Perhaps my favourite track in making on the album from last year Lucky Spoon was the song Daft as Me. The melody found itself one day on the piano and had a folk like purity to it. It was written after a friend helped me move a small ships piano from my front room to his sisters. Truth of the matter was neither of us were the young fit youths we used to be and the scene was reminiscent of the Laurel & Hardy episode involving a piano. So with this in mind the song developed into expolring the intractable qualities of friendship & kindred spirits.
Next in the process was recording the song and creating an idea of space and timelessness. I love the album that Jon Hopkins & King Creosote did together so I added the sound of seagulls recorded over Barrow in Furness with a drone in the key of the song. I then asked my violin playing friend Sim to create a counterpoint on a violin with a reference to Vaughn Williams Lark Ascending. He then created effectively a string quartet part. With all of this including the piano part I close recorded at home went to my friend Barkley Mckay's studio in Leeds ! Well Barkley had a vision for the song and started to build an unbelievable depth to the piece by creating an endless loop from the piano part I had recorded - he then added electric guitar parts that grew sonically above and below the whole piece and suggested adding another vocal dimension with stereo vocal parts. The result this incredibly lush crescendo of sound as the song climaxes and then comes down to earth again at the end.
Ok fast forward a year and I'm at a car boot/flea market and see this toy red grand piano for sale. I immediately have a vision of this tune being played on a lonely beach - something like a pythonesque version of the Piano movie. I then remembered a friend from the isle of wight who was making drone films of beaches and I got in touch . The final jigsaw puzzle was finding a red Chelsea Pensioners coat for sale in a local charity shop and I suddenly had visions of this lost Napoleon character playing the toy piano and an idea was born. We filmed the footage on two days on the Island. The first location was Whitecliff bay. We were wanting the epic white cliff aaginst the red but were taken back as much by the first lights and shadows on the actual beach. We must have picked the most beautiful day of the year as we got there at 6am to film. The beach looked stunning. The second shot was on Brook down the following evening looking to the opposite end of the island. Again we were lucky to get a beautiful light that was so evocative of everywhere and nowhere. The video was edited by myself on my poor creaking computer but the end result came out great ! Please enjoy and share !
https://youtu.be/MPwTqYtibY8?si=5UynYN4soRVuFxFf