Jazzualty

Polar Bear & The Beastie Boys

Music Fans vs Art Audience

I've been meaning to write something about the fantastic Polar Bear gig I went to at the Spitz for ages. Karen's brother Sean introduced us to their music and we have both in this instance fallen victim to what our editor would describe as Jazzualty status. We love them so much we're going to ask them if they'd like to work with Tim on our next film score!

Anyway I could give lots of detail about how great their Spitz set was (and that of Miso Soup an unexpected bonus band for me) but actually I wanted to comment on the way it made me think about an audience vs. fans. For regular gig attendees this would have come as no surprise but for someone more used to the low expectation levels of an art audience (and often it has to be said low returns!) being in a crowd of Polar Bear fans was as refreshing as Seb Rochford's brilliant drumming or Leafcutter John's Max/MSP manipulations ...

Basically what I really enjoyed was being in a fairly diverse audience of people who were out to have a good time. They love the music, they know the band and they have a pretty good idea that they're going to see - something of high quality. Most of them (except me!) had little to no interest in other members of the audience, and were happy to do their own thing - grooving at the front, indulging in some saxophone playing envy or just sitting at the side with a drink. I guess what I'm saying is there's a lot to be said for a fan base.

I was feeling rather pleased with this revelation (although unless I'm going to seriously revise my own musical abilities it means I'm in the wrong business) until I went to see the Beastie Boys latest offering at SXSW. Described as a feature doc (directed by Nathanial Hornblower AKA Beastie Boy Adam Yauch) you would need to be a serious fan to sit through this - as it's more a very long bootleg concert video than a feature doc. But as you can image in the SXSW audience there were fans by the cinema full. Much as I found the non-stop v. poor quality hand held video (captured on 50 cameras given to fans none of whom apparently knew how to work them!) hard going, the experience of seeing it in the cinema with such a hard core Beastie audience was ... well, weird!
They cheered every song (and admittedly the actual concert sound was pretty 'awesome') and most were obviously itching to dance about. Any filmic innovation (ie. following one of the camera operators to the loo) were met with whoops of delight, despite the terrible relentlessness of the camera work & quality. Now I know that this isn't the point, and the point was to make something innovative and distributed that felt like it was made by fans BUT it could have been SO much more interesting. At moments we were allowed to see a glimpse of the footage from all the cameras simultaneously and this was interesting ... you were immediately drawn into both the audience and the stage, but for most long stretches of the extreme-zoom-grainy-shots of the 3 Beasties I found myself willing them to switch to a camera that was focussed on anything other than the stage!

The real horror/interest came with the un-mediated 'Q&A' with the Beasties at the end - this was when the true hardcore fans were allowed to let rip with evangelical zeal: "That was truly Awesome", "I ****ing love you" "you're the sound track to my life" ... I could go on. In the end I just wished I could have been actually at the gig, rather than this dissected version.

I wonder what a Polar Bear Q&A would sound like?