Last night was the opening of Vinyl #2 at Redux on Commercial Street. After attempting to deal with a missing roof tile (don’t ask…) we arrived a little later than anticipated in the afternoon to deliver copies of File under Sacred Music (it always seems a good idea to travel with a stack of copies burnt on different machines with different branded stock to try and minimise those nasty incompatibility problems…) and File under Sacred Music (Reverberation), the lightbox containing our film poster. We met Peter on the doorstep, clutching a stack of soil covered records. Apparently they’d been underground for the past ten years, and had just been dug up for the show. A lovely Motown 7” sat at the top of the pile. Nice.
The plan then was quite simple. To go and meet our friends, Simon Third and Juliet, and eat sausage and mash in the Sausage & Mash Cafe opposite Spitalfields Market. Which was all well and good until we found out the place had closed at 5.30. So – lacking anything that might possibly pass for a good idea, we headed for Pizza Express. Keep it simple, and all that… pizza it is.
The event at Redux is a lot of fun, some new people to meet and some old friends unexpectedly stop by too, including the lovely Mr. Eliott Potts. A few “Vinyl” cocktails later, and we’re off back to Simon & Juliet’s to watch bad music television, play records, pluck guitars and wear hats.
Jane (left) and Juliet (right)
Simon (left) and a rabbit (right)
Bowieart · 21 August 2004, 18:47 · File under: Sacred-Music
Last night was the Bowieart film night at Westbourne Studios, part of the Portobello Film Festival. Having taken a wrong turning on the way there, we arrive to find that File under Sacred Music has begun, but we’ve seen it before, so it’s no big loss… We sneak in to the screening room to find an almost full cinema sat watching Alfonso shake his hair and Holly look mean and moody. It’s a two hour programme, so lots of slipping in and out seems to be the order of the night. It’s not the biggest projection we’ve ever seen the film on, but it’s quite possibly the best we’ve ever heard the sound. Because of the nature of the project, the sound on the DVD is really degraded. The problem is, it’s really easy to make it sound almost unlistenable if the system it’s played through distorts the signal even further. We quite often bemoan the fact that we didn’t artifiicially retain slightly more quality in the sound than we actually wanted because so much is always lost in the screening. We’ve no idea why, but here the sound is spot on. A really nice thing to see/hear.
Many Happy Returns · 17 May 2004, 04:18 · File under: Doing Sacred-Music
Of course it’s a real shame that the planned RE~TG event couldn’t go ahead this weekend, but fantastic that the band decided to go ahead and do something anyway. Seeing the crowds waiting to get in outside the Astoria on a Sunday afternoon was a little weird, but once inside it could almost of been antime/anyplace. Attempting to say anything about the performance would be… well, hard. Something really extraordinary happened, and we’re very happy to have been there to witness it.
Leaving the Astoria afterwards, we met Paul Noble, who’d seen File under… when we’d showed it in Sheffield. Nice of him to bother to say hello. We’ve always been completely crap at that, so it’s a good job some people aren’t. We’d probably only ever speak to each other and a handful of people otherwise. It’s not that we don’t enjoy meeting people for the first time, it’s just saying “hello, you don’t know me but…” Something we should practice more of really.
Holly Go Round The Roses · 13 May 2004, 07:32 · File under: Sacred-Music Loving
We didn’t get to see Kev and Seafood on Monday night, but we did get to see Holly last night. We managed to catch a couple of songs from support band The Pipettes, which was fun in a lighthearted kind of way and hard not to love a band described as being on a mission to “turn back the clock to a time before The Beatles ruined everything”. Holly was on top form, and with an organ player instead of a guitarist managed to pull off one of the best gigs we’ve ever seen her do. A great mix of older songs, some from the last album and a couple of new ones too… There were a couple of songs that were really stripped back – Holly with double bass and a quiet snare – they were breathtaking.
As we’ve seen ‘File under Sacred Music’ so many times, and handled the photographs from the filming there’s always something about Holly and Bruce in reality that’s, well… a little under-hairy. As Poison Ivy and Bryan Gregory had more than their fair share of hair!
Before you close your eyes‚Ķ · 9 May 2004, 10:16 · File under: Watching Sacred-Music
We’re right in the middle of sorting out some images for the Yugoslav Biennial catalogue. It’s fun, digging through images from Montreal… We’re showing the piece we made there in the Biennial, so we’ve been looking at various pictures – there’s the traditional installation shots of course, but also a bunch of more informal pictures we took while we were making and installing the project, and another pile from the opening party.
Looking through the pictures of making the work reminds us of all the people we met and filmed over there – Robin, Maryse and Sarah of course, plus Nick and Shiela, Eric and Bronwyn, James, Molly, Kevin, Alana, Mark and Antoine. Some of them we’ve heard from since we came back – some we haven’t. Nick and Shiela have emailed a couple of times, and we got a great email from James a while back. But Robin and Sarah are going to be in London very soon, so it’ll be nice to catch up with them properly and hear what they’ve been up to recently.
We should probably have been selecting these images a little earlier today, but we got more than a little distracted thanks to Sex, Lies and Videotape on DVD. There you go… sometimes these things just happen. Now we’ve got the slightly less distracting pleasure of Tindersticks on the stereo and our old friend Jack Daniels on the table. Always nice… We’ve also just realised that the show in New York opens tomorrow afternoon. We’re not going to be there, so we should email Tairone, the curator, and wish him luck for the opening. It’s a real shame, as it looks like an interesting show… the other artists are Rodney Graham, Raymond Pettibon, Steven Shearer, and Susanna Vapnek
One of the things we’ve done for the show is make posters for three of our previous live projects: The Smiths is dead, A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide and File under Sacred Music. We did the artwork here, but shipped it over to be printed, so we haven’t even seen them. We managed to see a really bad A4 colour print of the one for A Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide, but that’s it. Hopefully we’ll see them soon.
Talking of seeing soon… rumour has it that CocoRosie will be in Europe in May/June. Oh yes!!! In fact, a quick web search has turned up a gig at The Spitz in London on Wednesday 19th May, so tickets have been bought! They really are the finest new thing we’ve heard since… erm, um, The Tyde maybe? Talking of which… we really must pick up a copy of the new Tyde single on For Us. Apparently it’s a cover of the Modern Lovers’ Roadrunner on one side and Look Back In Anger by the Television Personalities on the other. There’s a record worth buying!
This Much Is Certain · 13 March 2004, 23:12 · File under: Making Sacred-Music
So, This Much Is Certain opened at the RCA last night.
Our friend Dan came down from Dundee for the opening somewhat unexpectedly – which was fantastic, we haven’t seen him for months… We got a text earlier in the day just saying he was coming down. Lots of other friends were there too, including Sophie in a red coat:
Rob took a bunch of photos…
And another surprise turn-out for the night was Mr. Eliott Potts, an old friend from way, way back that we’ve only fairly recently been back in contact with. Stylish as ever, he arrives just as the galleries are being emptied, so after some cunning negotiation with the ruthlessly efficient RCA security we manage to get him through the door to join us for the artist dinner…
Silence is sexy‚Ķ · 3 September 2003, 15:50 · File under: Watching Sacred-Music
So, yet again… trying not to write about going to this gig and that gig has stunned us into silence. So that didn’t work too well then. It’s been a while…
We were going to say something about the gallery talk we did at the ICA recently. There’s a change of subject for you. It was fun to do actually, although there was more than a little stress on our part before-hand. Talking about a show like Video Acts felt a lot more daunting than the usual type of ‘talk about yerself’ gallery talk, and it’s odd preparing for something like that knowing there’s two of you doing it and wanting it to have some sort of flow to it, some sort of structure. Obviously that then makes it really hard to go off anywhere other than where the notes take you – trying not to be unfair to each other by missing the links and logic to the talk but trying to keep some sort of space for reaction and spontaneous thought.
Our preference for these things is always the ‘in conversation’ style talks, where someone else gets to shape the direction, push the conversation, steer the wheel, and other bad clichÔø?s. It’s a lot more enjoyable just having thoughts and questions fired at you and having the space to respond there and then, not over considering and over complicating things.
It was great to get to talk about some of the stuff in the show though. We spent the best part of a day going through the show, stopping and strapping on headphones on a regular basis, finding great things, especially in the Vito Acconci room, which rocked.
The night after the talk was the launch party for the new Trash Money single at The Depot in Kings Cross. There was going to be a screening of our film, File under Sacred Music but a DVD player conspired against us and meant that after about 5 minutes the whole thing bounced back to the beginning and started rolling the opening titles again. Not quite according to plan… but it was a great night brought to an end when an over eager cab driver meant we had to shoot through before the end of Trash Money playing.
Right, that would sort of be it, except there’s one gig we just can’t help slipping in – PJ Harvey at Tate Modern. Not knowing quite what to expect, it was a bit strange seeing one end of the turbine hall turned into something that looked not totally unlike an oversized school hall, with black sheets draped everywhere as the space tried to pretend it was something it wasn’t – i.e. black. The show was stunning – and in some strange way the venue did add something. Not quite sure what it was, but it was a welcome addition. It’s just a shame that a less-than-eager cab driver left us sat outside the Tate for half an hour afterwards. Some you win…
We‚Äôre coming to take you away hurrah!! · 13 June 2003, 04:11 · File under: Making Sacred-Music
So, it’s tomorrow night! Everything seems to be coming together according to some sort of plan. We’ve tested DVD’s, they seem fine. We’ve been swapping emails with Mel at Core Arts and we’ve got equipment and everything sorted out there… The Parkinsons and Holly Golightly seem to have everything they need, DJ’s are, no doubt, bagging up their finest vinyl as we speak, so just a few more things to sort out, and then we’re done! Tickets seem to be going well, and it’s really exciting waiting to see File under Sacred Music projected nice and big with a real, live audience.
