F&M review for Fact

Fujiya & Miyage

Lightbulbs

Full Time Hobby 

Of all the ways to start an album, a bad joke about a rather tragic child star has to be among the worst: the song's called Knickerbocker Glory, and it's about the "ghost of Lena Zavaroni", who died of anorexia nervosa - geddit? Us neither. Anyway, it's strange that such a poor taste begins Fujiya & Miyage's third LP. I mean, few bands have traded so hard on their superlative taste: their previous album, Transparent Things had us crits gushing about its reworkings of Serge Gainsbourg and Krautrock, its tailored updating of rare italo synths and no wave elastic funk, and those influences are on Lightbulbs:there's a lovely bit of Tangerine Dream/Popul Vuh synthesized piano on the title track, and the closer, Hunrdeds and Thousands, a reprise of that horrific opening gambit is a lovely mix of restrained psychedelia. The new drummer, Lee Adams punches his weight nicely, with decent work on Dishwasher. Still, overriding the album's theoretical plus-points is a teethgrinding smugness. In combining elements from kommishe to slow funk, singer David Best's vocals are so, so deadeningly self-aware that the music is robbed of any viscerality, its heart-and-soul thrill. Through its murdering brevity, the album's taileating mixture of selfawareness and self-satisfaction... I don't know. All I mean is that a knowledge of German Oak is no substitute for a soul and Lightbulbs sounds like branded-denim adverts from the mid-nineties. It's just really, really fucking boring.

Coming Soon, Plan B

Coming Soon are a lovely French band, part of a flourishing anti-folk scene over there. Plan B, September issue:

First notes: Small places make big sounds. Coming Soon are a six-piece anti-folk band from the small town Kidderminster in the French Alps. They sound a lot like Ezra Pound and cold winters and hot summers and Bob Dylan cover art from the 1960s. “We grew up listening to birds, waves, trucks and garbage men, in a small town in between a lake and a mountain with a lot of graveyards. We all had very stimulating dreams,” says de facto leader Howard Hughes. “But we left 'cause it's small and we get bored. Sex shops are too far out of town and you can always meet some old friend who owes you money. You know the Lou Reed line, don't you? There's only one good thing about a small town: you know that you want to get out. That's strong enough.” They formed in early 2005 and while scratching and studying they visited New York, to party, and Berlin to work with Kimya Dawson and Paris to work with Stanley Brinks of Herman Dune. After two grind years, hustling labels, touring constantly (including a recent slot supporting Wave Pictures) and sneaking their demos into copies of Les Inrockuptibles (to “meet big producers and get instantly famous around the world”), it paid off, Paris’ Kitchen Music finally got in touch. The debut album is called New Grids, and on the CD is a drawing of a compass. In the midst of Hebrew letters and phonetic names of faraway places is the word Kidderminster, written at south-southwest.
Second notes: Loves saves days. Within the band are lovers with clarinets and friends with cameras and brothers with each other. One pair of brothers is Leo Bear Creek (who joined the band aged 13 playing drums and ukulele) and Ben Lupus (who draws dance steps and plays a banjo). When I ask Howie for a story about love, he tells me that both are somnambulists, and when sleeping together, Leo talks and Ben answers. This story breaks Howie’s heart. “It is a collective in a way; a ‘DIY’ thing where we try to trade roles & parts, like a hip-hop band, like a mafia where nobody wants to be the accountant forever (even if it's safer), because individuality makes you get up in an angry mood every morning and the band makes life bearable. We have this anthill with five breeding queens.” On the live experience: “We trade mics, we step on each other's feet and find all sorts of last minute stage ideas. Touring is a sheer beauty, there are at least two couples in the van and I spend my afternoons looking for post offices to write to my wife. Love obviously plays a major part in this game.”

Face Addict piece for Dazed and Confused

A chat with one of the greats of modern photography, Edo Bertoglio, for DazedDigital in September 2008:

When Edo Bertoglio came to New York in 1976, he was a young film student looking for a ring flash for his Leica and a good time. When he left in 1990, he was a celebrated artist and staff photographer on Interview Magazine, having been part of the downtown scene – the hedonistic circle of freaks, artists, musicians, writers and whatevers vaguely orbiting around Andy Warhol’s Factory. He’d also become a heroin addict, pawning everything bar his two chests of negatives – pictures of friends and lovers, many of whom never survived the AIDs and OD epidemic that swept through the scene. After fifteen years in Italy, he decided to make the trip back to the rotten apple to connect the pictures in his archive to the faces of those who survived. Face Addict, out this week, is the film he made on the trip: a remarkable document – part confessional memoir, part art history – of a remarkable time.

Dazed Digital: Tell us about the film.
Edo Bertoglio: Face Addict was shot over two or three trips to New York. I lived in New York for 14 years from 1976 to 1990, and I had the privilege to work for Andy Warhol’s Interview, in the beautiful time that was the “downtown scene”. Unfortunately by 1982, 1983, the community started to be wounded by heavy drug use and the AIDs, overdoses, so the lightening flash lasted for 4 years, the really good years from 78 to 82. With the film I wanted to see how my friends rebuilt their lives. We were all survivors, in a way.

DD: You came to New York in 1976 from Paris. What was it like, falling out into this crowd?
EB: It was a great time because there were so many artists living close together geographically, and the music was what tied us every evening together. There was no difference between playtime and work – it was nice, “serious fun”, because we were having so much fun doing our thing with movies, pictures, painting, writing, music. There was a lot of creativity, but as a community not as individuals

DD: It most of been very exciting for you, as a photographer.
EB: I’d meet people and say, 'Can you come to my studio in the morning the way that you are dressed now?' This was long before stylists and so on: it was just the way that you saw the world and showing that to other people on the scene. Young people had come out of the early seventies, and people were not caring about clothes: not hippies, but jeans and all that. But in that scene, there was a real effort to look special.

DD: Today, the downtown scene is held up as this creative Mecca: were you conscious that what you were doing was going to have such a lasting impact?
EB: When we shot 'Downtown ‘81', the original guy was not reliable, so the director was like, Why don’t we take this young kid called Jean-Michael Basquiat? He was a star in that little, little corner of New York but we didn’t have this idea that he was this big star of the world. We were living so much for the moment, for the day – we were so busy underlining the importance for us, but not as a thing we could read the signs of in the future.

DD: When did this change?
EB: The DIY scene got bigger and bigger and got fashionable, but that’s where it started to go wrong, because the core of the downtown scene dropped off, because of AIDs or drugs, or just because everything going so fast all of the people there at the beginning little by little fell at the waysides. No… heavy drug use in '82 was what destroyed the whole thing. Suddenly a lot of people got big problems. For really a little while, for the space of a morning, drugs helped the creativity, made us even more prodigious, more dynamic, and because were sharing and we were discussing; we really thought that we could go on like this and we could maintain this habit; but when it became a habit, it was not so important to paint that painting: what was important was to go out and get drugs. For such an experience there is a very high price to pay, you know and we did pay a high price. I was the lucky ones, but many, many of us are not here now. That’s why I call Face Addict a survivor’s film.