This will be my fourth year working on the You Are Here festival, my second as a creative producer. Our festival program is live- http://youareherecanberra.com.au/program/- and the festival itself is less than 3 weeks away.
Ima blog about the many absurd events and wonderful artists we’ve got coming up, but as an appetizer here are some highlight photos from 2013. Just clicking through them is triggering sense memories of transcendence and exhaustion. And many many burmese curries.
The gigging year has started in earnest: Myself and the cats from Prom had our first 2014 show at the Phoenix (thanks to the lovely and effusive crowd and to Adam Thomas for the above shot) and Luke followed suit a week later with Faux Faux Amis.
We’re playing together with Babyfreeze tonight, but that’s just a precursor to a very cheeky experiment taking place tomorrow: Prom, Babyfreeze and Faux Faux will be playing as one Lick-Nuke super bill on our own stage at the first annual West Bank Festival.
The festival is the brainchild of the Canberra Musicians Club, who asked me top put together a ‘pop’ stage around Prom. Programming only Luke and my acts started out as a joke, but the fact is that the recent awesome shows by incestuous local record label Cinnamon Records has led me to a place called Why Not?
If you think this is going to be the most self-indulgent night of my life, just know that it was going to be worse. Cracked Actor were going to be playing the festival too, on another stage, but in awful friend-of-mine news he’s messed up his knee and can’t drum. I guess I’ll have to settle with only playing three sets in two days. For a Canberra muso that’s practically semi-retirement.
Fun Machine approached me about making a clip to accompany their upcoming tour. The catch was they needed it in three weeks time, and only one of the four members (uber-drummer Nick Peddle) would be available to be in it. The song they sent through – Shave – was tremendous; catchy, joyous, and riddled with tempo changes. It needed a visual concept equally punchy.
After wracking my brains for two days coming up with as many ideas as possible (most of which involved dressing Nick P in ridiculous outfits), I hit on making our limitations work for us. If the band couldn’t be in the clip, why not get everybody except the band to sing the song?
There’s an innocence and whimsy to Fun Machine (I imagine they all live together Monkees-style and eat fairy bread for dinner) that I strove to capture in the bright colours and kid’s party vibe of the video. All our videos have had a strongpalette, but this is our most aggressively colourful yet (the test shots I filmed featured an Andy Warhol doll, an omitted but obvious reference) – next, I’d like to try something muted but equally focused.
Making a video with this many people, set-ups and edits, in the couple of weeks we had, was fairly ambitious. We shot the clip over a weekend – Lou and I spent eight hours the first day filming all the cutaway shots. Coming up with these shots and then realizing them was heaps of fun – no idea was too outré. It was great to be able to try so many things (e.g. stop-motion) under the auspices of making a music video. Look out for some of my favourites, including:
A gorilla crying candy banana tears.
The world’s dorkiest Raiders Of The Lost Ark reference.
A hand with green nail polish strumming a carrot.
A stop-motion Hulk mug scaring away a group of espresso cups.
A sock puppet smoking a cigarette.
There was nothing hugely complicated in any of these, but set-up and lighting chewed up most of our time (throwing a balloon into frame so that it faces the right way and your arm doesn’t cast shadows is surprisingly hard. See also: sliding a fish from underneath a table while someone else blows bubbles). I love that some of these shots are only in the clip for a couple of seconds (or less) – my hope is they add value to repeated viewings.
The next day, 19 people descended on our house for their close-ups. We’d provided the lyrics and song a few days earlier, but I had no clue if anyone would be able to lip-sync to it all. Some people were so focused on singing it word-perfect they barely moved. Others threw caution (and the words) to the wind and just made love to the camera for three minutes. Most fell somewhere in the middle. All of it was great and different and special, and every take told you something about the person – the wide angle lens was inches from each face, so there was nowhere to hide.
Nearly everyone got thrown by the same line – “I’ve been inside my love and ah ven chaver”. That’s verbatim from the lyrics provided by the song’s writer Ramsay. I googled it to no avail, thinking it was a snippet of some foreign language (many others did the same). I could have made a whole video out of everyone’s confused scrunched-up faces when they came to that part. It wasn’t until Nick P arrived and texted Ramsay that the mystery was solved – it was just gibberish, a random burst of scatting. The truth was, to be honest, a letdown – I prefer Jesh Brand’s interpretation (which coincidentally perfectly lip-syncs), “I’ve been inside my love and haven’t showered”. Brilliant.
We also pinned a list to the wall with all the other crazy stuff we wanted filmed. Scrawled on it were things like “comedy moustache”, “shaving”, and “slapped by fish”. Unsurprisingly, no one was taking us up on “slapped by fish”, so I added the enticement, “with free tequila shot!”. The plucky Kat Beecroft accepted the challenge (but graciously declined the tequila).
The day after we wrapped filming, I went to Melbourne for a week. But I packed my laptop and began the edit that night. The split-in-four screen was in the back of my mind when filming (because I knew we would have a lot of footage to fit into three minutes), but it didn’t really take shape until the edit. It essentially quadrupled my editing workload, but it makes the clip for me.
Yet again, Lou was indispensable, working as prop gatherer, set builder, camera operator, people wrangler, test audience and all round voice of reason. She’s all through the clip too – her eyes, her dancing feet, her painted fingernails – she doesn’t get the credit she deserves (we need to find the appropriate poly-title), but it would not have been possible without her.
Fun Machine were amazing to work with – they gave me complete freedom and trusted in everything I did. 16 hours of filming, 20 hours of editing, 19 faces, one killer song = three minutes of beautiful pop-art. Enjoy.
The last two projections have consisted of found footage, which I’ve previously described as “kaleidoscopic pop-art sensory overload” (“tumblr vomit” works fine too). For this new piece, I wanted something cleaner.We cribbed some moves (and attitude) from Jørgen Leth’s 1967 film The Perfect Human (which like most people, I discovered via the excellent The Five Obstructions). There’s a stillness and formality to it that’s quite seductive. It’s the kind of imagery that might normally accompany glacial minimalist electronica. How it will marry up to our garage-punk racket is something I’m looking forward to discovering.
After shooting it, the beautiful close-ups put me in my mind of Dreyer’s Joan Of Arc. Which was never the intention – I just like faces. When I used to paint/stencil, faces were all I would do. The first music video I shot, and the last (the soon-to-be-released next single from Fun Machine), are composed almost entirely of head shots. It’s an idée fixe I doubt I’ll ever work out of my system. And of course, the telegenic charms of Chris and Kev cannot be overstated.
The projection will again be synced to Chris’ kick drum pedal. In essence, it will be a music video where each edit is randomised. No two viewings will be the same – how cool is that?
A couple of months ago I had a psychological evaluation. The psychologist told me I was in the acceptable range, but cautioned that I border on ‘manic’.
I admit, I like to keep busy. And creatively, last year has been my biggest. After returning from South America, I’ve put most of my energy into one project – the pilot of my sitcom The Real.
It’s a huge undertaking – essentially putting myself through my own devised course in television-making. I have learnt so much – from the writing, rewriting, casting, running rehearsals, set-dressing, location-scouting, organising props, directing, coordinating cast and crew, editing, post-production, and a thousand other things. I wanted to do as much as possible by myself. But of course, filmmaking is the collaborative medium, the one that incorporates writing, theatre, design, music, and photography. Even keeping costs and (production levels) to a minimum, 25 people have helped or worked on some aspect of the production so far. That blows my mind.
I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved and thankful I was stubborn enough to just plunge headfirst and not give up during the (many) stressful moments.
I absolutely love directing. But I never planned to be a director. I got a video camera and started filming things to cross-train and supplement my screenwriting. Rather quickly, it took over. The four years I spent running around with a DSLR prior meant I hit the ground running – I already knew a bit about f-stops and shutter speeds, the importance of light and framing.
I spent years reading books and blogs on screenwriting (and still do) – much of what I learnt, through repeated immersion, is now second nature, things I do without thinking, that I take for granted. My directing is not there yet – I still feel like I’m faking it. One of the main differences is screenwriting practice can be done in private – directing practice requires participants/guineas pigs. I need to reach the same level with my directing – to that end, I’ve reading several books on directing (I’m good at applying book-learnin’ – in my teens I taught myself to juggle from a couple of paragraphs sans pictures in an old book). I also spent three days last week in Melbourne at a ‘directing actors’ workshop.
And next of course, I need to find some more participants/guinea pigs.
Faux Faux Amis tripped to Melbourne last week to begin Projetde Producteur (aka the Producer Project). Over the course of 2014, we are recording one or two songs a piece with different producers, and then releasing them in various ways (options include vinyl, cassette, music videos, remixes, etc.). The producers choose what song of ours they want to record, and then we invite them to weigh in with arrangement, style, and aesthetic considerations. It’s always intrigued me how much influence producers have over a band’s sound, and I want to explore how different studios, styles and personalities can affect that.
The first recordings took place at Elephant’s Foot Studios with our good friend (and sonic whiz-kid) Nick McCorriston. Nick’s tastes vary wildly, but he has a soft spot for punky stuff, so it felt like a good match for our initial foray. We spent eleven hours getting down two songs. Nick had loads of cool ideas, and I’m really pleased with the results.
Faux Faux Amis has been able to move quickly – only three gigs under our belt and we have a zine, a live video rig, recordings, and ummm, hats. I love the pace (and am driving it), but more than that, it’s testament to both Kev and Chris’s skill as musicians, and how completely game they are for any whimsical scheme I suggest.
The Rizal Fountain Raps were originated by the Arts Crew know as Too Many Weapons- Dave Finnegan, Georgie McAuley, Sam Burns-Warr and Jordan Prosser. They were in Manila working on a script called Battalia Royale, which would become a show, which would become a national phenomenon, which would become an international controversy, which would become a show.
But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re here to talk about the night they went to the Rizal Fountain, a rather garish construction in honour of Philippines national hero Jose Rizal, and filmed themselves doing some spoken word pieces.
Powered by nothing other than the annoying quality level of the artists involved, the Rizal Fountain Raps have become a series that has bounced between Melbourne, Sydney and Manila an sucked in a dozen other artists, including myself.
Myself, who of course had never done a performance poem or spoken word piece or the like before. Relying on nothing but my competitive instincts and a some things I really really wanted to talk about quite urgently, I wrote and performed this piece during what was already the most artistically hectic week of my life (this was filmed about five hours before I performed New Love Universe as described in the previous post).
I’m very close to this one and it’s slightly nerve-wracking to share it, but more importantly, here is the link to the rest of the Rizal Fountain series. These guys are some of my favorite artists and favorite people in the world. See if you can judge which of them I shamelessly aped the most!
I walk around with a list on my head of the types of songs that I will one day write.
Back in August of this year, my close friend Nick McCorriston and I found ourselves part in Quezon City taking part in devised theater show based around a fictional cosmology of love that we barely understood. I for one felt completely out of my depth, and so fell back on my most reliable nervous compulsion- pop songwriting. And the list.
NickaMc and I had played in bands and done music stuff together over the years, but had never written together before. With only electronic instruments at our disposal, I knew NickaMC was going to have to do all of the heavy lifting on the production side. I told him I wanted to do a Euro-Dance anthem called Love Universe, I wanted it to have lyrics in english with a super-earnest english-as-a-second-language vibe. He came back half-an-hour later with the chords in a sequence on his ipad.
In that moment, I was anxious. I hadn’t expected him to write the chords. What kind of chords did NickaMc write? I had little reference to know. What if they weren’t powerful enough?
He played them to me and I realised that I had the name of the song wrong. These chords were so powerful, they clearly existed as herald to something bolder than life and newer than love. New Love Universe. I wrote the melody and lyrics in about twenty minutes. The saga of the song then proceeded through the rest of our time in Manila.
The head of the Sipat Lawin Ensemble, the beautiful JK Anicoche, was very magnanimous when we informed him that we’d written a song for his deliberately non-musical show. He was downright saint-like when we got him to translate the lyrics into tagalog and record an alternate lead vocal for us when he was supposed to be getting the cast ready for the test audience.
I recorded my vocals in a booth made of mattresses in the apartment of Sipat’s other company head Sarah Salazar, in the sweltering heat, under NickaMc’s demanding gaze. The gorgeous backing vocals were provided by Sarah and her fellow Sipat-ers Joelle Yuvienco and Meila Romero.
We ended up performing the song as the climax to the final night of LoveNot, in an extended version that featured JK and also my stupendous White-Leg compatriots Jordan Prosser and Sam Burns-Warr on the inevitable rap verse. I will agitate NickaMc to release the extended mix.
The performance took place overlooking a balcony overlooking the pool that LoveNot took place in and is one of my most treasured moments as an artist.
My MOST treasured moment as an artist, however, happened a couple of months later. JK was in Australia, taking part in a panel discussion at This Is Not Art in Newcastle. I was in the audience as he briefly discussed the way that LoveNot had been designed as a precursor for a Sipat musical called Love. JK, a man who is never lost for a winning turn of phrase, referred to Love as an attempt to create a New Love Universe.
We’ve worked up a couple of covers to include at Faux Faux Amis’ next gig.
I don’t have much experience with bands and covers – I can exhaustively list it in a paragraph. It makes for an interesting potted history:
Before Chris joined The Missing Lincolns, Nick and I bolstered our duo set with You Really Got A Hold On Me, 24 Hours To Tulsa, We Can Work It Out (I got to sing John’s bit), and Apple Blossom. While I like all these songs, I have no recollection how we arrived at them.
Post-Chris Lincolns, I remember playing one cover – Paul Simon’s I Know What I Know. We spontaneously launched into it, on a remarkable night at The Phoenix where we could do no wrong and played a bunch of encores (one of my top five favourite gigs).
The Michael Jackson Pollock Experience, in our sole appearance, performed I Wanna Be Your Dog.
Cool Weapon covered Suicide’s Ghost Rider, and TV Rock’s Flaunt It (I’m going to confidently state we’re the only band to play both in the same set). We also spent a lot of time rehearsing EMF’s Unbelievable, but it never made it out of the jam room – instead, it’s now my go-to karaoke song.
The Bluffhearts disastrously covered John Prine and Iris Dement’s In Spite Of Ourselves – we played it once when Na and I drunkenly launched into it without bothering to tell the band, or having rehearsed it. Unsurprisingly, that was the first and last time.
Lulu & The Tantrums covered Ramones’ I Wanna Sniff Some Glue on Collective Unit Negation Theory. The three note solo made it the most complicated song on the album.
The Vindications, my Scottish quintet, covered both The Gories’ Sister Anne (my choice), and Ray Charles’ Hit The Road Jack (Jasmine’s choice).
And now Babyfreeze has had a crack at Ramones’ Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want To Fight Tonight), and Prince’s Lonely Christmas (which has become one of my most popular videos on Youtube). Speaking of which, Nick has done some incredible cover versions with Prom, including (off the top of my head) Prince’s Dirty Mind, Talking Head’s Nothing But Flowers, and PJ Harvey’s Big Exit.
I also covered a couple of KISS and AC/DC songs with ‘The Dull Thuds’, a band put together with some work colleagues for a charity talent show. I only mention it so I can run this photo:
Choosing covers is a weird art – there’s a lot of variables in locating that sweet spot between too obvious/obscure, too reverential/antagonistic, etc. I’d been toying with including an Iris Dement or Tuff Darts song, but these first Faux Faux Amis covers fell into our laps – I want to get out playing them while they still has some of that fresh energy attached.
Lick Nuke 