Wednesday 16 June 2010

In the quest for employment Or: What is it with these nautical band names?

I seem to be a summer blogger. In my defense I just finished my final year at university and it was a nasty, complicated, anxious, infuriating, ecstatic, exhausting, dizzying time (that sounds mainly negative but believe me there were some wild good times as well). I had a couple pleasant surprises once I moved back into the family homestead and started looking for work. The first was that I found out a video I was in last summer with the Camden-based band Dead Sea Navigators had gone live, which was lovely. The song is called The Other Side and is a a dark, moody track in complete contrast to the song I will talk about below. It was produced by the new indie film company called Image Of Independence, and they did a great job. My first gig on 16mm! Awesome! Anyway here's the video:

Dead Sea Navigators - The Other Side video

Dead Sea Navigators has released their first EP and started doing gigs in Europe, which I'm happy about because it means maybe all the blood, sweat and gin that went into making the video paid off for them.

The second surprise came not long after when Tom Milsom called me up and asked me to step in and make a music video with him and a few other people. It was kinda confusing and last-minute but I was happy to help out, even knowing next to nothing about what this was going to entail. But once I got to London and met the other people things got a little more interesting. They didn't really explain that much about the long-term aims of this project and so I gradually learned more about it over just the last couple days, but basically what it was intended to be is a promotional video for their new musical band collective thing ('band' seems a little restrictive for the model they're attempting, as explain in this video) which is called Sons Of Admirals and is comprised of the YouTubers and musicians Tom Milsom, Alex Day, Eddplant and Charlie McDonnell.


Umm yeah so I got to romp around London's East End with some of the most famous contemporary people you've probably never heard of and make a music video about how dreadful girls are (bros before hos as many commenters on YouTube noted) and getting hit on by an awful lot of randomers including a stoned-looking Jamaican guy riding pillion on his friend's bicycle who invited me back to his place (I didn't go). The song is a cheerful and innovative cover of a Cat Stevens song called Here Comes My Baby. In any case - video:

Sons Of Admirals - Here Comes My Baby video (Cat Stevens cover)

The video was to promote both Sons Of Admirals and their version of the song which was released as a single on iTunes a couple days ago. Last time I checked it was at No. 48 in the iTunes Singles Chart which was pretty surprising. I really would recommend you go check it out and , if you like it, download it for the standard 79p from iTunes.
The other side of Sons Of Admirals, as you would have seen if you had clicked on this video is that it's a flexible way for each of these solo artists to get their music out to a wider audience, which can only be good, since it's delightful. Now, I doubt doing this video will get me employed any time soon and so my search for work continues, but that really wasn't the point of doing it for me. I got to meet and know some really lovely people, explored a bit, learned a bit and got to be involved in the start of what could be something rather excellent.

If you are at all interested in looking into these guys further they all have Twitters, websites, YouTubes and facebook fan pages that you can find rather easily either through the links in this blog. To find out more about SOA it's worth following the band collective thing Twitter and keeping an eye on the various band members' YouTube channels, since this is still their primary way of reaching out to their fans. The Guardian also wrote an article about them and they got a brief bit of radio play on BBC Radio 2 yesterday after calling on their fans to request the song be played. Other than that all I can say is go check them out, follow, subscribe, comment, like, buy the song and do all those things that make these boys happier and more determined to succeed and make a living from the things they love doing. As for me, back to looking for work and maybe one day I'll be able to do what I love for a living as well.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good luck on your quest for work! May fortune smile at you! xxx

Tasha said...

You're soo lucky you got to meet them! :)