LOTP for FACT

Quick chate with one of my favourite bands of the last few years, Late Of The Pier...

Late of the Pier’s space odyssey started in the verdant summer of 2004 under the gleaming spires and proud turrets of Castle Donnington. Since then, they’ve made the kids dance dance dance with their indescribably beautiful hair and chrome-plated squat-suited electro. The debut album, Fantasy Black Channel, is produced by Erol Alken and sounds like a ship made out of heroically gleaming metal piloted by android Knights of the Realm of Infinite Sublimity. We chatted with lead singer Samuel Eastgate in the departure lounge of Heathrow airport.

Hi Sam!

Oh hello.

So, the new album is out now…

Yeah. It was finished in March actually, and we wanted to release it right away. But that would have been a very silly thing to do, as word spreads quite slowly, and still very few people knew who we were, and those that did would have been really surprised to see it out.

That sounds almost cynical.

Yeah, I dunno. We definitely wanted it be like the first chapter of something special, like the first step of a beautiful journey. That meant people would have to buy it and realise it was out. I mean, some people and some magazines have behind us since the early days, but a lot have only recently gone Oh, hold on…

I heard that the album was recorded in one big old house?

Yeah! When we signed, we thought Let’s do this properly. It was a conscious decision, definitely. We just thought, if we want this to be good, we had better be doing this all time, so yeah, we rented this huge derelict mansion with shoddy foundations just outside Nottingham and recorded the album there. There’s something about the immediacy of living in such close quarters, being able to get up every day and just make. It was nice relying on gut instincts there. And thowing really good parties.

There’s something very “English eccentric” about that idea: retiring to the country to make this strange psychedelic work…

Yeah, I suppose there is! But we’ve never seen ourselves as a particularly English band: a lot of the music that we’re into is from all over the place, which I suppose is totally normal, isn’t it? The psychedelic thing is interesting though… A forming point for us was stuff like Revolver-era Beatles, and talking about drugs, though none of us had ever taken drugs. So I suppose what got us together was the idea of mind-alteration rather than mind-alteration. It was totally just us going into this world of our own and thinking our own way. What was really lovely a few years ago was coming to London and Way Out West, the Underage thing and all that… Seeing these kids that just got it.

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.

High Places for Dazed and Confused

A lovely interview I from months ago on Dazed's ticket. Really, really cool band, and a really sweet couple:

High Places are really sick of fighting. "Everything extreme you can think of has already been done. Like if you want to see someone fucking vomit on the floor and beat their fists, you can, but it's done man," says Robert Barber. Rob plays nearly all of the instruments live in High Places, and Mary Pearson sings over the top, though that division doesn't stick in the studio. They're a really nice art-folk duo who live in flat in Brooklyn with their cats and sound like every song you've ever heard played backwards all at once.
They've played warehouses and split singles with Xiu Xiu and blown up The Smell with No Age. (Rob: "Everyone expects linked bands to be like mini-versions: people can't believe we're friends. But we love playing to new ears."). Pearson's a Michiganer who studied classical music and does projects about minimalism and immediacy and plays the bassoon. Barber grew up taking the Saturday train to New York to go skateboarding and studied printmaking at art school and designs some of their awesome covers with Pearson, like the red and yellow 03/07-09/07, which is a collection of EP and comp tracks.
Sitting over lemonades in Café Oto before the first date of their first European tour earlier this month, Pearson agrees that aggression is played out. "We get called childlike sometimes, but whatever. If that means we're honest, wide-eyed, then that's cool. When you see someone freaking out, it's like 'Yeah, that's interesting...'"
Barber and Pearson met through mutual friends (one of the Death Set, actually) in 2006 or so, and wanted to get together immediately. "We met while we were in the middle of our solo projects, and we just decided to work together," says Barber. Adds Pearson: "It was nice to do something not thinking too much – I find it really refreshing to collaborate and not have to think about, you know, classical form. I never annotate our music, but sometimes I'm still like 'You can't just change time signatures like that!' And Rob's like 'It's fiiine! It sounds good to me.'"
"We make tracks kinda like a collage, actually," says Barber. "We just make these small bits of a sound, sample them and piece them together later into songs." Pearson laughs: "The first song we did was just like messing about on a computer – emailing sounds to each through the walls. The other day I was just making this really horrible noise through a recorder, and we're going to loop that. I was reading Carl Sagan's Varieties of Scientific Experience, it's all about how there can scientifically be a God – this book about man's place in the universe. I got so obsessed with it last summer! But you have to stop drawing your place in the universe all day. It's good to have mundane tasks to stop your head exploding."

Book art piece for Insight

Since early 2008, including the amazing Blood On Paper at the V&A, there's been a really pleasing growth in that whole book art thing. In June 2008 we decided to cover its impact in Brighton.

A new generation of book artists have been quietly redefining everything you know about the tied and bound for over a decade – and judging many a book by its cover. With an international event on our doorstep in July, Charlie Jones has a pressing engagement.
A new global generation of artists are basing work on the printed and bound – remaking novels, rescuing pulped fiction, printing on potato and fur and creating fine art from £5 paperbacks. For these artists, the printed page is a way of creating art itself, rather than a means of reproducing existing work. It’s a broad church, ranging from Dieter Roths early experiments stuffing crap lit into sausage skins, to David Shrigely’s horror-drawings to Denise Hawrysio’s bound Union Jacks to Sam Winston’s word remodeling. It’s subversive, quaint and literate art in the midst of a renaissance that recalls the installationist’s rise in the early seventies. Most exciting of all, many leading lights are coming to Brighton this month for a one-day symposium.
“Eight years ago, no-one had heard of book art, but now almost every art school will offer a course in it. It’s a very exciting time,” says Sarah Bodman, editor of Artists Books Yearbook, the definitive international journal on the form. Sarah, who was introduced to book art when she happened across a handwritten stream of consciousness inside a novel in her university library nearly twenty years ago, is speaking at the Books That Fly event this month at the University of Brighton, a conference and two-week summer school bringing together typographers, artists, academics and writers from around the world. This exhibition comes hot on the tails of last months Phoenix gallery collection, Press and Release, a show of independent and small scale publishing, including many Book Artists, and one of the country’s leading Book Art shop is on Bedford place – Permanent, a group who specialize in small run art books. Lee Shearman of the shop: “It’s been huge recently! It’s exploded, just in the last year. Every month we hear of more event, more artists, more places. I really don’t know what has created this, but that’s the way with inspiration, isn’t it? Someone does something amazing, that makes people go ‘wow, I could do that’ and so these scenes happen.”
Brighton is one of countless hubs worldwide. Sarah Bodman:“Is it a global movement? Very much so! There are practitioners based on every continent, with incredible regional variation. With the new possibilities of internet publishing, it’s easier than ever to get works made – twenty years ago it would cost £100 to make a book, but today you can make one for a fiver, meaning that the person on the street can take home an piece of art.”
permanentbookshop.com
bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Brighton bound – our list of local bookies

John Dilnot
Through his beautiful re-renderings of milk packaging designs, bad-apple guides and the like, John Dilnot’s work is both weightily political and playfully subtle, and that's all for the better.

Illustrator's Elbow
A newly formed group of 20-odd artists currently studying at the University of Brighton, working in drawing, printing, painting, photography and book-making.

Borbonesa Publishing
A collective of writers and artists who design and make conceptual occasional papers, currently working with filmmaker Jeff Keen to republish RAYDAY, a private broadsheet from the 1960s.

Advertising piece for BlowBack

This little wonder featured first in BlowBack, a sadly missed street-style publication.

Late in 2005, everyone’s favourite monobrowed monkey Noel Gallagher was spitting blood at Jack White for writing a song for Coca-Cola. "What the f**k is he playing at? He dresses like f***ing Zorro on doughnuts! What the f**k is that about? He ceases to be in the club. He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking… I'm not having that, it's f***ing wrong.” A song! For Coca-Cola! Cue a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-pointing from the indie fraternity. “Sell out” was thrown about on blogs and broadsheets the world over. Principles not price, man! So far, so standard, just another easy tirade. The weird world of music licensing – when a track is allowed (licensed) to be broadcast – was made a little weirder a few weeks later. When all the dust had settled and Oasis made a quiet announcement. Their All Around The World had been sold for a AT&T ad.

There is an imagined time, somewhere before that Phat Planet Guiness ad, even before Kurt was horrified to find out Teen Spirit was a deodorant brand, when advertising was a filthy word. When no cool, alternative musician would consider letting a dirty ad man at his or her songs. When Babylon Zoo or Stiltskin could be laughed out of town for jumping on a Levis TV spot. A lot of this must be hazy nostalgia for a vaguely “realer” time, but a quick look over who’s been licensing what so far this year raises a few eyebrows. Bands on ads in 2007? They’re cool. Commercialbreaksandbeats.co.uk - an online database of music used on UK ad spots – reads like a Dazed and Confused contents page, with turns by Devandra Banhart, Black Keys, Fujia & Miyage, New Young Pony Club, Colder and Roxy Music all listed this year alone. Artists that were once spoken of in hushed, reverent tones by musos, like Vashti Bunyan or Arthur Russell, now feature on phone adverts. Most surprisingly of all, hardly anyone calls them a sell out.

Not to say that every licensed band out there are willing to drop their trousers for the next adman that calls. Far from it, these bands are reacting to – and acting in – a world that’s incredibly brand savvy. For Ayla Owen, Director of Music at Leap, the music licensing and publishing house behind Levis’ and KFC’s legendary soundtracks, “these bands are very aware of how their music is presented. Some brands are more attractive than others, but they don’t just want to know about the brand itself, they want to know about the director and the script.” This is one of the reasons that bands are happy to be used in commercials - their sheer quality. We all know that Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer and Michel Gondry started out directing adverts and we’ve all cooed over Sony’s coloured balls and paint splashes. Advertising is an established step on the trail for almost any ‘creative type,’ whether you’re a writer, a director, a musician - or indeed a music exec. This removes both the stigma of the dreaded corporate dollar and the fear that the ad might turn out a bit, well, shoddy. Abla El-Sharnouby, head of publishing at Five Missions More, a music publishing and licensing consultancy with MTV and The Beeb in their portfolio had a few words to say on the subject. “Creatives [at advertising agencies] speak the same language as musicians: they’ll want to make a cutting-edge ad with the best underground music. Even if that’s not exactly what the clients themselves want,” she laughs. Music selection is an incredible creative process in itself. Sam Reid from Hear No Evil, a Soho music consultancy could be talking about DJing when he says “it’s a very fun but subjective job. You really can’t put your finger on what makes an ideal track – some songs just fit.” Needless to say, most bands don’t have an issue with “fitting in.”



Bands aren’t selling out: they’re buying in, and are very clued up about how they’re doing this. This is the "myspace generation", after all: image is everything for a new band, and its kissing cousin self-promotion needs a tight control over how images are used. Fine for The Clash to finally reach number one on the heels of a Levis ad, with Should I Stay..., but when Joe Strummer’s image was used for a Doc Martins ad, heads rolled. Using images from photo library Corbis, ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi showed the icon in heaven wearing DMs underneath a toga – a clanger so bad it lost Saatchi the contract, and the person responsible for distributing the picture had their employment “considered.” Promotion and control are the key, but it’s got to be the right situation, the right ad and the right product. “Association with a ‘cool’ brand is great for a band, and it’s not seen as working for ‘the man’ in the same way as it might have been. Look at how many kids there are wearing Puma or Nike T-Shirts – they are essentially happily wearing an advert,” says Ayla. “It’s brand association.”

Punting your track out to an agency is more than locking onto a ‘cool’ brand – for an even vaguely alternative artist, it’s a way of contacting and connecting with a far, far wider audience than an independent or below-radar label could hope for. Abla: “a prime-time ad reaches literally millions of people, millions of people that might never come into contact with that artist. Just look at Nina Simone: thirty seconds on a Muller advert and a new Best Of is released” Whatever misgivings a listener might have about an artist’s five decade-long career being crammed into a thirty second yogurt ad, it didn’t lose her estate anything: 2006’s Very Best Of Nina Simone’s first track was Ain’t Got No, I Got A Life, and was one the year’s best sellers. While bands selling huge quantities by being “that band off that advert” is nothing new – just ask Babylon Zoo – the need for publicity is far bigger today than it ever has been, simply because it is harder to make a the same splash in the far bigger ocean. The price of launching a band in 2007 is astronomical – The Guardian set it at a cool £594,000, with each TV ad weighing in at £10,000. Abla: “we really try to promote music that wouldn’t be heard otherwise, that would be pitched otherwise. More independent, alternative, underground, whatever, artists are being featured on ads. It’s now far cheaper to feature a song by an up-and-coming artist than it was even two or three years ago, because of increased demand and there are also just so many bands out there.”

The digital revolution has provided a multitude of different places for advertisers to associate themselves with ‘cool’ bands, from viral marketing to podcasts. “There are so many avenues you could go down for entertainment,” says Abla. “Which means that people are very sophisticated about what entertainment they consume.” Ayla of Leap agrees. “I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a purely digital superstar – someone who side-stepped traditional record companies and was marketed entirely online.” The story’s subtext is the much publicised death of the record industry. June saw the closure of the country’s biggest “independent” store, Fopp, and the release of Prince’s new album, given away with every Mail on Sunday, and the ongoing nosedive of album sales. The industry is in dire straits. Advertising might just be part of the solution. Before music is declared D.O.A., let’s raise a glass for the ambulance chasers. Sell out? No sell out!