Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Sack The Headline Writer

Sack The Headline Writer

Monday, October 10, 2011

Spiritual Unity - Vimeo

Back in November 2006 I saw Marc Ribot's tribute to Albert Ayler Spiritual Unity play in one of the rooms at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Due to a traffic jam, I got there 10 mins after doors to find the doors closed and had to pretty much beg the stewards to get let in. When they finally relented I found my front row seat taken by someone else and the band whipping up a euphoric storm already. No matter, I perched at the side of the stage and left my crappy little Minolta camera running as well, so here's the 3 snippets it captured. Doesn't capture the volume but it'll do.





Comets On Fire - Vimeo

Jaybird and Holy Teeth from 7th October 2006 at Nottingham Boat Club






Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157594318810090/

The Monorchid - Vimeo

Back in September 2006 a few of us from Nottingham made a last-minute decision to go to Chicago for the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary. It was great fun, it looked a bit like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sumlin/sets/72157594314716448/with/261746806/

The last band to get added was The Monorchid. I'm a fan. I got asked to write something for Careless Talk Costs Lives magazine a few years ago. The plan was to interview vocalist Chris Thomson about the various bands he's been involved in but with an eye on deflating the whole revivalist/reunion culture that was on the rise at the time and now seems to have killed music stone dead. To quote Chris from another interview:

"It’s not that this music existed in some vacuum. We toured, we played out, and we did our best to make the performances accessible. So, if you’re upset you never got to see Monorchid or Lupus, I really don’t give a shit, there were plenty of opportunities"

It would have been good. Seems like every band the guy is in gets progressively less interested in referencing the past. If anyone can stick a banana in the exhaust pipe of the whole Michael Azzerad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, re-assessment of gut-instinct-events-as-carefully-planned-socio-political-plans then I figured it'd be Thomson.

The editor thought it was a shit idea. Oh well.

On the Friday, after the first day of the festival, they played a warm-up for their Sunday slot at The Note. Here's 2 poorly-lit, horrific-quality snippets of X Marks The Spot Something Dull Happened Here and The Warmers.






Woke up on Saturday morning with a bad head and about $2 in my pocket together with this covered in what looks like dogshit:

THE MONORCHID

Here's how Sunday went:

Felix - Vimeo

A few bits of Felix footage uploaded to Vimeo:




"Oh Holy Molar" from The Betsy Trotwood in London, April 21st 2011





"What I Learned From TV" from Cardiff Arts Centre, January 24th 2010





"Death To Everyone But Us" from Cambridge St Paul's Church, February 12th 2010





"Bernard St" from Liverpool Wolstenholme Projects, January 22nd 2010

Nathan Bell - Vimeo



Nathan Bell, Bristol Cube Cinema, May 7th 2011

Vimeo

Right. My external hard drive is collapsing in on itself like anti-matter under the weight of hundreds of snippets of footage I have taken on digital cameras of varying qualities (usually of the "not that good" quality) of gigs over the last 5 years or so.
I posted a lot to You Tube a while ago but there's something about having to select "Do Not Allow Users To Add Comments" each time I upload that reminds me about how the world's going to end so I'm going to reassemble them all in Vimeo.
Most of the footage isn't that great quality but I'm an excited gig-goer with a beer not a cameraman.
The whole list (being added to weekly) is here: http://www.vimeo.com/user2333244/videosLink