miscellaneous
The Sonic Mook Experiment a series of gigs with a motley crew of wannabes filmed by Phil Knott and myself in 2002
Fish Logic A record sleeve for a Lowestoft band
Vortographs Experiments in abstract Cubist photography
Hermot Menee were the Finnish tango band I played drums in
Influx zine an image for the petrolhead zine
/ adrian cox /
Vortographs
My admiration for the European art movements and developments of the early 20th century includes the great work of Alvin Langdon Coburn. Using a smashed bathroom mirror that he had nicked from his mate Ezra Pound he produced some of the world’s first abstract art photography.
In an effort to reproduce the style and light of these photographs to use on an album cover for brilliant clarinetist Adrian Cox, I smashed some mirrors, made a kaleidoscopic device and held it onto the front of my digital SLR (Coburn had used a large 6 inch negative camera). Light refraction and manual focus was the key to getting the right amount of warmth and tone into the pictures and I ended up printing out photographs of Adrian that Jane Mingay had shot and taping them to the front of my desktop lamp or the window of my bedroom. The process was so much fun that I ended up with a lot of useable images a selection of which you can see here.
/ fish logic /
Some friends of mine in Lowestoft had a band called Fish Logic (don’t ask me!) and were playing crowded shows at local venues and building a lot of support in the area. They decided to release a 12″ inch single and asked me to design the cover for it. I think it’s probably my first ever piece of graphic design. I photographed the orange on the front, with a band logo fruit sticker on it I had made, with the first serious camera I had bought, a Praktica SLR.
/ portsmouth school of art /
I decided that if I was to make it through my twenties then I’d better get out of my home town and its drug culture. I put a portfolio together of twelve pieces and chose a college that was far enough away, but still by the sea.The Technical Illustration course in Portsmouth taught me how to use a plethora of techniques from 3-point perspective to airbrushing. For my FMP I looked to Russia and the hypocrisy of its new Glasnost policies at a time when the Berlin wall had been toppled and the world was full of hope.I discovered that despite the U.S.S.R’s new ‘openness’, censorship, always a pet hate of mine, was still rife amongst women in Russia. I decided to illustrate a series of books by female poets and authors who were doing their best to set the record straight. All the visuals were done by hand (including tracing the type by hand) because I was a luddite when it came to the computers that everyone else was deciding to use for their outcomes. Oh, the irony.
/ english heritage /
On completion of the Technical Illustration course we had the final show in our studio and when we were packing up a bedraggled man came in, stood before us and shouted out “Anyone want a job?” He looked around at the sceptical group and carried on, “If you fancy it I’d like you to draw, er, draw, a fork in ink and bring it to this address tomorrow”. He put the piece of paper he was holding with the address on it down on a table and marched off. His name was Dr. David S. Neal, an eccentric Roman mosaic expert for English Heritage and the address was a fort on the edge of Portsmouth that they used as a base to produce reports and publications relating to their work.I spent the first six months tracing actual size plans made on site on one metre square pieces of tracing film that I had to ink over and add depth and shading on the stones and ground to enhance any building or burials they had excavated. The flint drawing here was the highlight of nearly two years working there. What felt like months of that time was spent in meetings and I would sit and draw the staff, all of them like me, trying hard just to stay awake.
/ future rock & roll /
Music Viddy.
Say what you like about Sean McLusky but the man knows how to play the game alright. He was staging a bunch of gigs around London under his ‘Sonic Mook’ umbrella with new bands, who were usually skinny white Hoxton wannabees but also included bands like The White Stripes and The Strokes. He had asked Phil Knott to shoot videos of the bands performances that would be collated and shown at a ‘Future Rock ‘n’ Roll’ event he had planned for the weekend of the Queen’s Golden jubilee celebrations in 2002. Canny McLusky had booked the main hall at the I.C.A. just a few hundred yards from the official ‘Party at the Palace’ on the Mall. While the queen was tapping her feet along to the old guard with the likes of Paul McCartney, Queen, and Elton John, we were getting jiggy with Liars, Earl Brutus and the Libertines. Doherty was off his tits (no, really?) and set off a fire alarm five minutes into their show with his cigarette so we all piled outside and I managed to sit and have a smoke with my childhood hero Jerry Dammers while we sat and watched all the flag wavers going home early to miss the crowds on the underground. Phil and me spent days curating, editing and sequencing the two hour video using iMovie because we didn’t have a clue how to use any other software.And by the way Mr McLusky you still owe us money from those ad’s you took out in The Stool Pigeon. A canny little weasel indeed.
/ hermot /
Vittu! I had worked with Finnish wonder Sami Seppala at adrenalin and it was love at first sight with this lunatic who is a true libertarian and 100% Finn. Sami with his best friend Saska and top flight skateboarder Jussi Korhonen formed a band and asked if I’d like to join them and play some Finnish tango. Yes reader, Finnish tango. Two words that shouldn’t sit together but are perfect for each other, with sad old Finnish men singing about the moon and lost love to Argentine tango music. It was also great being the only Englishman in the band because when they argued I couldn’t understand a word of it, so when the storm calmed I’d be ready at the back of my kit with a 1-2-3-4, and off we’d go with the next song.
/ influx /
Mike Fordham was working with classic car insurer’s Adrian Flux providing online content and a print zine under the ‘Influx’ title. He threw me a bone to provide an illustration for the zine whose artworks would also be available as prints. This illustration is a multi-media digital composite of a motorcycle.
/ norris raider /
My good friend and compatriate Norris Raider has been making music for many years. He’s always a been a source of new and exciting things to listen to so when he asked me to make a promo viddy for a new track he was releasing on 12″ I jumped at the chance. Only at the very end of the conversation did I ask him “How long is the track?” to which he replied, “Err SIX minutes”.
Well as you know, I never choose the easy route. I had been making images from ascii text for a while so I became obsessed with making animated ascii scenes for this promo.
I took filmed scenes, split them into separate frames and then made ascii text versions of them, which I collated into an animated scene. I used a similar process with frames from rolling waves that I shot on the beach, which I made into bitmaps and collated back into moving images.
