Andy Ross – Almost People

Andy Ross - Almost People from fugueur on Vimeo.

Last Sunday evening my old friend Andy Ross came over to Leytonstone to make a video previewing his debut album Almost People, which was produced by ex-Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay at Press Play Studios in South London.
Andy was my room-mate in a terraced house in Forest Gate when I arrived in London from the Chilterns back in 1989. We had both rocked up carrying guitars that we could barely play but that didn’t stop us spending the next 3 years writing songs and forming a band with the rest of our dubious bunch of housemates who had little more musical apptitude than us. We were a parody of a late Thatcher student band with songs like ‘Block of Concrete Flats’, ‘Brian Walden’ and others too cringe-worthy to set down here.We carried on writing music for a bit after leaving Poly, recording songs on borrowed four-track machines, but I wandered off on my travels (buying a guitar on the way) and that ended our musical collaboration.
But Andy has perservered and honed his craft over the ensuing 20 years and he’s now made a really beautiful album. It was a genuine treat for me to be able to rekindle the collaboration in some form but this time with some proper songs that don’t have titles that sound like they had come from the pen of Rick from The Young Ones
We went up to The Hollow Ponds to catch the last hour of light which I seem to have slightly miscalculated meaning that we were chasing the sunset around the edge of the water. Being a Sunday we ambled round the grounds of the parish church and I grabbed a few images of Andy on the church steps before, out of the gloom, the vicar started shouting angrily at us about the Churchyard being private property and that we should ask permission to enter – no wonder church numbers are dwindling.
Oddly one of Andy’s songs I remember most from Poly days was called Vicar in his Chapel – perhaps it was a prophecy.

Westfield Stratford City drift (with rotting meat and Olympic village vertical slum)

Yesterday evening I got a call from artist Bob and Roberta Smith asking if I fancied exploring the new Westfield Stratford City that had just opened that day down the road from Leytonstone. I quickly grabbed my minidisc recorder and a mic and off we went.
Bob then played out the entire disc live and unedited on his Resonance fm show, Make Your Own Damn Music. This is a sample of the broadcast.

The London Perambulator in full

John Rogers, Iain Sinclair, Will Self

Here’s the full-cut of The London Perambulator that I’ve decided to release online after two years on the festival circuit. The film is not just a profile of enigmatic cult writer Nick Papadimitriou but about the lure of the edgelands of the city, the idea of psychogeography and Nick’s very own Deep Topography.

When I made my first video with Nick in 2005 I remember Googling ‘deep topography’ and there was nothing. Now it has been discussed at academic conferences, cited in national newspapers, mentioned on Radio 4 and even been the subject of an item on Newsnight. To cap it all Nick landed a publishing deal with a top London publisher to write the definitive deep topographic text which is due out next year.

I’m not sure we knew what to expect when we premiered the film at The Whitechapel Gallery in the East End Film Festival, April 2009. When you perambulate the margins as we do, schlepping round the fringes of industrial estates and tromping through the ‘acoustic footprint’ of the North Circular, you develop a natural scepticism about how your endeavours will be received. But the screening sold out that night. The film was discussed by a panel that included Iain Sinclair, Will Self, myself and was chaired by Dr Andrea Philips from Goldsmiths – and seemed to go down well.

More screenings followed, including The London International Documentary Festival, Cine City Brighton Film Festival and Doc Days at Curzon Soho.  A few years ago I’d been inspired by seeing Jem Cohen’s Chain at the Curzon and here now was our film playing on the same screen. That was a good moment, but there have been loads.

Putting it up Youtube now feels like a homecoming of sorts – that was where we uploaded our first videos and you could, if you wished, chart the progress of the project through to its conclusion with The London Perambulator.

Although is that the conclusion? We continue our work together with our radio show on Resonance fm (that was a product of the film) and I’ve inevitably filmed Nick on walks. Who knows, maybe there’ll be ‘Scarp – the movie’.

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Ventures & Adventures field recordings

We’re starting to think about another series of Ventures and Adventures in Topography on Resonance fm so I’ve been sorting through some of the field recordings from walks from the first two series.
The first recording here is a reading from the introduction to The Fringe of London – this is the credo that inspired our walks. 
The complete podcasts can be downloaded here

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golden hour

SANY1962

This was the view west from Blackfriars Bridge at around 7.30pm this evening

Sany1962

SANY1971
We walked via St Andew’s Hill and looked in at Wardrobe Place where the plane trees reach over the Georgian buildings in defiance of their life-spans, soon to expire.

Sany1971

 

Paternoster Square felt like the living civic centre that the architects probably hoped for – the Italinate piazza where families take an evening passeggiata

paternoster.mov Watch on Posterous
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Scenes from an East London garden

Last year I thought I’d do my bit for the dwindling bee population and plant some borage after nurturing 4 or 5 plants from seed. This summer they came back with a vengeance entirely covering a previously barren plot of dusty lifeless soil. The borage patch is now alive with bees. So I thought of getting help from a lawn service near me and handle the issue at the earliest.

 

Look at them here getting absolutely sozzled on nectar, sucking it in till their little furry cheeks puff out. That’s probably not what they do at all but they seem to be in some sort of elevated state as they dance between the translucent blue petals bumping into each other like inebriates staggering home from the pub.

After attending Pestival in 2009 I vowed to let my garden become a bit more untidy to allow the insect universe to flourish. I let the herbs go to seed and now this small kitchen patch is bustling with hexapoda activity.

I saw this  butterfly jockeying with a bee for the best position on the flowering mint. I’ve had a go at identifying the butterfly without luck – I’ll take a punt that it’s a variety of Skipper.

There’s an element of jeopardy feeding here as it is the domain of a greedy-gutted spider that has spun his super-sticky web across the entire bed. The other day I saw him capture a wasp, wrap it in web then carry it off to hang from the underside of a mint leaf. Such efficient slaughter. My young son informed me that the spider would inject a poison into the wasp’s gut that would liquify it and allow him to suck it up much as the boy slurps down a smoothie.

A ladybird and a flying ant both took a promenade along the wicker arch that supports the sweat peas, largely indifferent to each other each, peacefully co-existing – maybe we can learn something from them (but not the spider perhaps).

These yellow flowers have emerged quietly in the shade of the overhanging ivy. Consulting R.S. Fitter’s Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers (1956) tells me that they’re a Ragwort of some kind I like the idea that they’re  Hoary Ragwort simply because of the name, although they’re most likely Marsh Ragwort, meaning that the seeds could well have come home with us from a walk on Leyton Marshes or Wanstead Flats.

Knowing the name of the plants that spring up in your garden changes your relationship with them – they’re no longer just a weed but have a heritage and a mythology – there’s a popular belief that Ragwort can kill horses (not by sneaking up and strangling them but if the horse eats its own body weight of the intensely bitter leaves).

Apparently Ragwort is a favourite of the stripy caterpillar of the cinnabar moth which I spotted over on Wanstead Flats recently, then when down in Devon last week saw a few of the post-pupa moths themselves marvellous black and red wings lighting up a deep Devon hedgerow.

One of the most surprising things to emerge from the ground this year is a triffid-like pumpkin plant, legacy of leaving last year’s Halloween lantern to rot on the edge of the vegetable patch that has no vegetables (until now). Two grasshoppers have taken up residence on its great bristly leaves – or are they crickets. I haven’t heard them sing yet.

Here are some more photos – all taken with the space of about 20 minutes

Update @ 21.30: This fella just came and joined the party and hop out across my foot as I was watering the borage

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