Monday, May 18, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
easter sunday otley chevins panoramic view thing
for this stations of the resurrection project i've been taking a lot of reference photos in and around leeds lately, then chopping them together in photoshop and basing the compositions of the drawings on them...
tonight i was sticking together some pics that i'd snapped early on easter morning up on otley chevins* and i'm loving this panoramic view which emerged pretty much accidentally from the various photos that i'd shot...
*they have an easter daybreak service up on the chevins each year. someone told us that the giant cross there is made from timbers reclaimed after the IRA manchester arndale bombing [don't know if that's true or not]
tonight i was sticking together some pics that i'd snapped early on easter morning up on otley chevins* and i'm loving this panoramic view which emerged pretty much accidentally from the various photos that i'd shot...
*they have an easter daybreak service up on the chevins each year. someone told us that the giant cross there is made from timbers reclaimed after the IRA manchester arndale bombing [don't know if that's true or not]
Sunday, May 10, 2009
fuseleeds and jeffrey lewis - belated reviews...
so in this post i said that david gedge performing with the bbbc big band could be amazing, could be terrible. well, it wasn't amazing.
gedge was great, but i just don't get big band music. don't enjoy it, don't understand it.
and i was kind of hoping that the band would meet gedge halfway and it'd be an interesting meeting of styles, but it turned out that they'd just re-written his tunes in a very big band stylee and asked him to sing over the top. then when he did sing he was quite often drowned out by eleven assorted trumpets, saxophones and trombones all going "BADDA-BA-BA-BWAA-BADDAP-BWWWAAAAA" as loud as they possibly could. gedge was funny and engaging and the lyrics survived the orchestral mauling, but the result was a bit disappointing tbh. but you don't have to take my word for it as the gig will be broadcast on radio two on the 1st and 8th of june, apparently...
vessels were the support band though and they were brilliant - go look them up here. they're a bit like a prog-rocky version of mogwai [progwai?] - and my enjoyment of their set wasn't even dampened by a dopey geordie bloke stumbling down the steps behind my seat and tipping half a cup of hot coffee down the back of my shirt...
later in the week i was back at the playhouse, this time with sue, for a triple bill of nancy elizabeth - inventive low-fi folk with harps and guitars and pianos and hitting chairs with a drumstick... really very good - the acorn, who were great and sue took a shine to the lead singer - and a hawk and a hacksaw who were excellent [of the three acts they were the ones that i'd been least sure of, but the musicianship was brilliant and there was something almost punky about them - excellent]
lastly on sunday i bobbed down to the hyde park picture house to see jeffrey lewis and junkyard. it was probably the worst-lit gig i've ever been to - just the red cinema-screen footlights to illuminate the band so you could hardly see their faces... but the music was great - funny, quirky [one song was an illustrated history of korea] and strangely moving. very very enjoyable indeed.
gedge was great, but i just don't get big band music. don't enjoy it, don't understand it.
and i was kind of hoping that the band would meet gedge halfway and it'd be an interesting meeting of styles, but it turned out that they'd just re-written his tunes in a very big band stylee and asked him to sing over the top. then when he did sing he was quite often drowned out by eleven assorted trumpets, saxophones and trombones all going "BADDA-BA-BA-BWAA-BADDAP-BWWWAAAAA" as loud as they possibly could. gedge was funny and engaging and the lyrics survived the orchestral mauling, but the result was a bit disappointing tbh. but you don't have to take my word for it as the gig will be broadcast on radio two on the 1st and 8th of june, apparently...
vessels were the support band though and they were brilliant - go look them up here. they're a bit like a prog-rocky version of mogwai [progwai?] - and my enjoyment of their set wasn't even dampened by a dopey geordie bloke stumbling down the steps behind my seat and tipping half a cup of hot coffee down the back of my shirt...
later in the week i was back at the playhouse, this time with sue, for a triple bill of nancy elizabeth - inventive low-fi folk with harps and guitars and pianos and hitting chairs with a drumstick... really very good - the acorn, who were great and sue took a shine to the lead singer - and a hawk and a hacksaw who were excellent [of the three acts they were the ones that i'd been least sure of, but the musicianship was brilliant and there was something almost punky about them - excellent]
lastly on sunday i bobbed down to the hyde park picture house to see jeffrey lewis and junkyard. it was probably the worst-lit gig i've ever been to - just the red cinema-screen footlights to illuminate the band so you could hardly see their faces... but the music was great - funny, quirky [one song was an illustrated history of korea] and strangely moving. very very enjoyable indeed.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
on the desk...
illustrations for an ELT-type project...
hand-drawn, scanned and converted to vector images, then coloured in Illustrator...
spaces left in the centre are for text.
[and i'm a bit disappointed with that gorilla]
go buy this...
more fuseleeds music reviews if and when i get some free time to blog stuff, but in the meantime our friend andy b aka homecut has a new single out and i'm urging you to go buy it from itunes as it's rather good. it features corinne bailey-rae and soweto kinch and you can give it a listen here
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