After all that messing about with sequencing, I thought I’d mess about with video. This has been made with iMovie and really it couldn’t be simpler. iMovie imports all the video on your machine – not that much in my case as I don’t actually have a video camera and have to rely on the video from my camera and strangely it didn’t catch the movies from Ratter’s Flip camera – but it’s enough to play with.

Putting the clips together and trimming the various clips is also pretty simple, although I’d like to be able to see the audio waveform when trimming, rather than simply hearing it, to ensure I got the trimming absolutely spot on. However, given I haven’t bothered to read any documentation or view anything other than the opening You Can Do This movie, I’m sure there are ways to do this. In any case it doesn’t seem to have proved too much of a deterrant to getting the cuts in the right place.

Anyway, this is a video of the Boon cavorting to my latest tune Kyle.

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Fundamentally, we’re all fucked. We’re fucked and we’d better run. Not, as Nick Cave would have it, to the City of Refuge, because that’s toast, that’s yesterday’s safe point and brother, it ain’t safe no more that’s for goddamn sure. No, if I’m reading the subtext of BUG 11 (The Director’s Cut) right – and I like to think that I’m reading it right – we’ve all got a whole load more running to do to get to the Safe Zone.

The Safe Zone is here at BUG. It’s all over the place. The signs could not be clearer. Everywhere I look, whether it’s ‘Handfed‘ by Above The Sea, or ‘Caskets‘ by Damien Jurado the Safe Zone is in your face. It’s a fucking wood cabin out in the middle of nowhere watched over by a moody time-lapsed sky and home to the most arid colour palette this side of Quantum of Solace. And even here it’s not bloody safe. Instead of the everyday nuclear catastrophes of imploding economics and spending something like five hundred grazillion pounds on bankers, the Safe Zone is full of burning houses, dead people on telephones and really primitive medical operations. Hardly a haven of tranquility.

And even if we’re not being burned, gassed, anaesthetised and buried alive we’re still surrounded by horror and ghastliness. An exploding thermocline of what looks like badly applied wall filler threatens to sandblast crap Scotch tossers Glasvegas. I’d put a link in but a) the video and the song are bloody dreadful and b) it’s on a site run by Carling, who even if I bothered to drink alcohol, I wouldn’t touch with someone else’s ulcerated liver. Glasvegas are everything that’s wrong with major label bands. More bloated and festering than U2 ever were (although I may change my mind when the U2 album finally emerges), Glasvegas are like Guns n’ Roses without BOTH Slash and Axel.

Glasvegas aside, the rest of BUG 11 is class. Rex the Dog‘s ‘Bubblicious‘ is class stopframe animation (which leads to the bizarre ‘Rex The Dog cooks dinner for Goldfrapp‘, which in turn shows that there’s no place for weirdness that can’t be found on YouTube). zZz‘s ‘Running With The Beast‘ is the most perfect homage to the late Tony Hart, the sort of action painting extravaganza that encourages young children to take up art as a career along with vegetarianism. And there are laughs aplenty as vaguely-too-old-to-be-doing-it Metallers Red Fang take on the might of the local Dungeons and Dragons reenactment society and come off covered in Monty Python gore in ‘Prehistoric Dog‘. As the comments on YouTube say, “They remind me of Mastodon but better”. And frankly, that’s pretty damn good. At least better than Mastodon.

Previous BUGs have always included a few interviews with video directors, this one didn’t because we had missed the first showing (BUG 11a) due to lax ticket purchasing behaviour and had to put up with no directors. However, this was actually a good thing as many of them aren’t very interesting and when they are being interesting they require audience participation from Downstairs Charles, which surely can’t continue. Instead we get a view into Adam Buxton’s laptop, which features premature ejaculation, copraphelia and bloody big Monster Trucks shrunk down into teeny weeny modelmaker view and set to music by Myrobotfriend. And while I can live without the first two thank you very much, the Monster Trucks were fucking great.

YouTube commentators once again reveal the real truth, “This is incredible,” they say, “The focus and wide angle make everything look like scale models. This video broke my brain.”

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I’ve been frantically reviewing and relistening to loads of old albums since Christmas. Seeking out tracks like Mongoloid by Devo (the first song my first band ever attempted to learn – with catastrophic effects), the first Dexy’s Midnight Runners album, classic Kraftwerk and a pile of others. Why? You ask. Because of this outstanding doorstop of a book.

When I originally saw it I just thought it was a useful sort of anthology present thing that at £4 was an easy win, but on reading it I just got sucked in. Not just because Mulholland’s initial choices for albums pretty much matched my musical indoctrination, but because the writing was just so damn good. It not only gives you a sense of what each album’s like, but the conditions under which it was made and puts it into some sort of historical and musical context. That way I’m genuinely intrigued about albums I really haven’t been bothered with, like the Dexy’s Midnight Runners one or Kate Bush’s The Dreaming.

It’s not simply this, but it’s the appearance of some pretty obscure records that I can remember listening to a lot while I was growing up, like the first Roxy Music Greatest Hits album or Christina’s version of ‘Is That All That There Is’, which in the aftermath of punk were something of a revelation for me. It’s a selection that gives you that strange internal wink that says, ‘Yes I was there and even though only 3 people liked this record, it was one of my favourites’, the shared secrecy of musical obsession. And it’s Mulholland’s understanding of the year zero effect of punk on people’s musical tastes that is so impressive. His thesis that punk was about the elevation of the guitar and the intoxication of the live experience and that the mid 80′s saw a corresponding elevation of bass and rhythm hadn’t occurred to me, but seems patently obvious once you consider it.

The great thing about books like this is that you can see trends slowly appearing through time as punk collapses, pop emerges and rap and dance music evolve. It reminds us in retrospect what a divergent time the mid 80′s was, with UK indie music going all jangly and arpeggio, rap just beginning to find its feet and American guitar music preparing the way for the grunge revolution of Nirvana.

As with all these books, your own journey and the author’s start to diverge as Mulholland gets engrossed by rap. As a result he misses out of a pile of my personal favourites, The Young Gods album, Underworld’s ‘Dubnobasswithmyheadman’, Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’, The Stone Roses’ debut and others, classics all and certainly head and shoulders above some of the later inclusions.

Even so, as a whole Fear of Music does the most incredible thing, it makes you genuinely excited by music and, at a time when the shuffle button of your mp3 player has competely changed the way we listen to music, it makes the concept of the album as a coherent entity, rather than as a series of discrete tracks, viable again.

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So on the surface it seemed like a vaguely good idea no? Cello n decks n macs n probably not much rock n roll. All in some newish venue in the rapidly emerging from its own cesspit of filth metropolitan giggidge zone that is Kings Cross. Oh pity the poor fuckers because we’ve been well and truly done over. Turns out the only thing that’s changed about Kings Cross is the method of the mugging. You’re still going to come away poorer and with a sore head, but it’s been done with near tenner a time tickets and some godforsaken neo-classicist musical bullshit, instead of with a rusty blade and some barely coherent English.

The venue, the unappropriately named Kings Place, couldn’t be more antiseptically impersonal if you doused it with Dettol and stuck its arse in Wallpaper*. I guess it’s trying to be like the Guggenheim NYC crossed with an E-Z Kleen police state interior. Unfortunately it just reminds me of Damien Hurst’s really bad period, where he whiplashed between polka dot painting and trying to build his own pharmacy in a box and sell it as art. So it’s white shiney and very, very plastic.

That would all be acceptable if the noise lived up to the promise. I can see Bach cello suites (a personal favourite) being magnificently messed with and bashed around by some kick arse deep beats, then flipped back on itself with the cello somehow coming out on top. Sadly the reality is that we get some well played suite stuff, which is then timidly fluffed about with like some I guess now 10-year-old trying to get their rocks off for the first time, but not even getting to tongues. Normally you’d just shout encouragement from the sidelines, but somehow you sense the inner embarrassment of the poor chap who’s only just got into double figures and feels so intensely pressurised to get it on. Frankly it’s far better to look the other way and hope the little fellow realises the futility of his actions and goes on home to his tea.

Now I’ve seen groups messing round trying to figure out what a sampler’s for and what’s the point of it anyway. I’ve seen Einsteurzende Neubauten reduce the ICA to snivelling art whore wreckage. I’ve seen Frank Zappa play for (fuck me was it really) six hours and, you know, really felt every one of those hours weighing down on me like a cement collarbone. So, I guess I feel I can take it, whatever it is, although I draw the line at fretwank jazz bullshit for obvious reasons. So this, this little rabbit scared recital was easy to work through. I just let it wash over me and treated it with the contempt it deserved by drowsing off and gently snoring in time to the overindulgent head posing of the cellist. I have to say that if you’re going to pretend that you’re doing something majorly ambitious and profound with turntables you probably should listen to some classic pre-Gangsta rap records or maybe hang out with our 10-year-old friend, who for all his sexual ineptitude has been fucking with vinyl for at least half his natural life and has elevated that to beastly godliness. Then you can talk to me about how you’re pushing the envelope by whipping three records together over the course of 15 minutes.

Til then. Kiss my arse. Puma.

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Went off to BUG 07 this evening at the BFI for another evening’s revelatory music video malarky punctuated by Adam Buxton’s ranting and the reading of various expletive laden missives from deranged YouTube viewers for whom the concept of constructive criticism is utterly alien.

As usual the mix was pretty funny, more for the pre/post match analysis than the actual videos themselves. The videos weren’t aided by a frankly shite sound system, which was conveniently blamed on Frank Sinatra for some vaguely logical reason that currently escapes me but made perfect sense at the time and served to explain all the circumstances behind Frank’s death a few years ago.

My picks were Interpol‘s Rest My Chemistry, which is what all MP3 visualisation tools dream of becoming when they grow up, super trippy shit; Flight Of The Conchords‘ Ladies Of The World, which was every movie Will Farrell has ever tried to make distilled to 4 minutes 51 seconds; and Josh Raskin‘s animation of 14-year old Jerry Levitan‘s interview with John Lennon in 1969, I Met The Walrus. The sound quality on this may be really shit, but in this case we can’t blame Frank Sinatra, as it sounds like it was shit in the first place. Doesn’t stop the animation being fantastic though.

However, my personal favourite was the video for Aussie Rules post-rock group Pivot‘s In The Blood. As usual it confirms one of the key Rules of BUG (aside from Rule 1 ‘Don’t mention BUG as the tickets sell out fast enough as it is and we don’t want any more competition for places thank you very much’), namely the best video stories are all reserved for obscure guitar/metal/thrash monkeys and that no matter how hard you try you can’t ignore the fact that there is always room for creative stupidity. This video starts where Spielberg‘s JAWS and Todd Haynes‘ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story leave off, so it’s crazy dolls v plastic sharks with lashings of claret.

Quality moment was during the interview with director Dougal Wilson. Now Dougal may be creative and all his videos have at least one interesting idea in them even if they are someone else’s, and yes Bat For Lashes‘ What’s A Girl To Do is pretty fucking neat in a ‘I’m ripping off Donnie Darko‘ sort of way, but those Goldfrapp videos are bloody terrible. Either that or the new Goldfrapp album is simply godawful cokebaiting eartrash. Anyway, Dougal is relating his many curious run-ins with people recently and culminates in a story of how in BUG 06 he has a run-in with someone who dared to accuse him of actually making money out of the music video racket. Both Buxton and Dougal are about to vent spleen on the hapless malcontent, when up stands friend of the Palace, Charles, saying, ‘It’s a fair cop guv, it was me’. At this point they can’t simply howl him down as he is embracing the moment and have to invite him onstage to universal acclaim. Fortunately Charles’ moment won’t go away as it was being filmed, probably for future use in one of Dougal’s videos.

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