Jamie Harrison, Man Is Slapped, Thomas Flipping Truax

There's a dude called Thomas Truax who I've been a fan of for a while. He invents his own musical instruments out of gramophone horns and bicycle wheels and his website introduced me to the word "Steampunk" and he's all sorts of awesome. When I noticed he was coming to York last December I started hopping from foot to foot with excitement, and sent him an email asking if I could film him for posterity. He emailed me telling me to ask the organisers, who told me to ask the venue manager, who stuffed a load of fliers into my hands then told me to ask the organisers and Thomas again. The whole thing  sort of went ahead with everyone expecting everyone else to say no. 

I don't go to gigs as much as I should. It was weird finally meeting someone you are massively in awe of among a couple of people who aren't quite so much; people were setting things up, discussing sound levels, asking where I wanted to put the cameras, and all the time I was just standing there looking like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of The Body Snatchers. 

I'VE SEEN YOU. ON THE INTERNET.

The whole gig was amazing, the supporting acts Jamie Harrison and Man Is Slapped were utterly fantastic, because of it I ended up writing a 2500 word essay between the hours of midnight and 10AM but it was totally worth it. 

And then somehow it took me four months to edit. I mean, I had lots of other things to do in the interim, but I also got into dangerous levels of nitpicking. It's easy to do this with editing live music shows, you think you've got a nice little rhythm of cutting from one camera to the other and back again, then one of the cameras jerkily zooms in to a close up of someone's nostril or a chair leg for two minutes and your silly arty little crossfades pattern falls apart. Then there were actual problems, like one of the cameras of our two camera setup dying halfway through one of the segments. It was all a bit silly. Anyway I've finally declared it done and stuck the whole thing on the internet tonight. I'm not sure what people are going to think of it. The B3ta board has been silent so far, maybe they thought I was trying to sell them something. Maybe it was because I posted it at one in the morning. 

The playlist of songs can be found here, here are some of my favourites:

See? Awesome. You should watch the rest of these. 

Will.