paul capewell's blog

May 15, 2012

Are you writing a book? It sounds like you’re writing a book.

After missing breakfast yesterday, I was up early for breakfast today [at the Windsor Hotel, Christchurch] and spoke briefly to the lady at my table, a social worker from Wellington, down for a conference.

Headed over to Tuam Street and Real Groovy [record store] and had a quick browse and texted Paul [Kean]. He met me outside shortly after and led me to a coffee shop a couple of blocks away and jogged and started like a kid now and then. I bought him a long black and me a flat white and we took a seat. Piercing blue eyes and a child-like way of sitting with his feet up on a chair. Lots of chat about his bands The Bats and Minisnap and coming to London soon. Very enthusiastic. He answered a couple of my questions about how he heard about new music in the late 70s and early 80s, and how he had set up the makeshift studio in his old flat to record the Dunedin Double EP, amongst other things.

So I wrote, in my diary on February 20, 2008, in Christchurch, New Zealand.

A lot of Christchurch has changed since I was there last. The devastating earthquakes have meant that, amongst hundreds of others, The Windsor Hotel has gone, and so has Real Groovy. But I shan’t dwell on that here.

When I went to meet Paul Kean four years ago, it was on a bit of a whim. Having been into NZ music for years – particularly the sort of post-punk and guitar rock released by Flying Nun Records in the early 1980s – I found myself with a few days in Christchurch, the spiritual home of all things Nun.

Having chatted with Roi Colbert – an expert in the area, and a thoroughly nice chap – he encouraged me to meet up with anyone I fancied grilling on the subject of the music made back then. His encouragement in the past had led me to exchanging a few emails with The Clean’s David Kilgour – a hero of mine – and I took him at his word.

I can remember fairly clearly, sitting on my bed in the cosy little twin room at the Windsor at 8.30pm, holding my mobile phone, and dialling Paul Kean’s home number. He had no idea I’d be calling, and when his wife picked up, I suddenly found myself having to explain who on earth I was, and why on earth I was calling.

“Is Paul there? Yeah, it’s Paul. He doesn’t know me. Thanks… Uh, hi. My name’s Paul and I’m from England. I’m in Christchurch for a couple of days and I was wondering if you’d have the time to meet up for a coffee and a quick chat about a few things to do with Flying Nun, and all that sort of thing…?”

“Sure! Of course, I’d love to.”

“Oh! Oh, wow. Ok. Well – I’m leaving in a couple of days. Could you meet me tomorrow?”

“Of course. I could meet you for a coffee in the morning? I know a great place. Do you know where Real Groovy is?”

And so it was. I’d rung up a complete stranger and he had quickly agreed to meet me for a coffee the very next morning. It turns out that most of the Kiwis I’ve ever met will pretty much extend you the same sort of blind kindness. It’s really nice.

My meeting with Paul Kean was brief, and it is largely covered in the above quote from my diary of the time. I sort of wish I’d recorded the chat – I went on to have a couple more conversations with other similar folks about similar things – but it is still fairly fresh in my mind four years on. I loved Paul’s infectious, childlike enthusiasm – especially for things that happened thirty years ago.

I’d thought that a lot of the people involved in all that stuff would be sick to the back teeth of talking about it, but Paul talked about rigging up the makeshift recording studio in his parents’ home – by sticking the tape recorder in the next room, a bathroom, I think, and running the cables through the doorways – like it was something he’d done the other week.

He was just as enthusiastic about living and working in Christchurch, and about his current project, Minisnap, and a French band he’d had staying recently, while on tour.

In amongst my questions, which were admittedly rather primitive and unprepared, Paul asked me a question:

“Are you writing a book?”

“Oh! Um, no, I’m just kind of… Interested I guess.”

“…It sounds like you’re writing a book!”

Maybe I was – at least in my head. When I spoke to another chap closely tied into Christchurch music from the early days – he recorded The Clean’s Tally Ho!, the second single released by Flying Nun – Arnie van Bussell agreed with Paul, adding a philosophical slant on it, saying that everybody ought to be writing a book, especially nowadays with such easy access to authoring tools.

Maybe so, maybe not.

The point is, this trip, and those meetings, didn’t lead to me writing a book. They’ve led to all sorts of photographs, diaries, blog posts and countless hours of thought and daydream. And maybe that’s better than a book, at least for me personally.

But I was reminded of all this stuff – and about Paul’s query – hearing him in a recent interview. The excellent 95bFM, a student radio station in Auckland, is currently broadcasting a documentary series about Flying Nun EP releases. Each of the 22 hour-long episodes deals with one particular EP, talking to those involved in making it at the time, and playing the tracks from it.

It’s a masterclass in the radio documentary form, at least in terms of source material, and it’s great to hear familiar tracks explained fully, and to discover some that I’ve overlooked.

All the episodes are available online to stream and download here: http://95bfm.com/default,18,bcasts.sm?cast=205161

Paul Kean features on last week’s episode, dealing with sides 1 & 2 of the Dunedin Double EP, featuring The Chills and Sneaky Feelings. The recording of the EP was what Paul and I discussed in the above recollection. On the documentary you’ll hear Paul’s own recollection – he’s the one with the chirpy, kiddish delivery!

There’s even some short video clips of the interviews used on the shows, which makes me wonder if the whole thing was filmed as well as recorded, and might lead to a DVD release or similar. That’d be pretty great. But it already makes for excellent radio.

It’s a great project, and it makes me a little sad that I didn’t do more with the opportunities I had four years ago – maybe I should have written that book? – but I also know that I wasn’t the man for the job.

Luckily though, there are plenty who are.

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May 13, 2012

So I turned my bedroom into a camera obscura

This weekend, when I was supposed to be revising for one of my final exams on Monday, I had an itch that needed scratching.

Since moving into this house nearly three years ago, I’ve often thought that my bedroom would work well as a camera obscura. That’s the name for a closed box with a small hole at the end to let light in. The light from the hole is then projected onto the opposite end. It’s how a camera works, actually, and it works in a ‘box’ from the size of a matchbox pinhole camera, right up to a room or specially-designed domed roof.

I saw this done on a BBC documentary about photography a few years ago, and it’s been at the back of my mind ever since.

The theory is simple: the small hole acts as a lens, and as the light pours through, it is inverted and projected onto the opposite wall. You then get a ‘live’ projection of the world outside on the darkened wall.

And the box/room must be darkened – as close to pitch black as possible. With a small box, you’d use tape. For a box the size of a bedroom, you must black out all sources of light from the windows. I used bin liners, but you can use anything that will do the job.

The best thing about the setup is that the ‘lens’ is really just a hole. Literally just a 10p-sized hole, cut into whatever material you are using to black out the windows. I read some stuff about using an actual lens over this hole – presumably to sharpen the projected image – but it’s pretty clear without.

All the ‘gear’ I used was:

a roll of parcel or gaffer tape;
a roll of twenty or so bin liners;
a pair of scissors.

The bin liners weren’t ideal – they’re quite thin, and I had to double up the layers. Thicker garden waste bags might work, or you can buy a more expensive roll of thicker plastic, for lining ponds, for example.

Anyway. Once I had spent an hour or two carefully covering the windows and plugging any stray sources of light, I turned off my bedroom lights. The room was pitch black once my eyes had adjusted. I went over to the larger window and pinched the middle of the plastic, cutting a small hole. Immediately, light shone in. I looked over to the opposite wall, and was instantly blown away by what I saw…

Crazy!

Due to Science, the image is, of course, inverted. This takes a minute to get used to, and makes it quite fun to look around at a familiar scene, trying to spot where it has ended up in the room. And because the image is live (for some reason, I half expect it to be static), the movement of the clouds and tree branches is quite magical.

It was a bright, sunny day, and my bedroom faces south east, and this makes for ideal conditions to make a camera obscura. It also helps if your room is painted a light, plain colour, with as few distractions as possible to break up the image. I removed most of the pictures and frames from the wall to provide as large a canvas as possible.

Purpose-built camera obscura can be found here and there – I visited this one in Bristol about fifteen years ago and was very impressed.

The colours you see in the images above are a bit brighter than they appear in real life. That’s because they are long exposures – between 5 and 20 seconds, I believe, allowing the camera more time to absorb the colours and light.

As well as inverting the image, the hole ‘lens’ actually helps you to understand how camera lenses work. The smaller the hole (or aperture), the less light can get in, but the sharper the image. The larger the hole, the brighter the image, but the fuzzier it is. I experimented a little, holding up a few lenses to the hole – but nothing beat the hole itself.

If I wanted to take the metaphor further, I could’ve used a wall-sized piece of film or photographic paper, and created a print. My room would then have basically been a camera proper. Unfortunately, wall-sized photo paper and film is a little hard to come by, so I was happy to revel in the experience in person – as well as taking some digital snapshots.

An amazing result, and I’m so glad I gave it a go. It might also be the most extravagant and time-consuming form of procrastination I’ve completed to date. That’s something to celebrate. Now, back to revision.

Finally, this short video neatly helps to show the whole process, should you be curious:

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May 10, 2012

A sudden downpour – then thunder: Little Linford, Buckinghamshire

The calm before the storm… Little Linford

We had just crossed a sloping field, home to some pretty ponies, when we decided it was time to pop our raincoats back on. Once over the stile, we took a moment to assess our position, and to look at our surroundings. Behind us, the sloping field led to open farmland; before us, the start of native woodland, heavy with new growth.

It was the colour of the sky, threatening and seeming to darken as we looked at it, that compelled us to wrap up. A distant rumble was heard; I had dismissed it as a lorry on the nearby M1 motorway, but it soon became clear that it was, unmistakably, thunder.

We felt the first drops of rain coming through the thick canopy of trees overhead as we made our way along the footpath, still sodden from days of heavy showers. It was now evident that another of those showers was well on its way.

The path led us along the edge of a field where overhanging trees had recently been trimmed and tidied. The resulting piles of branches and foliage resembled large bonfires waiting to be lit, but as the rain began to pour, such a prospect seemed impossible.

By the time we had emerged onto the open fields once more, the rain had gotten steadily heavier and the flat land concealed large patches of at first boggy, then waterlogged grass. Our jackets kept the rain out comfortably, but our inadequate footwear had long since given up the fight.

Suddenly, a flash. Indistinct, and located somewhere above us in the vast, grey murk of the sky – but definitely lightning. As if to reassure us that we weren’t seeing things, the expected rumble followed a few seconds later. Where the earlier rumble had been some way to the west, this latest sound reverberated all around us in the sky above, as if in glorious surround sound.

With a sodden path leading ahead of us to a fishing reserve, and increasingly regular cracks of thunder and lightning all around us, we retreated to a road leading to a farmhouse. The thunderclaps came every couple of minutes, with the lightning now very obviously forked, striking only a few miles away. Where the rumbles had previously been low and mournful, they were now sharp, crackling with a frightening intensity.

With our pace quickened by the ferocity of the weather, we took shelter from the torrential rain by a roadside house. The winding country lane was slick with a few centimetres of rain, and we gathered ourselves as close to the house as possible, our frantic knocking unfortunately going unanswered.

Thankfully, the strikes of thunder and lightning were getting further apart, but the rain was at its heaviest as we watched the road for familiar vehicles. Cars sped by, an arc of spray following each one.

Then, suddenly, our lift! I rearranged my backpack to protect our precious cargo of cameras before sprinting up the path to the road, which now resembled a skid pan, and with visibility very low. Getting into the warm vehicle, I don’t think we’ve ever been more relieved to get out of the weather and into the insulated warmth.

As we drove off, the rain, impossibly, seemed to grow yet heavier.

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May 5, 2012

Station X – an exhibition at MK Gallery

Photo: Rachael Marshall

Milton Keynes on a Saturday afternoon can be incredibly disorientating and disconcerting. So it was with some luck that I happened to stumble into the MK Gallery – or more precisely, the neighbouring Project Space – and the new Station X exhibition.

I’m interested in the history of Bletchley Park – also known as Station X – and the blurb on the door piqued my interest.

Inside I found a collaboration between four artists, each from a different background, which aims to document the ‘visual and aural histories’ of some of the Park’s derelict buildings.

I went from the usual Saturday afternoon hubbub – of people coming and going from the theatre and shopping centre, and of the blustery April weather – into a small but self-contained area which instantly began stimulating my senses.

On the walls of the gallery are photographs taken inside the derelict huts by Rachael Marshall – oh, but what’s this? That one isn’t a photograph, it seems to be a physical bit of wall itself. Maya Ramsay‘s work includes actual pieces of the walls and associated debris, carefully lifted off in one piece and pasted to the wall of the gallery.

All around me I could hear the work of sound artist Caroline Devine – cacophonous sounds of… birds, were they? And then they morphed into reverberating rhythms which I couldn’t quite place. At times they rose to a climax that I found almost disconcerting, before subsiding again to an ambient throb and thrum.

I watched a video piece at this point too, nicely displayed on an old CRT television, and where the video itself has been left to decay a little, as though watching on an old VHS tape or a badly-tuned station. But the picture was occasionally clear enough to see that we were being shown around more of the derelict buildings – a guided tour of urban exploration.

Together with Luke Williams, the four artists have combined to make a small but neatly formed whole which does very well to remove you from the busy urban bustle of Milton Keynes on a Saturday afternoon, placing you firmly inside the dimly lit and derelict buildings of Station X before they are due to be renovated.

The combination of the, at once familiar, yet other worldly, sounds and atmospheric photographs of dust, cobwebs and the odd decaying bird, along with the physical ‘casts’ of the walls themselves all give a very peculiar overall feeling.

I visited Bletchley Park recently, and was awed as much by the beauty of the main buildings as by the technological ingenuity contained within when it was needed most.

But while a visit to the Park itself reveals objects and buildings being restored and brought out on display – as they should be – the Station X exhibition at MK Gallery does a good job of capturing the areas not seen by the public, and the associated sounds and sights which have been left to decay and evolve alone.

With my interests in history and in archiving and preserving lost objects and environments – and particularly in field recordings and photography – I was very grateful to have stumbled on the exhibition.

Station X is on at MK Gallery Project Space (to the right of the theatre entrance courtyard) until 27 May. Entry is free. The Gallery is open every day except Monday.

http://www.mkgallery.org/information/

http://www.mkgallery.org/education/projectspace/station_x/

http://documentingstationx.wordpress.com/

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April 25, 2012

Lisa Took Me – film photography by Lisa Abrams

I made A Thing recently. A website, part of a birthday gift. It’s called Lisa Took Me.

It’s a kind of online portfolio for the film photography of my partner, Lisa.

I’m very proud and impressed with her photographs, and although they are already online via Flickr and Facebook, I felt like I wanted to make a little website to give them their own space online too.

Plus it’s a bit easier to browse than Flickr’s rather archaic interface these days.

It’s a rather basic website, built on Tumblr – both for the content management system in the background, and for the social/sharing functions (read: folks on Tumblr seem to dig film photography).

I picked a nice minimalist theme that I liked the look of, and tweaked it a little to present the images at a decent size, and I added some code that someone had kindly put online, enabling endless scrolling.

It’s a simple website, as I say, but it stands for more than that, and I’m mostly just happy that Lisa’s work now has a home online. You can see photographs she’s taken with a Zenit EM, an Olympus OM10 and, as of last week, a Fujifilm Instax 50s.

Pop over to lisatookme.com to have a look. And click ‘follow’ if you’re a Tumblr user.

Oh, and yes, the titular format of “name verb me” is, of course, borrowed from the wonderful Mr Charles Paget Wade.

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