DJ Dream Caravan has just done a big load, in preparation for spinning some tunes at a Fence Records showcase at Glasgow's Oran Mor next weekend, as part of the West End Festival. There's an amazing line-up; Fence, as usual, filling the machine beyond the manufacturer's recommended capacity. Where other labels might spread the load across two washes or more, to prevent potential damage to the machine, they always have to try to squeeze in just one more musical towel.
Anyway, it's a biggie, 5pm until midnight, with Randolph's Leap, Kid Canaveral, eagleowl, Pip Dylan, Monoganon and The Pictish Trail all playing. Dream Caravan will be the renegade pink sock let loose in the mix... going to try to play mostly appropriate records, and not turn anyone's sets a lurid shade of flamingo, but... as fellow travellers of the myth-dimensional vinyl spin cycle will know, when the cosmic flamingo awakens, its call can be hard to ignore.
There are still tickets left! You can find all the info here, and there's a Facebook event here.
Pleased to say that Peanut Snake will be dispatching their secret special-ops minor-affray DJ Dream Caravan to the dancefloor combat-zone of Anstruther's Legends night club this Friday, for the opening party of Fence Record's "Gnomegame" festival. Should be a blast!
Expect romantic space disco, some rudeboy riddims, er.. Eighties hip hop played at the wrong speed..? As for whether Legends is really ready for Ralphael's "Disco Lady"?? Well, it seems like a long shot, admittedly. But you have to try these things.
I've just done a poster for The Pictish Trail's upcoming tour with Eagleowl. Johnny Pictish has been hugely supportive of my vague efforts to draw more pictures this year, and gave me free reign with this design, a tragic lapse in judgement which has led to this heartbreaking image of a wobbly dog, lost, with inconclusive packed lunch, in Volcano Bacon National Park. Let's hope he gets out of there okay, and that this doesn't mark the end of my association with Fence. Anyway, a pleasure to draw something totally free range, so thank you Johnny! Go and check out the tour, it is going everywhere, it's a big bus and you cannot miss it.
Just did this poster for an upcoming Randolph's Leap gig in Glasgow.
The gig is to launch their new single, the Hermit E.P., being released on 7" by Fence Records as part of their Buff Tracks subscription series - full info here. I've had a sneaky listen and it's really flipping good!
I've designed a logo, and have also been working on a few posters and web bits for a braw new festival that Fence Records are staging in St. Andrews this April - Eye O' The Dug!
The artwork is intended to tie in with the cartographically-inspired artwork for their new Chart Ruse subscription 7" series (David Galletly is designing the sleeves for those, and the first one is a beaut).
The original brief was to produce a logo representing St. Andrews as the dug's eye on a map of Fife, but I've since manhandled the project down a dank tangent of my own making, which basically means that I've gotten to draw some dog-based cyclopean sea monsters. Good times.
You can find all the info about the festival at the Fence site here, or at the official Eye O' The Dug website (currently still in the tweeking stages at the time of writing). All up in the Facebooks here.
I recently designed a poster for Fence, paying cheeky homage to Kim Grove's Love Is.. These are being sent to independent record stores which order Fence stock, with each one personalised to the shop in question. Spreading the love!
The photo above is swiped from the Facebook page of Glasgow's Love Music, and the one below is from Fence's Facebook page, showing a magnificent display in Music's Not Dead, a new shop in Bexhill-on-Sea.
If you'd like a closer look at the poster, then please make your way to your nearest quality record shop! Avalanche, Monorail, Norman*, Unknown Pleasures, and One Up should also have them.. and if you're lucky you might manage to pick up one of the Fence Autumn catalogues, featuring a highly desirable nerd-ready checklist of every Fence release to date (which is a lot of releases!).
* Don't really try to visit Norman, it's only in the internet!
It's now been a month since Fence Records' second HaarFest event, and I think I'm just about ready to regather my senses, think up a local-news-style headline, and cast a teary backwards glance over the week's events.
HaarFest is Fence's more relaxed sister-event to the now well-established Homegame. Where that festival now has about forty-five acts, crammed into several venues over one weekend of concentrated chip suppers, pear cider and hedonism, Haarfest harks back to the event's earlier days, with the music only running in one venue at a time, and with quaintly diverting activities like sack races and geological walks to fill lazy days. And pear cider.
I was running a felt hat making workshop this year, which ran across two days, to meet demand. Yes, people were mad for making felt hats, it turned out.
The premise was similar to that behind last year's successful googley-eye workshop; to start with a simple idea that then provided a jumping-off point for participants to go bat-poo-crazy with: in this respect, the results could not have been more satisfying! HMS Ginafore had dubbed the workshop "Hardsparrow's Madhatters Hat Party", and so I felt duty bound to provide party rings and pink wafers, but a majority of these actually ended up as integral elements of people's headgear. We first made simple felt hoods, but these really began to come alive when the workshoppers started adding their own embellishments and design-twists!
You can see pictures of some of the hats on the Fence forum here.
Madhatters in Cellardyke Town Hall.
The hats were subsequently worn as part of a pageant on the Sunday, with King Creosote and HMS Ginafore leading a colourful musical procession, winding its way from the Fisheries Museum to the Cellardyke Town Hall, where a ceilidh dinner-dance brought the week's events to a climax. Later that evening, the last of the bands played, before King Creosote treated those still wobbling to carefully selected gems from his extensive collection of Eighties vinyl.
Confiscate KC's early Eighties vinyl at your peril
Sadly, I missed the church tea, the sports day, the playwriting workshops, and the Pictish Trail's musical pub-crawl, but the fascinating geological tour of the Cellardyke shoreline, and the usual sterling line-up of musical wonders (see video, top) more than made up for that. I'm sure there were other things too, moonlit swims in the Cellardyke pool, Seamus Fogarty on stage in a biscuit and feather-covered felt hat, rescuing toads, wandering around beaches in Pittenweem unable to find Jo Foster's art installation (had it washed away?).. but not much of it comes back to me with any clarity now, lost amidst the usual jumble of laughter, music, good times and drinking that constitute a Fence event! So, a big thanks for all the hard work of the organisers, and to all the inspirational hat-makers, and godspeed next year, when Haarfest will hopefully once again roll to shore.
Seamus Fogarty wears silly hat (photo by Ade Brown)
