stuart bowditch

Working Classes @ The Ship, Leigh-on-Sea 2 Nov 2007 - Review by Stuart Bowditch

It had been a long week, in the run up to the Working Classes gig @ The Ship. A long week full of nothing much at all. All the excitement was to be crammed into the last day before the weekend. And so I waited. And so it transpired to be crammed into the last half of the last day of the week. So Graham, of Little Penguin fame, turned up at the front door and came in. The premise was simple. We had 6 hours to film 45 minutes of footage for my live set later that evening. We were armed with paper, pens, a 1980's Playskool ghetto blaster, a toy piano, a Casio VL-1keyboard, a DV camera with an hours worth of tape and a full battery and a laptop with the set for friday's gig on.

So we spent the afternoon driving around to various places in Southend and Leigh filming ourselves geeking off and making use of public spaces. We recorded a piece of footage for each track, in real time with no editing, using just the stop/start record button.

All this creativity took a lot longer than we had anticipated and the sun was already nearing the horizon (behind some clouds) and we'd only recorded 20 minutes of footage. But we soldiered on through piles of dog shite, sweet shops and rush hour traffic to complete the task.

We arrived at the venue completely knackered out, but with some dinner from Graham's favourite kebab shop to keep us going. So we got stuck in and waited with anticipation for the start of the gig.

There wasn't as many punter as usual tonight, maybe it was too cold, or maybe people hadn't completed their crazy, lets-cram-lots-of-random-instinctive-filming-into-one-afternoon type activities in time. Which was a shame because they missed some really good music...

First up was Gagarin, a very pleasant fellow from London town, who I had the pleasure if gigging with ealier in the year at MultiVitamins. His set started off rather lush with spacial textures and slowly grew in intensity becoming more beat orietated towards the end. He was using several pieces of hardware to play and improvise quite a lot of the sounds and got really into it, moving about on the stage. He was also promoting his latest CD that had been released on Smallfish Records that very day, which was very reasonable at £3, and featured songs that he'd played in his set. I got mine!!

Accompanying the acts as always were visuals, this time courtesy of promoter Lee (Weirdgear), who was showing a mixture of films and cartoons. This included Button Moon and Rainbow, which sat rather well behind Little Cosmonaut, a 5 piece band who'd travelled all the way from Oxford to be with us tonight. Their sound was rather twee, using a glokenspiel, various keyboards and a melodica, which, together with the female vocals, made them sound a bit like Múm in places.

The whole event was in conjunction with the Love Music Hate Racism organisation with a stall to promote themselves and at this point in the evening they gave a little speech about their cause and what they do.

Then came the moment of truth, for Graham and I, and our chance to watch back what we had recorded that afternoon whilst I played the music. I had chosen to play a few old familiar tunes like PM/AM (from the forthcoming 'Snow Cover' EP on Rednetic Records) and Interduvet Yarns Part 3, along with a plethora of new tracks I've recently finished, using field recording made whilst I was at Ars Electronic this September. It was harder for me to watch the visuals behind me but there were quite a lot of laughs from the audiece which suggested that we had managed to create something reasonably good for our afternoon's work. So I think we deserved to pat ourselves on the back for a job well done.

To finish off the evenings proceedings was Andy [relation] to play us out with a selection of his finest house tracks, including a remix he's recently finished of Weirdgear's "Coffee Girl".

So, on that note, we headed off home for some well deserved sleep and to start the long, long wait til we could do it all over again next month...well, maybe we'll try filming something different, and less physically draining than a child playground next time.