It’s Tuesday and I’m stuck in front of the computer waiting for the last 3 days of footage to be copied from the travel drive to my RAID. A travel drive that has travelled all the way from South Africa to Ireland with DHL as its travel provider. It’s for a new feature I’m working on, my 6th with SA company Azania Productions. One of the challenges of working so remotely is that while I am the only editor on the job I am also the only assistant editor on the job. So the task of copying, renaming and re-syncing, building timelines, managing paperwork etc all falls on my shoulders. It’s time consuming but I am fucking anal about how my library events look and how my folders are structured etc. I’ve talked in the past about Post Haste which is absolutely brilliant for house keeping and file management. I have at length gone on the rampage here about poor file naming and naming conventions and so won’t bore you any further on that front.
Now having looked back on what I just wrote and what you just read, you might feel that I am an ungrateful bastard and despise the chore. Well, I don’t. I thrive on doing the work because of one very real reason. I can get really up close and personal with the footage before I even start cutting. I don’t mean sitting and watching everything like I would when I’m about to actually cut something, but it’s the grabbing of clips at random and checking them against continuity sheets etc. Syncing clips and checking the sync in the timelines in the Synced Timelines Event. Scrubbing through snippets of footage and audio. It all serves to get my subconscious all a flutter, getting me to process a mindset of how I’m going to approach the material when I finally get into editing.
And this brings me onto what I wanted to ruminate on today. While I’m not really using my one working brain cell on editing by doing ‘menial’ tasks in the edit suite, I listen to music. Lot’s and lots of music. I have a very fucked up taste in music, not weird music but an eclectic array of tastes. I only have three dislikes in terms of music genres, Opera, Country and Western. It’s hard to put me in a box, and no it’s not because I’m a fat bastard, it’s just that I can’t be pinned down on one particular genre. I have friends who only listen to albums from the 70’s. Our music taste I feel is really defined when a teenager. My teenage years were in the mid 70’ and 80’s and I had a plethora of genres to get into. The 60’s gave us rock ‘n roll, the blues, prog, metal but the 70’s gave us a whole lot more, glam, hard rock, punk rock, disco, reggae, ska, new wave, post punk, synth pop, and so on And I loved it all. I ‘grew up’ listening to Queen, Bob Marley, The Clash, Wire, Gang of Four, Toto, Earth Wind and Fire, Roxy Music, Duran Duran, Madness, Special AKA, Tubeway Army, Kiss, Leonard Cohen, AC/DC, Shawn Phillips, The Cure, Marillion, Stiff Little Fingers, Chris de Burgh and countless others. I have this philosophy of not being like my parents (whom I dislike) who only ever listened to music from their day, like some of my friends previously mentioned. So because of the refusal to not be like my dysfunctional parental units, I am ‘forced’ to discover new music all the time. Now this does not just extend to today’s artists I also enjoy discovering artists from my youth and even before. In that way I am able to appreciate a wider range of music than many of my fellow brethren. For instance one of my recent biggest crushes was The Animals, yes House of the Rising Sun Animals. As a kid I did not follow Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd or Deep Purple and even Led Zep. But I did eventually. As time goes by I discover newer music, 21Pilots, Muse, Lorde, Portishead, Archive, Sophie B. Hawkins, Pink, Sleep Token, Floyd Wonder, Lola Young, Christina Perri, Toro y Moi. Hell I was even listening to Bhangra Music for a time.
I’m also a completionist so if I like one album I get the rest of the albums, I’m anal, remember. Sometimes I come across something from my past that I may have say 1 album of and fall back in love and rediscover the band or artist. One example is today, rekindling my love of Talk Talk. I have had their first album The Party is Over since it was released on vinyl then on CD and now on Apple Music but the biggest joy was discovering the one album of theirs I did not have, until today, and holy fuck it broke my brain. If you haven’t heard it I suggest you do, now. It’s their 4th album, Sprit of Eden. And it’s for me a truly remarkable album. It’s also got a great origin story behind it’s making that would just not be possible in this day and age.
My kids share the same eclectic taste and have a wide variety of things they listen to and what’s cool is that it’s not just new stuff, they love the older stuff too. Although I still can’t persuade them to love Marillion anywhere near as much as I do:-) They have developed a love nearly akin to mine for Nick Cave though. They also play music at me sometimes and drive my desire for finding new bands and artists. One source is TV Shows and Films. I found Archive as a result of a TV Show, too long ago now to remember which one, but that same show turned me on to Massive Attack as well. The Brothers Sun series on Netflix got me into Toro y Moi. His song Mr Postman is all types of quirky and catchy. Another way I track down new music is by listening to compilations, or best of lists. I spent ages going through Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time last year and found a number of great things. With the compilations, I sort through albums with lots of variety, the Now Series is sometimes a stopping off point, with oddities like LateNightTales a great source at the moment. So I am forever on the lookout. It keeps me young:-)
But… there is one song that stands out above everything else for me, I loads of favourite songs, Johnny Was by Stiff Little Fingers, So Long Maryanne by Leonard Cohen, Roxy Lady by Neill Solomon, For Your More Than This by Roxy Music, Into My Arms by Nick Cave, Something Waiting to Happen by Marillion, Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol (if I’m in need of a weep) but the one I listen to the most… It’s a great track for when I’m a little low or on a roll, or having a fucked up day or having a great day, taking a break from the work or just walking around the streets of London when I’m there. (That’s become a tradition now). The track is by a band most of you would never have heard of, and it is more South African than a South African from a town called Springs in South Africa. It’s The Radio Rats’ first single ZX Dan. I fucking love this song. Like FUCKING LOVE IT! I have loved this song since the day I heard it in 1979. I saw the Rats live at His Majesty’s Theatre in Commissioner Street Johannesburg and was the very first concert I ever went to. Followed by a night with Chris de Burgh in the same theatre a year later. And Exile probably a year after that, on an actual date with an actual girl. So while I may still dote on a track from when I was 15 years old I take pride in the fact that I’m not stuck there. I guess it’s because I’m too messy and then too fucking clean.
Or maybe just too fucking dumb?
Peace Love and Vomit
J
