And Action!

On Making Stuff, Making It Up & Making It Work

Yesterday I helped out on a short film shoot, made by a group of seventeen year olds. I just picked up the slack and did whatever little task needed doing; clapper loader, art direction, set decoration, caterer, runner etc. It was great to witness their innate confidence in knowing what they wanted, and the energy they brought to it. I think it’s going to be great.

It made me think about how artistic pursuits brings us together for the greater good. It’s a funny thing how most of us are happy to help someone out who is trying to create something. There’s some kind of contagious, altruistic, magnanimous spirit around art making. We all intrinsically know it’s bigger than us, good for our souls and a worthwhile way to spend our time.

I’ve been involved with making things up and putting on performances and parties and productions my entire life, but I am pretty sure the first film project was in the mid 90s when I had a band called Automatic Cherry, and a friend of the band, David Biltmore, offered to film a clip for us if we wanted. Of course we did! David was already coming along to shows and filming them for posterity and really seemed to know his way around a camera, something that was (and is still) fairly mysterious to me.

I had a song called ‘No Bed To Call My Own’, that was inspired by a pulp noir book called ‘No Bed Of Her Own’, written in 1931 by Val Newton, author of Cat People.

The premise: Winter 1931. New York is in the grip of the Depression. When Rose Mahoney loses her typing job, the peppy, hardboiled blonde believes she will quickly find another. But soon, meager savings dwindling, she is homeless, cast alone into the underbelly of the cold, dark city . .

The song had a kind of jacked up, seedy haunted groove to it and seemed like a good song to make a video for. It also ran under 4 minutes when many of my songs were more around the 6 minute duration. These are the kinds of things that will happen when bands don’t have label bosses telling them to rein it in and cut the fat. I do love a long song.

Anyways, there were eight of us in this particular band, and a pretty good mix of faces, and we also managed to convince a few friends to come along and be part of the filming, including legendary musician/songwriter and Kings Cross denizen Don Walker, Simon Day (Rat Cat), Ed Clayton Jones (The Wreckery) and notorious rock’n’roller Ian Rilen (X, Rose Tattoo), who played my ‘love interest’. We were sticking close to the crime novel setting, filming in a bar portraying ourselves as a bunch of n’er-do-wells, rogues and hustlers on the make, all slicked back hair and shiny cocktail dresses.

Amazingly we were allowed to film for free at Les Girls, an iconic Kings Cross venue that had recently closed after thirty years as Sydney’s destination nightclub for incredibly glamorous drag performances on what was known as The Glittering Mile, or Sydney’s answer to Las Vegas. The Carousel Club, which housed Les Girls, was created by ‘entrepreneur’ Abe Saffron, known as The King of the Cross, who my dad had worked for in numerous musical establishments over the years. It was also the last place where newspaper heiress Juanita Nelson was seen before she was presumably murdered, most likely over her anti development activism. The place had serious history. It also had a special place in my heart as just one of the many clubs I walked past every day since I was a young teen and moved to Kings Cross with my family. I always loved the tawdry, garish vibes emanating from places like that. Since Les Girls had closed down, it had re-opened as a hip and groovy retro themed nightclub called The Tender Trap that my friends and I often frequented to dance the night away.

Carlotta at Les Girls @Rennie Ellis 1970/Les Girls/Juanita Nielsen

I drew up a rough storyboard, told everyone what to wear and made some snacks, and David (with no crew/assistant/helpers as far as I can recall) filmed the band and our friends lounging at the bar, slow dancing, gambling, drinking, winking, pouting, raising eyebrows and indulging in general shenanigans, all dressed up but generally looking dodgy as hell over a couple of days, dramatically lit by existing nightclub flood lights and mirror ball. Our friend Juliet John came and worked as art director and whatever else was needed. Everybody that was there just generously mucked in and gave what they could to make this music video happen. My mum sent more snacks in with my dad, who was in this band. The footage was fantastic and should have made for a fantastic music video, which back then was a real launching pad for a band. But it never saw the light of day as I was too broke to ever afford to get the Super Hi-8 film processed or to hire an editor and tragically the film just languished away until eventually that band fell apart.. ..

But in due course the clock ticked around to 2017 and by then getting film transferred was pretty cheap and easy and I could teach myself to edit for free with iMovie. Unsurprisingly, much of the film was decimated by age, disappearing and flickering, grainy and busted up, actually giving it a rather beautiful, nostalgic and haunted quality.

I looked at trying to finally edit the original clip together but half the degraded footage was completely unusable and it seemed like a bit of a pointless exercise, for a long gone band with no recorded catalogue currently available - when I had just released a new album and was in need of a music video for it.

So in the spirit of working with what was at hand, I decided to cut the old footage for use in my new song - called ‘You Never Learned How To Dance’ - and they fortuitously seemed to fit hand in glove. It was immensely satisfying to see the long ago imagery quivering back to life, repurposed and put to good use. Not only did it make a perfect music video for my current song, but I loved that all that energy and hope and care that had been invested in it originally was no longer being wasted, and it could be appreciated and enjoyed. There was an added heart wrenching element to it for me that Ian Rilen and our bandmate James Cruickshank, both so alive and vibrant in the clip, were no longer with us.

As I finish writing here at home in my bedroom, at 11am on a Sunday morning, I can hear the sounds of the making of the short student film continuing in the hallway and kitchen, they are debating how to best throw a sandwich for a shot… and I can hardly wipe the smile from my lips as I think about how happy I am to be surrounded by their energy and how making art is about so much more than the end result. It’s about capturing time and preserving moments and people and ideas and dreams, regardless of how inconsequential they feel or seem at the time. It’s about a collective desire to elevate the ordinary to understand it and to remind ourselves of something and to make sense of meaning and matter.

Even trying to define what it is that we’re attempting to do by making art feels impossible, because the very act of making it transforms our possibilities. Georgia O’Keefe said “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.”

So many of us feel like pretenders if we dare suggest we’re making art, but so much of that is based on this unnecessary concept of the self importance of the artist. I feel like we should all think more like Andy Warhol, who said “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”

Get it, friends, and get it done; for yourself, for whoever, whatever, whenever and however long it takes - I have to go fry some halloumi and gaffa tape some black fabric up for a shot, ready for Action! x

PS: I have just hit my 1000th subscriber here on Loose Connections and I’m so glad and grateful to have you all along for the ride.