Sunshine Beauty – a geek summer anthem from Ben Walker on Vimeo.
I’ve had this song kicking around in various states since before Christmas, but since today felt like the first day of summer I decided to finish it off. I let my email subscribers see it yesterday as a special treat (I’ve been sending them a weekly email about social media and music).
I’ll be playing it for the first time at Ben’s Big Gig next Friday! ;)
It’s been a busy week in Benville. I’ve been selling tickets, plastering posters and organising video, wireless, poetry, comedy, pianos and shrubs for Ben’s Big Gig.
The highlight has been the beautiful new gig posters. Nick Gill printed them by hand (on a proper old-school letterpress), and blogged about it. Xander and I then spent a pleasant afternoon pottering around North Oxford and charming our way into the most bizarre shop windows.
We’re still hammering out the details of the set and coming up with quirky and amusing vocal harmonies to lift the arrangements to a new level of pop genius. Here’s a little treat from the phone camera archives:
Today I made a video (or a “music clip”, as the Australians would have it) for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the second song I have written for the 50/90 Challenge. Shot entirely on location in rural Oxfordshire, it features several different fields, some sheep and even some lavender. Check it out:
I was going to include a load of explanatory photos to add to the comedy effect but I couldn’t bring myself to detract from the pure rural beauty of the raw footage, so I’ll explain here. Firstly, for those of you who don’t know who Hugh is:
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (born 14 January 1965) is a British celebrity chef, television presenter and “real food” campaigner, known for his back-to-basics philosophy.
On television, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s reputation is that of a eccentric chef. Initial exposure came in Cook on the Wild Side, an exploration of earthy cuisine. His habit of “picking up roadkill and eating the hedgerows [...] earned him his nickname of Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall”. He followed this with the series TV Dinners, during an episode of which he notoriously flambéed and puréed a human placenta which was served as a pâté and “much enjoyed by the baby’s family and friends”.
from Wikipedia
I was introduced to Hugh by my friend Rowan, who recently appeared out of the blue on the Channel 4 reality holiday show Shipwrecked. Back when we were in a band together, Rowan used to bring bags of videos to the studio and make us all watch alternating episodes of River Cottage and Ultimate Wrestling, in which fighters from every discipline would be pitched against each other in a battle to the death. Or so it seemed. Lucky for me, I repressed all memories of Ultimate Wrestling until recently and instead concentrated on the rural, organic idealism of the Hugh.
There’s a line in the song that says “he grows PSB in the shade of a tree”. If you haven’t tried locally grown Purple Sprouting Broccoli, you haven’t lived:
I also mention that Hugh can tell his woodcock from his snipe. Can you?:
And while we’re at it, to pass the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall chicken test, can you tell the difference between battery farmed and free range chicken?:
That’s probably enough quasi-educational rambling for now. I hope you enjoyed the song and the video. And if you happen to run into Hugh in your local Tesco car park, be sure to tell him about it…
[thanks Flickr for the Creative Commons licensed photos. Click the images for originals.]
It’s not necessarily finished yet, but who needs to finish songs when they can be YouTubed around the world in seconds and then fly back like a boomerang laden with feedback and comments, ready to be rewritten and demoed a few more times. Unfinished is the new finished.
Of course sometimes things are actually finished. Like the five songs I put on last.fm yesterday under the title “I Hate Mornings Vol. 1″:http://www.last.fm/music/JB+Walker/I+Hate+Mornings+Vol.+1. They’re good to go. Fully baked. Done.
h3. It’s all about Tenpower.
So the new song is cool. Poppy (as in the genre, not the flower). Simple. Effective. It’s called Ten. Want to know why? I’ll tell you. I was reading cvs2bvs: software for your brain from the “School Of Thinking”:http://www.schoolofthinking.org, and came across the concept of Tenpower, which is “the deliberate or habitual use of the number 10″ as a way of imposing an arbitrary system of measurement on a situation. The idea is that you can always aim for a situation that is “ten times better” even if you can’t measure the initial situation.
Applying tenpower to a fraught relationship, we find our hero desperately trying to prove his love (on paper) by working out how many times better things are now that he is with his lady. As I’m sure you’re all aware, this isn’t really what girls are looking for when they ask you to prove your love. As usual, the solution is not to look for a solution (even if you can prove it on paper), but to think “outside the box”:http://www.schoolofthinking.org/how-sot-training/lateral-thinking/ and go for the age old three pronged attack of Understanding, Validation and Emotional Support. But that’s for another song. You’ll have to make do with some amusing facial expressions for now…
h3. Video
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