Cinema Without Priests: foolishpeople.com

After I played two rather lovely shows in collaboration with Matthew Hamblion last month, as London burned myself and The Devil May Cares have been rather inactive. I did have a hand in this article by Rachael Blyth on www.foolishpeople.com though.

Cinema Without Priests - FoolishPeople

Foolish People are a long-standing London-based occult group:

FoolishPeople create film, theatre, music and books. We curate and engineer immersive experiences that have the power to raise the numinous within the spectator.

Over a number of years, we have developed a unique practice, Theatre of Manifestation. We combine mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration in the creation of this work. Each piece takes form by merging text, performance, sound, art, light and the building itself to create a unique, dreamlike world that living characters inhabit.

Foolish People are currently working on their first feature film. Filming for Strange Factories will begin next month in Czech Republic. Funding for the project has been secured entirely through online contributions to their indiegogo campaign. Now that the insidious "cultural sector" is being abandoned in light of the state's nightmarish austerity program, it will be interesting to see whether campaigns like this one can provide a democratic funding model for experimental output. Wired ran a pretty interesting article on the campaign.

The Phantasmagoria of Strange Factories from FoolishPeople on Vimeo.

In all my cities...LIVE HOUSESHOW TOMORROW NIGHT

Tomorrow night, Matthew of A Number of Young Lovers and I are playing this...



As part of this...

HERE tomorrow night (Tuesday 19th July). In a collaboration reminiscent of THIS.

Under the name 'Young Kids' we'll be drawing on Matthew's earlier combination of songwriting and storytelling (below). Using songs by both bands along with snatches of Italo Calvino and other writing we'll be performing a half hour set about cities. A detective story of sorts.



If you would like to attend, you need to e-mail harriet@groveendroad.com to let them know you are coming as its in their house. Its £3 entry and guests need to arrive before 7:30. For details check with the organisers.

"This here is the sound of a garrison town..."

At the end of a recent evening demoing new The Devil May Cares songs with Nick Olorenshaw (bass player with The Devils and guitarist with Being There) we did a take of this very old song:

Tyler's Rebellion acoustic demo by The Devil May Cares

The influences on it can be labelled like those models in fashion pages.

Tyler's Rebellion was the first song written for what became The Devil May Cares and probably the first proper "song" I wrote (after yelping over effects-drenched riffs for a year or two). I still would hope it captures something true about the anti-war movement of 2002/3 and the oppressive atmosphere in a small garrison town like Colchester (where I was living) at that time:

the air hung heavy with muck spread
on the monday you came home
which would make it late september yet
then again I might be wrong

your tread had grown so soft upon
the floor by then
that the automatic doors didn’t open
when you walked write up to them

each night you make a few more sales
then you’re clocking off round nine,
yeah I hate myself as well
but it’s just temporary, right?

it’s been five years since I met you in
another late september
of war protesters
and dog eared on the roads

and you wore a ban the bomb pin then
and another badge that’s lettering read
the only bush I trust in is my own

and the rivers out here are filling up
with the shells of burnt out cars
and mattresses and there’s a restlessness
in your softly beating heart

this here is the sound of a garrison town
it feels a million miles from home
you know sometimes it’s like there’s
twice as many birds as there are stones

The Waxing Captors in town on Friday

And, a few days earlier than our show (see below), The Waxing Captors are playing for the same people just around the corner at Roadtrip. Joining them on the bill are the also excellent Athens Polytechnic.

Here's a stupid video:



The Waxing Captors are also playing the night before.

Folk and Dagger presents... Tuesday July 12th, Hoxton Underbelly

Here is the poster for the show I'm playing next week for the lovely Folk and Dagger (Tshepo of The Devils: "We'll be all dagger!"). Details are here. If you get there before 8pm its only £2. Otherwise its £4. Incidentally, I reposted something from The Frequency Trap below about Rowan Coupland and now realise that Beth Porter - who is playing at the Underbelly too - sang a duet with Rowan on his "Thorns, brambles, white water, and black oak" (Wilkommen Records). As did I!

Here's Beth singing with Rowan...

Weather Report

"The storm was visible from some distance in the approaching dawn, moving in a white wall towards us. Robinson waited in tense anticipation, sober now and alert, no longer the drunken wreck that had sat with me downstairs. The others watched with a mixture of fear and wonder, their faces lit pale by the first bolts of lightning. We should have seen this storm as evidence of forces larger than us, though no-one did. Each of us believed - I could read it on our faces - that we were the cause, that our ritual ceremonies of the last week had invoked it, and this deluge was the dramatic result of our efforts."
Christopher Petit, "Robinson"

Since summoning Robinson in Cambridge yesterday during rehearsals, I've started to wonder...

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Chaos-as-homes-and-rail-lines-struck-by-lightning-28062011.htm

ThE FrequencY TraP: Your Best Place

ThE FrequencY TraP: Your Best Place: "Rowan Coupland is a writer/singer/multi instrumentalist whose work focuses on the depths of situations, real and imagined. His voice has gar..."

Mr and Mrs Samuel Kidd Live

A first post. Next month I'll be playing a "solo" show at The Underbelly in Hoxton for Folk and Dagger.  Piano accompaniment will come from Sam Tannenbaum and probably other members of The Devils will join us.  As 'Mr and Mrs Samuel Kidd' we'll be playing some brand new songs and new arrangements of things you might have heard before.

The new songs take up the Robinson myth via Celine, Weldon Kees, Chris Petit and Patrick Keilor.  I'll be posting about Robinson more in the coming months as the collection develops.
The Decline of the English Murder Ballad Pt 1 Demo by The Devil May Cares

I recorded this demo with Nick from The Devils on a cassette four-track in his bedroom a few weeks ago. 'The Decline of the English Murder Ballad' finds Robinson and I committing an increasingly debauched series of murders in search of better subject matter for songwriting.  But as the murders become more depraved, we find that both they and the songs slip into self-referential vulgarity.