Tuesday 22 February 2011

Good eggs.

I'm sat in my living room about to have some eggs which I hope I've boiled perfectly. Just eggs. No bread. Actually, with an orange. Eggs and an orange.

Probably the most stupid first line to a blog entry ever!! Anyway, little update - we had the first Liquidation and it went way better than we expected to really! We had a dance floor until about 5am and then gradually people started drifting home. Me and Jules were both lashed by this point anyway to be honest and were ready for calling it a night, which we did about 5.45 I reckon. But yeah it was boss and the guy who runs it was dead sound and kept bringing us beers and vodkas and tequilas all night! We're doing another one there in April and in May but we need to find another venue for March as he'd already booked it all up. I'm meeting a guy called Pascal at a club called Dazzle at 2pm this afternoon.

I worked with James on Monday, shooting a video involving a Smart Car entirely encrusted with mirrors (most camp thing I've ever seen), and two men dressed in really glittery all-in-one suits (actually, that's the most camp thing I've ever seen). One of the two men was the keyboard player in the band A-Ha. It was nuts. He was nice enough guy though, although I'm sure he nearly knocked me out when one time during lunch I was sat next to him and made a light-hearted quip about his glittery all-in-one outfit (which he was wearing at the time). I think I was only spared his fist (and possibly my job) by the laughter of everybody else who was there, but there was definitely a split second when nobody was sure whether to laugh or not and he shot me a look.
I really enjoyed the day though - started off helping to build a massive kaleidoscope!!

Graham was over for a week too and it was dead nice. Because he was here for a week, it meant there was no mad rush to do everything all at once so we just took it easy and had a slow burning boozy time and loads of fun.

This weekend just gone, the lads from Hot Club came to stay too because they had a gig here on Friday night. It was boss man, I hadn't seen them play in over a year and it was so good watching them. Free the Pterodactyl 3 is, I think, probably their greatest ever song. It's fucking brilliant and beautiful. Very considerate house guests too for future reference.

Here's the video I did too...Matt, who made it, is such a gem and all the people who feature in the video are either friends of ours or kids that Matt babysits. See if you can guess which ones are which. Share it too. Pass it around the whole earth and make it a sensational internet smash hit.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

Where did the good times go?

Well it's only 2 days now before the very first Liquidation. I'm nervous and excited and all those usual feelings you get when you just have no idea how something is going to go. There are about 110 people confirmed as guests on the facebook page but that's not really an accurate figure. I think about half of those people live in countries very, very far away from Germany so the likelihood of them actually attending is very slim. Jules is arriving tomorrow night just in time to go watch the Liverpool game somewhere and Liverpool have just sold one my heroes, Fernando Torres, to Chelsea for a record £50million and bought another record signing, Andy Carroll, from Newcastle for £35million. Nuts. So the game against Stoke on Wednesday night is one I really want to watch (not to actually see Andy Carroll play - he's injured at the moment, but to see ANOTHER one of Liverpool's new big signings, Luis Suarez).

On Friday Hendrik started to film his documentary and spent the whole day following me around. It's nowhere near as daunting and as intrusive as I thought it might be. In fact it's the opposite and I very rarely noticed he was there at all. In the morning I went to play football as I always do on a Friday and he filmed the whole game from loads of different places. I normally play an OK game of footy but for some reason, even though I honestly didn't notice him filming so much, I played atrociously!! Every shot was spooned west and...oh man, it was awful. I'm going to have to insist that he comes again when I play better!!

After footy I went to practise with Nick and Mic, the 2 lads who are going to play guitar and bass with me when I do the Silent Sleep EP launch party on the 12th Feb. Again, Hendrik blended into the background and we cracked on without giving him a thought.

The gig later that night was really nice. The venue, Antjes Oekselund, is mad. It takes yo uages to find it because it's in this courtyard with no lights and it's tucked away in a corner, but when you walk in it's kind of like this magic space. The first thing I noticed was this dead creepy manequin child holding a load of helium balloons. Through the back there was a bar and next to the bar was a smoking cubical. A tiny room with an ashtray and a stool in. Royalchord, the band I was supporting where absolutely lovely...2 girls and a load of dead nice old keyboards (including an omnichord, which I want badly) making beautiful and sad songs. One song that stood out was called 'The Good Times'. I'll post it here at the end of this.

A few months ago I spent the morning chasing a Brazilian dancer around Berlin whilst being photographed. It was for the Go! Team's new video for their song 'Rolling Blackouts' which was made by James and Violetta, who are becoming really good mates here. I don't think you can see the video in the U.K. just yet but I'll stick it up here when you can - it's great...all photographs and stop motion and dead stylish.

Here's that video and some photos of the gig from Friday...