Streets and Sheets

punks in the park

Smith and White

The Band

MYSPACE.COM/ERGOPROXYUK

check us out. we play tunes, ofcourse.

Punk

Lily with Trees

my soul has no face
it is made of lights
and shapes
and colours

Blood, Sweat and Queers

Kap Bambino rip Cargo apart (in a good way)

check out more of my shots of the night at:http://photos.viceland.com/albums/206

Nouvelle Vague

Its all getting a bit serious now with digital magazines and tumblrs and blogs and all the endless online thingymajigs that I'm worried actual things on paper are going to go out of business. Everyone wants it and they want it now, so internet - well, you can get it, immediatly.
I did an interview with Nouvelle Vague a while ago now but everyone else has already been chatting about them for ages, so I feel like old news.
either way, here is an snippet of an interview with them.

you can catch the rest in this months Super Super magazine. Which infact...is on paper. But you can't wait so heres a bit NOW...


‘Nouvelle Vague’ make pretty bossa nova covers of some of the most depressing, angry or anarchic punk and new wave classics of the late 70s and 80s. How on earth do they do it and manage to sell half a million records?
Vas: What was the drive then to do covers rather than your own songs?
Melanie: We did write our own songs before but Nouvelle Vague became kind a of side project, it was refreshing and just a more fun way to make music so we thought…why not! We make the songs our own, its not really an imitation as the feel of the song totally changes. Some people don’t even realise these are covers!

So what do you salvage from the original? Is there an effort to make it recognisable or is that not the point?
Melanie: The lyrics are still the same of course, but the message of the song changes, we’ve given the music a more feminine approach, the original new wave bands of the 80s were all about aggression and getting some sort of political point across. It was all macho and bands which were more about performance than anything else, it was all egos flying around.
Leelou: We did a cover of ‘God Save The Queen’ which is on our new album, and it’s a huge contrast, we’ve turned it into a gentle romantic song, I don’t think you could get any further from the original!

Do you think people would be shocked by that, what does Johnny Rotten say about all this?
Leelou: I’m worried at times that people might start throwing bottles at us on stage, saying ‘what have you done to this song!’, that the real punks might get upset about it, but luckily that’s never happened!
Melanie: I’m sure Johnny would be very proud…


Read the rest in this months SuperSuper.
bam

Pathos Two

Screening of 'Looking for Eric' with Steve Evetts and Eric Catona

I attended the screening of the new Ken Loach film - Looking for Eric, out in cinemas June the 12th for a quick Q n A with the leading man Steve Evetts and producer Rebecca O Brien.

Looking for Eric is a captivating drama surrounding the story of Eric Bishop, a Manchunian postman who’s life is a mess of different dilemmas that are revealed throughout the film, a frail and gentle middle aged man having to deal with gangs, family woes and his own strength - the only miracle that saves his life from falling to pieces is the magical appearance of a football superstar - Eric Catona - as his prophetic mentor.
The realism is powerfully gripping, and Steve Evetts captures our hearts as the lovable Eric Bishop. The striking aspect of Ken Loach’s directing is the super-realistic portrayal - so much that seeing Evetts in the flesh makes us feel as though we are meeting his character in person.
Steve: Ken shot the film in sequence which was a great way to work, you don’t often get opportunities like that, there was no script and the scene where I am talking to the poster of Catona and he suddenly appears behind me was the first time I met ‘im! Ken kept the room dark and had him hid behind a curtain and so when I turned around - that was real shock!

I never even knew Catona was going to appear in the film! Working with him was amazing but you have to overcome that feeling and see it as two actors working together. He isn’t like a normal star though, he has this presence. When we were out in Manchester fans would mob him wherever he went, one guy burst into tears on the spot just because Catona couldn’t give him an autograph. He’s a fascinating man!

Rebecca: Catona first approached us with a proposal for a film about a man who gives up his life to follow his success, but it didn’t really grab us. This story is all Paul’s (the writer) but Catona still plays himself. The trumpet and the proverbs, they are all Catona’s own input, it had to be Eric as himself as much as possible because Looking for Eric was all about these two guys as real men and the audience had to see them as that.

Steve: Its almost too real, the car crash which opens the film was also a spontaneous moment. It was an actual head on collision! Ken was in the back and I was meant to be going around and around the roundabout but one of the stunt women got a bit cockey and we crashed, and Ken just got out the back and said ‘Well we might keep that’, like nothing fazed him at all!
With Ken secrecy in his films is really important. You never know what is going to happen, we learnt the characters entire life story through improvisation so your living in the present, actually fearing for your life as much as the characters - it becomes you. The scene where the police raid the house was a first take. The guards weren’t extras - they were a real armed response team so the fear is real!
Its like a game, and adventure. Its beautiful really!
Despite all the drama the film is really a comedy though, its got some great characters that are all just genuine funny blokes, it is a comedy, but after all a comedy is a tragedy with a happy ending.

http://www.lookingforericmovie.co.uk/

Pathos

Interview with Crystal Fighters

Recently signed under the Kitsune label and louder than the biggest bass, ‘Crystal Fighters’ consisting of Graham, Sebastian, Gilbert and vocalists Mimi and Laure, are ready to take Europe by storm. SuperSuper caught up with them in old street and got the low down on their genre-breaking, Basque inspired, electro-opera…your not ready for it!

Im extremely intrigued about this ‘Basque’ focus of your music, what is it all about, and what is Basque?
Gilbert: The Basque country is basically this region in Spain where our lead vocalist Laure comes from. Us guys were making music in London before we met Laure, doing DJ sets and making beats but we found out about this amazing culture that the Basque area has, this exciting heritage and incredible folk music which is really ahead of its time.
One day Laure was clearing her grandfathers attic when she discovered this book he had written entitled ‘The Crystal Fighters’, it was kind of a Basque folk story but the writing itself was really ahead of its time. We were really inspired by this story so we kind of just took what it represented and created ourselves.
Sebastian: Yeah the book basically became our new focus and direction, we took a combination of the story and our knowledge of working with music, as well as the Basque culture to capture the dark and prophetic feeling of this place and recreate the tale through music,
G: it allowed us to make this totally new kind of dance music, not the generic type you hear a lot know a days, but music that includes a whole culture within it.
What is Basque music actually like?
G: Its at times very dark and eerie, yet it is folk music, that’s why our sound has a huge folk music influence within it. Basque music is a very modal and ambivalent sound, so we took this in order to bring out a dark and eerie side of dance music…if that’s possible!
S: But we also use a lot of Latin rhythms, that really exciting syncopated beat which drives people to crazy levels, it is very tribal.
G: And combined with Basque melodies which underpin every track, we take that Basque melody and but it over a strong bass and the sound is wild!
So what about this story? How are you recreating the tale?
G: When we started out playing live we performed as a ‘live opera’ which was directed from the story written by Laure’s grandfather. It was a very theatrical performance, we would even come out holding cards with text from the book written on them, like a play.
S: Most bands are so 2 dimensional on stage, they come on, play a song and whatever, but we wanted to do something incredible, diverse, like to bring an element of performance art into dance clubs…generally something quite unheard of. For us to bring the theatre and the opera on stage with dance music would be the ultimate movement.
How does the crowd react to this?
S: We really try to build the crowd up, take it somewhere unexpected, the crowd often don’t know what’s hit them! But they love it. We feed off the crowd and the crowd feed off us.
G: The last few shows have been different, though, we’ve brought a harder vibe to the music - a new stage to the story, we are just recreating the story of the book and therefore don’t know what will happen next! We want to take it somewhere visual, theatrical, to incorporate something greater to the whole experience, because live shows should always be an experience.
S: Yeah its all very high energy and that’s what gets people excited, we actually use Basque instruments like the Txalapata when playing live.
G: but our music also has a raw punk edge to it, which we can tap into. We played alongside Selfish Cunt and Ulterior, bands with a rather different feel to our music, but we managed to combine the sounds and break the boundaries of genres.
Your music doesn’t seem to have a genre at all, unless you could call it Basque-Opera-Electro-Tribal Dance?
S: We definitely want to mix genres, bring old Spanish sounds with more melody and combine that with dance and dubstep beats, there is no box to put that in! Our song writing also has grander themes than the average dance music track, which connects us back to the story.
So is there a single or album on its way since signing with the Kistune label?
G: Yeah the single ‘Xtatic Truth’ is released with Kitsune on the 28th of May. It’s a very solid dance song however our album which we are working on at the moment will be much more melodically and harmonically diverse, more like a journey/movement/story of sound rather than just ‘songs’. In our live shows we don’t play songs like ‘our next song is…’ etc. we just make noise and create this musical opera, a story telling through music.
S: We don’t know where the story will go, we just let it create itself and we’ll find out….
www.myspace.com/crystalfighters

filming - its now night

filming - next stop dalston

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filming tales