Last Sunday I went to Buckinghamshire with Gavin to shoot some promotional shots for a band called Sweet Billy Pilgrim. I only know of them through Gavin, but apparently they were nominated for this year’s Mercury Award, which is quite frankly a massive thing. Basically, instead of helping out with the post-production, which is what I did for the Mark Ronson behind-the-scenes video, I was instead helping out production-wise, which basically meant: camerawork.
The band themselves are really fucking nice guys, which sounds like a generalized cliché, but really isn’t. The bass/banjo player, Bish, also plays with sometime indie darlings The Boy Least Likely To, who I still listen to today.
The day roughly meant me getting up at 7am to get to Gavin’s after a 3am ending to the previous evening at Plastic People (rating: underwhelming) for Jess’s birthday. After getting to his for breakfast we left his house for the sunny sights of Buckinghamshire, picking up Bish on the way. I’ll come onto my thoughts on the county and West London a bit later, but most of the day was spent playing the same two live tracks over and over again and filming the band with a three camera setup miming along, to be edited into a promo at some point in the future. I think we used about nine DV tapes by the end of the day. It was just a good way to gain experience in the production side of things, and once again I’m glad that Gavin has thought of me and offered me the chance to get some much-valued experience that most other media and film students have to really work for.
The shoot was in the middle of Buckinghamshire, in the Chiltern Hills, near the town of Amersham. If you ever get the chance to go to Buckinghamshire and/or specifically the Chilterns, go. Trust me. I’d never been before and it is likely that I would never actively choose to visit them, but driving through them at 10am on a sunny day is beautiful. The house we were filming in was on the top of one of the hills, in a slight valley. It was the most stunning domestic view I’d ever seen.
Contrasting to this was the necessary negotiating of the major roads of West London. We all know that Notting Hill is tree-lined avenues, and is so gentrified that it’s one of the few places in London where the trees connect overhead. But far-West London is ridiculous. I’m referring to the areas surrounding the Westfield shopping centre and Park Royal, those sorts of areas. They are exactly the same as LA, to the point of ridiculousness. The newly constructed Westfield is slap-bang surrounded by freeways and overpasses, and is horribly Americanised.
Anyway, enough of Sunday. Today is Friday, and the end of Freshers’ Fortnight here in New Cross and most of London. It has been most excellent. I will refrain from an in-depth discussion of every evening, mainly because it bores both me and you, and because most clubs are just the same as everyone else. So here is a list. In the last fortnight I have been to:
Goldsmiths SU – Freshers’ Welcome Party/Pound a Pint Tuesdays/Club Sandwich
Punk – Bite
The Den & Centro – Skint Mondays
Plastic People
Corsica Studios – Off Modern
We’ll ignore GSU and Punk, as I’ve gone on about them far too much more than can be deemed acceptable, and Plastic People is just underwhelming, although I did leave early with Oliver, and I heard the others had a good night.
You may have heard of the Den & Centro before, but not have been aware of it – this is because it was previously deemed to be the third-best club in London known as The End. It hosted such nights as BuggedOut! And DURRRR, and I had the pleasure of experiencing my first ever night out in London there to see none other than Boys Noize, last September, which remains to this day one of the best nights out ever.
Sometime last year The End was bought by property developers, much to the chagrin of hundreds of students and fans of indie and electro. Long story short, the property development bombed, and the people who had forked out multi-millions to buy the property promptly re-branded the club as The Den (note the anagram) and the side-club Centro. What they have effectively done is turned something from one of the brightest and most exciting clubs in London into just another studenty Soho club, much like The Roxy, or Madame Jojo’s, or Moonlighting, just MUCH more mainstream. The three rooms were playing as follows: cheese & ‘student anthems’, R&B and urban, and in the third room was Hedkandi anthems.
The night itself promised ‘all you can drink’ for a £15 entry fee, and so seemed like a safe bet for drunkenness, if not good music. However, due to the death of a UCL fresher the previous evening at Koko which was originally presumed by the media (mostly the Daily Mail) to be alcohol-related (It now emerges that it was probably a heart attack, but the damage was done), Camden Borough Council (which include the Soho area) then advised The Den to pull the ‘all you can drink’ promotion, which meant £5 entry, but still cheap, cheap drinks. Which it was. I got so drunk and was in pain for most of the day afterwards.
Yesterday night brought the first Off Modern of the year at Elephant & Castle’s Corsica Studios, which basically feels like a slightly more organized house party. Studios used to host Chew the Fat!, but after the shambles of entry in the infamous non-show of Fake Blood, it moved to the far more music-appropriate Arches in London Bridge. Anyway, I had a good night. It was too busy so I didn’t drink as much as I wanted to, but I saw everyone who I expected to see and had a pretty good time.
Before I go, I think there’s just enough time for something a bit less pointless, and a bit more media-based. Last month, Transport for London changed the Tube map. I agree with this in principle – the current map was far too cluttered, some interchanges looked like they were on different lines and it was generally difficult to read if you didn’t have a basic understanding of London geography:
What TfL did was to simplify some of the interchanges, remove the travelcard-zone shading in the background, and remove the Thames. Promptly, there was outrage, across message boards, opinion pages of the paper, and reactionary headlines on all London-based papers. Why? Just take a look at the new map for a second:
In my opinion, this map is far more useful. The simplifying of interchanges is the best improvement, seeing as it was the biggest difficulty in the old map. The removing of the zones is useful (but sneaky – if they remove the zones it means they’re either trying to shift the zones in an unpopular way or alter the price ranges for each zone, which would be unpopular whatever the change was) because a simple white background means the lines are much more clean-cut and easier to track.
Most of the outrage stemmed from the fact that TfL had removed the Thames from the map. Why? I know it is a London landmark, and one of the biggest at that, and could also be used by people as a starting point, but it’s just a landmark. The argument is illogical – if we HAVE to have the Thames on the map, why not other tourist traps? Why not any museum, gallery, or park? Why not stadia like Twickenham, Wembley, Emirates, White Hart Lane, or Stamford Bridge? Why not major roads? And if we’re really serious about having a geographical natural landmark on our map, why not superimpose the entire London metropolis underneath the Tube lines instead of travelcard zones, or even as well as the zones? Having a geographical landmark, and particularly one with such a well-known defined shape, is problematic with the Tube map, as, as everyone knows, the map is ridiculously un-true to the actual locations of lines and stations in regards to the others:
So that’s my rant, and my update over.
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