At the 2008 Robin Ince run “Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People” in London, comedian Tim Minchin performed his 9 minute beat poem “Storm.” Tracy King was at the event and afterwards approached Tim with the proposal of turning the poem into an animation. He quickly accepted. The film is not finished yet (there is a production blog here) but an official trailer has been released and it looks amazing. I can’t wait to see the full nine minutes.
They called themselves Big Star and never made it big or found stardom, and there, along with a 2:49 song called “September Gurls” that shimmers and chimes with all the hopeless longing you ever felt for someone you never got to hold or to keep, is the pocket history of power pop.
As everyone else is talking about this so, ever the bandwagon jumper, I thought I would post it too.
I once saw Ok Go live in 2000/2001 in a little pub in Bristol, where they could clearly play but were never going to set the world on fire – although they did play a versions of Totos “Hold the Line” which was quite funny. To be honest I am surprised they are still going especially as all of their effort seems to go into videos rather than the music. Ho Hum.
BBC 2 showed the Blur documentary “No Distance Left To Run” last night and being a great believer in using technology to improve your life, I had videoed (I have no usable term for saving on the Hard Disk of my V+ box that is quite so quick) it to watch this evening.
The documentary is a mix of four talking heads, Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave, interviewed separately and then spliced with footage old and new and hung around the concept of the mini tour of the UK which finished with an awesome headlining slot at Glastonbury 2009 and two big Hyde Park gigs.
It was a good insight into what it must take to be in a band with four individuals who have their own lives. By no means as depressing as Radioheads Meeting People is Easy film it did have some similarities (Alex James sitting in front of a camera doing radio idents with the slow realisation that this was going to be a soulless exercise was almost exactly the same as in the Radiohead documentary). It was also clear that these were four friends, four very different personalities, who had been through it as young men, had been incredibly close and then as lives progressed and pressure built up around them, slowly disintegrated.
The film though, was ultimately redemptive. They had got back together, not to make money or a new album but to be friends on one last adventure. This adventure culminates at Glastonbury where Damon breaks down and cries just before singing This is a Low and afterwards declaring how happy he is to be with his friends playing music. And then, finally, finishing with the magic of a Glastonbury crowd singing Tender right back to the band. It was good to go back to the nineties for a while, Oasis v Blur for number one, Brit Pop and Indie discos, it was good to revisit Glastonbury but I’m reasonably happy to be back in 2010.
I’ve thrown in an early version of the song Sing from the bands first album demoed when they were still known as Seymour and the video to Beetlebum, a song that reminds me of wandering into the large Virgin megastore in Cardiff to buy the single – I don’t know what is there now…
