there... then... here and now

OK, it's a cheap trick and this track doesn't really have a title so it seemed a good idea to connect with the previous one. Quite like the idea of reprising parts used in other compositions and there are a couple here.

One of those projects initiated more by way of a rush of blood to the head than anything else, the central motif here is a sample from a Henry Mancini cover of Herbie Hancock’s ‘Butterfly’. To this I have added a bass-line, half of which has something to do with Horace Silver’s ‘Song For My Father.’ Added to this are a variety of keyboard parts, voicings and saxophones. The thought occurs: why mention this at all? Well, maybe it’s because I believe there are some who may be interested in some of the ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’ of a musical production. Sampling has been around a long, long time now and people far better informed than myself have written about it and used it far more creatively.  It is simply wonderful that he repetition of a phrase nicked from one composition becomes the rhythmic-base for another. We operate now in a time in which it is possible to grab, plunder, parody, pastiche or plagiarise from whatever data-base we fancy; an image from here, a line from there and just that bit from the brass-section right there.  I may have my Burroughs’ reference all wrong here, but I think he anticipated something like this when writing about the ‘subliminal kid’. A few seconds of a Mancini cover of a Hancock-tune begets three minutes of Peekaboo-bebop.
The title is another lazy cinematic reference, taken from a film that has been parodied, pastiched and plundered many, many times previously. And whilst none of this would have been possible without Herbie Hancock and Henry Mancini, I’m the only one here.

The follow up to MyBook. Get the picture. Hear the sounds. Get the point. 

Not having put any music up recently it may appear that I've given up on the whole project. Not really. There's been a holiday and whilst such periods are always anticipated with a commitment to doing loads of things that I never ordinarily get time to do, most of them still don't get done. Whatever, I'm back at work and don't want to burden you with the details. There are a few tunes that started to take shape before the summer, one of which is this one. It's title is based on nothing more than that very contemporary discourse of social networking that has my head spinning. You'll have guessed already that the follow up track will be called SpaceFace.

Positively the last of the Chalkwell beach pictures, this one actually a ‘joiner’ on account of not having a wide enough lens to capture the panoramic scope of the scene. Therefore, this was a case of starting pretty quickly from the left and then hoping that - by way of the wonders of digital-imaging technology -

all three would join up. Bish, bash, bosh. You don’t need to be particularly eagle-eyed to spot the tell-tale signs. I’m not going to point them out though. Obviously, this has been resampled in order to reduce the size of what amounts to being three images joined up.

From the same shoot as below, there are just a few more contemporary signifieds - such as the laundrey bags and recycled plastic bags and bottles - that anchor the event in the ‘here and now’. I think that the water in the bottles appears to have been taken from the sea – or estuary – rather than serving some purpose in a picnic or beach-side feast.I hope nobody drank it anyway.  I cannot recall seeing what happened to the bottles as the event wound to a close. In my view, it is those juxtapositions, contrasts and contradictions of ancient and modern that make this image effective.
There is a saying – false I think – that every picture ‘tells a story’. Whatever narrative sense that the viewer gets from a picture is implied. We can speculate what happened before the image was produced and we can predict what might have happened after. A single-image cannot in itself narrate. The viewer, therefore, actively participates in the construction of meaning. The text that I have accompanied these images with concerns the photographic event. I know how the photographs were produced. I can still only speculate what might have been happening.

Whatever appeals to us in the photographs we look at as well as the ones we make or take is obviously subjective and discursive, but the discourse related to this image is – again – of new media technologies, communications, instaneity etc.  It is also more explicitly about race, belief and gender, but this is how this image really happened. One sunny afternoon in early September, my son, out on a bike-ride along the Thames Estuary from Southend-on-Sea to Benfleet Creek, sent a picture via his mobile from Chalkwell showing a group of people all dressed in white performing some sort of baptising ceremony on the beach. I immediately telephoned him (old-skool Iand-line) to ask him how long ago he took it and whether or not they could still be there. His hunch was that they could be, so I grabbed my camera and drove there in about 5 -10 minutes. By the time I arrived, there was a sense that that things were winding down, but collectively the group certainly made quite a spectacular sight. There’s something almost biblical about the scenario.  It might have been nice to photograph from the front but this would have meant framing them in front of very up-market and expensive suburban houses. I think the group originates from Nigeria and it was only after a couple of minutes shooting that one of the party admonished me for taking photographs. My assurances that I’m not press, media, documentary expose film-maker but just a humble teacher don’t carry much weight, but I got to keep the camera. Indeed, the guy who seemed to be the ‘leader’ (obviously a patriarchal set-up judging by the gender division) gave me a leaflet and told me that I can take as many photographs as I like ‘in a huge place’ that, according to the leaflet, turns out to be Newham Town Hall at the end of September. Maybe a huge civic-hall full of similarly dressed folk will present some spectacular photo opportunities, but I can’t but help have a hunch that anyone with anything resembling a real camera won’t get in.
Bottom-line here is that I would not have got to respond to the potential of this photo-opportunity had it not been for the speed and instaneity of digital-media. Not quite Weegee though.

It was 1977. I’d moved to Leeds but was back in Coventry for a few days. I’d bought a Canon AE1 from someone who’d called it quits upon discovering that pictures would only happen if aperture and shutter-speed were – more or less –  working together. It was clear to all by now that punk was happening. Working for Virgin meant having tickets to most venues in and around Leeds. One such venue was Leeds University where – get this for a line-up – Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, The Clash, The Damned and The Sex Pistols were to play one of the rare gigs that formed the basis for the ‘Anarchy in the UK Tour’. In fact, Coventry was one of the few other venues that allowed them in (check out Kevin/ Isotope’s review of same). I believed it then - and I think history has recorded it in the same way - that although not top of the bill, it was the Clash that really delivered that night. Lydon looked spectacular, but essentially it was a ragged, gobby gesture. The Clash, performing in front of their own painted backdrop of urban high-rise living – were threatening and cinematic. Every one of them had presence. More than anything else that night, I think some folks might have actually felt a bit frightened.
Some friends in Coventry had moved in to the same sort of tower-block that the Clash were using for dramatic-shaping and sense-of-place. I think it was somewhere not far from the Stoney Stanton Road. Perhaps a bloke with a camera was a novelty, but as I recall, without too much prompting, the kids willingly participated in the construction of this photo-opportunity. For the record, I played no part in encouraging them, but it seems that – already – these kids are mugging for the camera in precisely the same way that countless punk-bands were to do for the next couple of years. Too many years in my view.
Almost 30 years later I find the 10 x 8 b/w print in a folder. The folder was in a bag which was in another bag. This is the closest I get to archiving. I decide to re-work the image using Adobe Illustrator, a package that – like Photoshop – enables the user to combine conventional, hands-on 'skills' with the sort of multi-layering and precision offered by digital media. You can ‘draw’ - or trace - with such a fine line in Illustrator. Most Photoshop files will pixelate  at 200%-300%, but because Illustrator sees those pixels as a different ‘shape’ (it’s the difference between raster and vector) you can just keep on zooming in.
Much has changed in the thirty years since this photograph was taken. Whilst - hopefully - it doesn’t put me in the same company as Gary Glitter or Pete Townshend, you’d be wise to run a mile from such photo-opps today.

Scanned from a photo that must have been taken on a box-camera, I now wish I had more like it. I think this may have been Buxton in the Peak District in the 60s. The perforated edges suggest that the photograph – effectively a ‘contact-print’ - has come from a booklet. I included the edges in scanning as – like a Polaroid – the framing implies a historical and socio-cultural context. It’s more than just funky.
Photography has always been the democratic medium, images such as this representing where and who we were. We didn’t always have a car and so day-trips like this will have been a rare and coordinated treat. I cannot recall who it was, but perhaps a grandparent or an aunt or an uncle will have framed us all. And a good job they made of it too.  Of course, the original image - like most from this period - is in monochrome. Colour was expensive. I can only speculate what an incredible, high-quality image you could be looking at if I had the original 120 negative and I had printed it in a darkroom. The amount of information facilitated by negatives this size is incredible and there can be little doubt that the miniaturisation of cameras and film that was to follow this period impacted on image ‘quality’. Remember those disc-cameras? In terms of the amount of film used, every picture from every 1970s holiday would fit on one 120-sized negative. Almost.
Obviously, the addition of colour is entirely speculative. I tell myself that I recall – very vaguely – a top with an interesting tennis-player motif. Looking now at the size of those ears, I can’t understand how I had the nerve to take that sky-blue hat off.

One of the many spectacularly empowering characteristics of the digital revolution is in its instaneity. Photographs such as this have long been possible, but the extent to which the user achieves - more or less - what they set out to do has never been so liberating. Of course, whatever one's perception or definition of what constitutes a 'good' photograph is always going to be subjective. As it is with music. I'm not particularly interested in pegs, but the camera - and medium of photography - has this extraordinary capacity to represent and transform what is in front of the lens. Even the most modest digital cameras now have macro features enabling the user to very simply produce images that reveal far, far more than the viewer actually sees when taking the photograph. And if it looks too light or too dark, you can take it again. I can't remember who said 'Photograph something in order to see what it looks like photographed' - I think it may have been Gary Winogrand - but it makes so much sense.