Out of gallery
I have been collaborating with George Vjestica. George is the guitarist in the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He also writes and records his own songs and music as Bandante. We are both big fans of the scene around the ‘happenings’ in London during the 1960’s at various underground clubs like UFO and The Speakeasy. When George was first thinking of doing some live Bandante shows, we talked about the raw creative flow and tremendous spirit the UFO nights must have had going on, and wanted to do something inspired by that. Since then, we’ve been putting together shows now and then with Bandante headlining the bill, with a moveable feast of players, whilst I create spontaneous sound and light installations with super 8 ‘collage’, film loops and liquid light using a crazy array of film projectors, overhead and slide projectors. Various spoken word performers and dj’s have joined us, and together we aim to give our audience the feeling of being in some far-out place.
In 2018, Bandante released its first 7” vinyl single - Bang Bang b/w My Friend, entering the Official Vinyl Charts at #23, Rough Trade’s ‘vinyl of the year’ and The Vinyl Factories’ ‘vinyl of the month’. I made the cover artwork and videos for both songs. During 2020, and the live music venue shutdown, I made a third video, thousands of images gathered off the net and sequenced together for George’s latest recording So....this is now - put together towards the end of the first London lockdown and released during the summer as a video single on youtube.
When I am out with Bandante, I am usually so up to my neck with film reels and bottles of coloured dye that I rarely manage to take any pictures of our nights, but the few I have are included in the gallery above, along with the 3 videos and some of our publicity posters.
Out of gallery