May Newsletter '26
May 1st - International Worker's Day! And I was hard at work on location, filming the animals at Kentish Town City Farm. They all looked tired, perhaps overly warm. The shoot moved to arebyte Digitial Art Centre, where I nabbed a few clips of Ambie Drew's Soft Bodies, Cold Machines exhibition. Very pink. Popped into Morrissons on the way back for a Pomegranate to slice up and smear all over myself. Clang! I dropped the knife in the shower. Very red.
On the 9th of May I turned 21 - I was standing with relative strangers in redeveloped deindustrialised dockland, on the way to an overpriced rave. The bouncer conviscated my weed, but let me in. I got higher and higher on acid - I eventually decided to leave and listened to Cilla Black, looking out at the ships and thinking of my ancestors who had worked in Southampton docks for Generations. After navigated some extremely pedestrian-unfriendly town planning i made my way home. The message of the trip was I want to be a woman looking chic in front of some drab factories, preferably in black and white. I spent the morning with my dad, luckily sunglasses concealed my comedown, then I saw an East German film alone at the cinema. She cut him up, ate him, ground up his bones in the food processor and threw the marrow-coloured dust into the wind.
May 10th - Four Blokes rehearse for the first time in 8 months, the first time with the new lineup. The fact we are a real band actually playing together in a room again is an EXPONENTIAL change of circumstance, that's what I've been trying to acheive for literally the entire first year of uni and we're finally there. A lot of the difficulty came from anxiety creating paranoid delusions that everyone hates me and nobody would ever want to be in my band, but I overcame eventually. And it went fairly well!
I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but I've had a song called Theme for a Mountain Goat going around in my head for AGES. Earliest mention I can find was back in January, and i came up with the main melody in the shower in maybe March? But this month I actually sat down and figured it all out on piano - on May 12th, very early in the morning, I wrote the score for string quartet and fed it into Logic via the BBC Symphonic. Slept, woke up, took a lovely walk across sunny London (a quick stop at the Serpentine to see some Hockney) and then buckled down in the studio. After spending AGES adding a drum part to sections of Mountain Goat that was so frustrating to do, I'd whacked off 2 more songs in half an hour - Did a few takes of Dockers & Dinnerladies (thought this one up in December, first work of ANY SORT on it beyond the conceptual) and some drum parts which I may or may not use for Wishes.
14th and 15th, out filming again. First back at Tiago's - i cycled a bike around the kitchen table, but Jan took the directorial decision to film the tesseract. I had Tiago operate the zoom on a digital camera, and espouse the benefits of GEAR! ❄️ Thinking about editing all the Tiago's house footage into one scene... having ideas... filmed some scenes down on the shore which came out nice, some with an old lady in the Victoria Pub, and finished off the block with some footage at the death of the evening in the woods, climbing trees. Everything came out in A deep, verdant shade.
On the 17th I was recording again - this time, bass and vocal overdubs. I was playing Tiago's 5 string Fazley Sunset, although perhaps I didn't utilise that low D string as much as I could've. It's weird being stood in someone's lounge singing - funnily enough i was singing like a lounge singer too. Morte Dolorosa, Dolorosa...
May 20th - filming again. Now, I was pretty fucking stoned, but the V&A warehouse is a super super cool place to look around in any state. I want to go back just thinking of it. Anyways, got some great shots of the inside of a mock-up of a building, putting the exposure wayyy up - the light source was behind the fake window so it looked like a nuclear bomb going off. I'm gonna sync it up to some of the infinite feedback loop sounds in Bluebells in the Meadow.
May 22nd - back in the studio! This was the main session for Bluebells in the Meadow, dubbing a Fender Bass on as well as several different synthesiser parts. I was thinking of someone when I wrote the words, and I was thinking of them again when I added the arpeggios in the chorus - it's funny how your feelings about a person can manifest themselves in a song. I think that part is evocative of her, I don't know why. You might meet her one day - maybe next newsletter if I'm lucky. The next day I wandered around in London, did a little bit more filming, shots of the Thames and inside the Tate Modern.
I flew out to Germany early in the morning on the 26th - I got some GREAT clips inside the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. Just you wait til you see this robot parrot! Of course, the real reason I was there was to watch Crystal Palace in a European final - after a disastrous train journey from West to East Germany, with fires delays and cancellations aplenty, I made it to the stadium. It was well worth it as we won 1-0 and lifted our 3rd trophy in a little over a year. I drifted around Leipzig until the first coach at 5am - sitting on a park bench i was approached by the local dealer who not only sold me a gram but rolled me a huge fattie. You just don't get that kind of customer service in England! Stoned off my bonce, I walked around the town chatting with all sorts of people, Palace and Rayo fans alike. It was a dramatic image, the train station hall strewn with sleeping football fans, cocooned in their flags. After 1 more night in Hamburg, in which I inadvertently got our song Geisterbahnhof played in a bar (officially approved by the German barmaid!) I headed for home.
It's fairly obvious that the rehearsals are for a return to stage, but the recording? The FILMING? What are they for? Well - I can exclusively reveal Four Blokes are set to release a new LP this summer, once again comprising 14 tracks - the first 7 of these will feature in a new MUSICIAL FILM, interspersed with other scenes. Work is still ongoing but I reckon it'll be about 45 minutes long? It's like a TV special, I guess.
The new Album and Film are based around the concept of an archive of humanity in a post-extinction future. Both sonically, lyrically, and visually it's kind of themed around 2 basic dichotomies - past vs future, beauty vs horror. There's plenty of Dystopian and Sci-Fi imagery and sounds in there, but also plenty of the baroque and the quaint. I'll hold back on the title for now, I'll tell you that when a more formal announcement comes. This is just a sneak peak. In terms of release date, probabaly July? I'd imagine the film would come out a few weeks before the album.
Auf Weidersehen
Harry
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