Members of Comet Gain and Crystal Stilts have joined forces for Cinema Red And Blue, a new project which spans the Atlantic.
With their debut album due to be released on October 25th, ClashMusic invited David Feck to introduce the project..
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1 – Cinema, Red and Blue started in my head as some kind of revenge project on who or what I forget – the first recording was about 6 years ago in Phil’s place when he lived in a proper country in the Highgate region of north Londonshire – we did a Weekend song (the band) a John Cale song (the Welshman) a Bertholter song and one of my cheesy potatoes – I lost the tape except for the cale song which i cheekily put on a Comet Gain “crap we were too embarrassed to put out before but now were desperate” CDR things…I wrote an epic soundtrack called “The Lowest Ebb And Comeback Of..” but lost that too – we went to America and hung with these handsome men one of which was Phil – we thought a good excuse to get closure to them was to pretend we had this band and ooh lets do an lp, but it all went horribly wrong and we got drunk and somehow this lp actually got made in 5 days -we even got to walk over the bridge and eat New York things. Fun.
2 – Cinema, Red and Blue is a collective of “memory ache” a singular inner series of sentimental photographs on display in code, a hieroglyph of emotional debris and the attempt to collate meaning and forward thinking answers to deeper themes by joining like minded types in a carefully orchestrated “fun” atmosphere and let chaos loose to see results and whether we can produce new archetypes for future generations. See also “excuses to get drunk for 5 days and eat Mexican food”.
3 – “It was certainly more fun mentally than playing Comet Gain songs because there was no expectation and i could get away with just asking someone else to do the difficult bits – Kyle especially – we all just loosened up and decided to just see how it went and if in fact we could do 17 songs in a short amount of time – without fear of adding chords and verses and such or passing out during a guitar solo knowing that Andy or JB would just pick up said guitar and continue solo until I passed in again. Also learnt that Americans CAN drink huge amounts of beer and that cicadas become annoying after awhile and that Gary is a dancing man and once you get into a musty cupboard with a musty man its hard to get out again. And that in Brooklyn Anne-Laure decides beer o’ clock starts about 10 minutes before she has a keyboard to play – even if we just woke up.
4 – “They are all very handsome and eager to rock, they know a lot more chords than I do and that 12 strings are gonna fuck your fingers up. I love those guys – sob sob – sorry getting emotional now… better punch myself in the belly till it dies down.
5 – “The idea was always half my songs and half other songs that were kinda obscure so we could do as we wished and they would sound fresh to even uber nerds – I had been playing the hermans hermits song fer awhile – I don’t like most of there records but that song makes me think of films like ‘Billy Liar’ etc – in fact theres a lot of kitchen sink stuff like ‘Charlie Clarke’ – the Julian Cope song cos nobody in America seems to dig the glorious Cope – on the record its off its about 1 minute long so i thought lets do a 10 minute acid folk Velvets dirge which sadly we edited to about 5 minutes…we tried to make Dead Moon sound like Go Betweens – I loved that song from a mix tape Ian the Spiv Svenonius made me years ago – The West Coast Pop Art are one of my fave bands and it had great words – the Mathew Sawyer song cos he’s a great modern songwriter and I liked it in the old folky days when people would do songs from friends to kinda help out… of the originals I like that vision pure is about being in Comet Gain but it’s a Cinema Red and Blue song – Jesse Lee Kincaid is some gothic story and turns out I musta read the name in some rock ‘n’ roll memoir cos he’s a real person who did this great baroque folkrock song – I just like the sound of his name – most of side one was just gonna be people’s names – stories from people who populated the Cinema Red And Blue-like mini films-all the songs are short kitchen sink films about outsiders, losers, weirdos and creeps. I think… sounds good though.”
