the gradual erosion of this global movement.
Curtain Minus 45 Years- Worldwide communication and trade shrinks to a relative minimum due to ever-increasing ideological schisms. Art and culture from other societies is treated with hostility and skepticism, and each community retains a tightly confined suite of images, songs and stories that are agreed upon and sanctioned. Dissident artistic depictions become extremely rare, having been violently oppressed for years.
Curtain Minus 30 Years- The Deep Ocean Colonies slip into feudalism, dominated by a popular culture which glorifies warfare and expansionism. The extremely degraded state of all travel technologies creates a significant drag factor on these military campaigns, as does the armies’ low level of martial competence. Many of the the smaller settlements are allowed to live in peace for years before being attacked, many of them taking steps to prepare, some choosing to evacuate.
Also,Our Protagonist is born into one of the absolute smallest of the Deep Sea Colonies, a place know as Gales Edge.
Curtain Minus 5 Years- Scilly is taken by expansionist forces. Due to incompetence and mis-communication at the leadership level the people of Gales Edge are wiped out instead of subjugated. Our Protagonist is, as far as he knows, the only survivor.
NICK- Hey Guys, we thought we’d tag-team the post for this, the third of five videos from the EPINADAY.
I originally wrote Lake George to pitch to Luke’s country band The Bluffhearts. The chorus line- ‘it sure ain’t a good idea’ – just popped into my head with the melody attached, and it was one of those good lines that brings the whole narrative with it. I remember sitting down to write it in the leafy backyard of a sharehouse in Hackett, it took about 40 minutes. I went straight out and played it at a gig that night.
It was a bit too 3/4 for the Bluffhearts but it went on to be a bit of a showstopper for Big Score, the jam band I had going with a bunch of other singer-songwriter friends. We use to play a very rocky version with me strumming dumbly on the bass and drummer Nick Peddle going apeshit out of the bridge stop. Nick also plays on this version and it’s a testament to his versatility that he nails the sparse vibe every bit as well.
Obviously it’s the sort of Place Name song were the Place has very little to do with the narrative. That was very much on purpose, as I’d wanted to use an iconic ACT location without trying to say anything about Canberra. It’s a Song-As-Short-Story about dodgy guy meeting dodgy girl, when I wrote it it was pure fiction but in the intervening years I’ve probably skirted close to some of this behavior (though I still don’t drink OR drive).
I’d say it probably still stands up as one of the five best songs I’ve ever written and I love this version. Jules nailed the sing-along hook (which was originally sung by Big Score’s Beth Monzo) but for me it was particularly cool to have her on electric guitar instead of her usual acoustic. Matt resisted my advice to play a busier part, and as always he was right. Sam’s slide licks were played on a homemade guitar that his Dad made as a young man, hopefully we can find a still shot of it to post ’cause that thing is nuts.
LUKE – Lake George is one of my favourite Delatovic songs (I still remember the first time I heard it years ago at a Bluffhearts practice in Mel’s garage). That beautiful, weary line towards the end – “I’ll take off my spurs/And I’ll put on the bridle” – is as perfect and unique a metaphor as it gets. I remember the version Delatovic and Peddle used to play in Big Score as obstreperous, the individual segments coming together like parts from different songs. This take is more cohesive, slower, stately – Sunday morning rather than Saturday night. I needed the edit to reflect this.
Black and white images always seem at a remove. Some people think this remove is one of time, harkening back to the pre-colour era of film. I think the remove is not in time, but in reality – the world we live in is in colour – black and white is hence otherworldly (or just other). It’s a space that belongs to imagination, to movies, and to dreams. It’s set aside from real life, and larger than life in some cases. It can make the ordinary seem artful, and make the artful seem sublime.
All of which is unimportant to the casual observer, but as a filmmaker, it’s certainly an interesting place to start. The dissolves (don’t get me started on dissolves!) enhance the floating atmosphere, and complement the unhurried, hazy pace of the arrangement.
Taking footage from the same session and making four visually distinct videos is a challenge. World Of Hurt and Lake George have set the bar high – I watched Gimme Shelter this week for inspiration – maybe I need to superimpose a long flowing pink scarf onto Nick!
The second of five EPinaday vids is up, and instead of a song this one is a short interview piece, also captured on that one day, that explains the whole enterprise.
The song featured is World Of Hurt, which you’ve already seen performed in it’s entirety as the first video. This is a song that I’ve been playing with PROM since that band’s first gig, so Julia was already well-versed with it. That said, it was completely re-jigged over the course of the day, changing both key and genre and morphing from a chord-based chugger into a latticework of nimble riffs.
I wrote the song in the wake of a particularly intense one-night-stand experience a few years back, one where the friendship was protected by me pretending that I hadn’t fallen hard for the other person. I wrote the song as a ‘what- if’ story, what kind of disaster might have happened if I’d let the person know how I was feeling. As is my want, I leaned hard on the melodrama and the apocalyptic imagery.
I’d always thought of it as my Springsteen song (or at worst my Hold Steady song) but the version we’ve recorded reminds me more of one of my favourite bands, Memphis-based post-soulsters Reigning Sound. The live-in-studio approach really seems to have been a perfect approach for this track.
So the last couple days I took part in a two-day workshop and then a development performance of a show called From This. From This is the new show by Chenoeh Miller, artistic director of Little Dove theatre art, and the ‘cast’ for this first version were myself and a very talented performer named Erica. I never caught Erica’s last name, in fact in the two days we worked together we weren’t allowed to talk to, make eye contact with or overtly acknowledge each other.
You’d have to ask Chenoeh why she asked me to do it but for me it’s been an interesting companion experience with Bomb Collar, another recent project that’s pushed me to the limits as a performer.
Photos by Martin Ollman
Lick Nuke 