‘JMW’ – ‘Prince of the Rocks’

*Ros and Shaun McCrindle with ‘The Rising Squall’ at Tate Britain*
Photo by Andrew Graham-Brown

Do you recall my post about Bristol City Art Gallery’s crowdfunding campaign to buy ‘The Rising Squall’, J.M.W. Turner’s first exhibited oil painting (shown at London’s Royal Academy of Art, in 1792)? The crowdfunding campaign was successful (over £100K was raised through public donations in a single week) but ‘Bristol’ was unfortunately outbid at the Sotheby’s auction when ‘The Rising Squall’ came up for sale and we could not ‘bring Turner home’.

*Screenshot of images from Bristol Museum’s #bringturnerhome crowdfunding campaign*

My wife and I suggested the crowdfunding idea to Philip Walker – Head of Culture and Creative Industries at Bristol City Council – so I was honoured to be subsequently invited by Phil to film a performance of a new song I’d written about Turner, at Bristol City Art Gallery’s ‘Prince of the Rocks’ exhibition. The exhibition featured rarely seen local watercolours painted by Turner during his ‘teens, including a view of St Mary Redcliffe Church before the spire was added and two very accomplished watercolour paintings of the Avon Gorge at Hotwells, painted very close to where ‘The Rising Squall’ was painted.

The logistics of organising the film shoot would have been far more complicated if the project had been undertaken as a commercial enterprise. We would have needed permission to film in a council-owned space and we would also have needed insurance, risk assessments etc, to film in front of invaluable works of art. (We would also have required considerable sums of money to pay for all the above!) As it turned out, the process flowed smoothly as the project was undertaken as a collaboration between the art gallery, the musicians, a filmmaker, and a sound crew.

*The ‘JMW’ team, including film crew, sound crew, Goldfinches, and Fran Coles*
Photo by Grace McCrindle

Fran Coles is the Collections Care Manager at Bristol Museums. On the day of filming, Fran was there to monitor the ‘light budget’: how much light the Turner watercolours – and other works in the gallery – could be exposed to during our shoot. (She also helped us out with the clapper board during filming takes!) The musical group I performed ‘JMW’ with is called Goldfinches. We have been playing in Bristol for a few years now and it was a pleasure for us to perform the song acoustically in the gallery space, right in front of Turner’s work.

*Goldfinches (the group)*
Photo by Andrew Graham-Brown

The gallery was quite reverberant, so it was essential to have skilled sound engineers to record our performance. Our partner in sound was the award-winning creative studio, dBs Pro. Jay Auborn is the Creative Director of dBs Pro and, on this shoot, he was assisted with the sound recording by two undergraduate students, Louis and Oliver, on a work placement from dBs Institute.

*Jay Auborn from dBs Pro with work placement students from dBs Institute*
Photo by Grace McCrindle

The final essential partner in this venture was an old friend of mine called Andrew Graham-Brown, of AGB Films. Andy has many years’ experience working as an award-winning documentary film maker. He has great kit, and he loves music, so he was the perfect person to capture our song performances (we shot half a dozen or so live takes in all). Andy was assisted by my daughter Grace who also documented the day’s activities on her phone, for a short ‘making-of’ film. All together, we made a great team and the official video of ‘JMW’ should be available online for all to view soon.

*Andrew Graham-Brown (AGB Films)*
Photo by Grace McCrindle

We hope that one day the owner of ‘The Rising Squall’ will consider loaning the painting to Bristol City Art Gallery, so it can be seen in its local context (perhaps alongside the preparatory watercolour sketch in the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection?). ‘The Rising Squall’ is currently on show in London – for the first time in over 200 years – at Tate Britain, in its blockbuster ‘Turner & Constable’ exhibition. It’s a fine painting and not bad for a 17-year-old! (Imagine submitting ‘The Rising Squall’ as part of your A-level Art portfolio!?) In it, Turner seems to have applied oil paint in thin translucent washes, almost like the watercolour paintings he was making up until this point. It’s a very bold and assured painting for such a young artist and it would be lovely to ‘Bring Turner Home’, even if it were only for a short while.

*Click on the image to watch a clip of Shaun busking ‘JMW’ on the steps of Tate Britain*

‘Combined Honours’ – Thom and Stanley in 4D at the Ashmolean Museum

It was great fun to see the Donwood/Yorke takeover of several galleries at the venerable Ashmolean Museum in Oxford last weekend. ‘This Is What You Get’, an exhibition of Radiohead-related artwork and memorobilia, spanned 30-plus years of creative collaboration between the songwriter and the visual artist associated with Radiohead, one of the most interesting and influential rock bands of the modern era.

My wife and I took our daughter Grace along to the show. It seems the appeal of Radiohead endures, as successive generations of young people discover their music. I remember Grace wrote an essay on Donwood’s artwork as part of her Fine Art degree course a few years ago. Grace’s younger sister Lyra has sung on a recorded version of ‘Creep’. And, in my current work as a technician in a secondary school, I have overheard GCSE art students discuss the merits of a band that inspires fierce loyalty among its fanbase. So, what is the key to Radiohead’s enduring appeal?

Based on the evidence of this exhibition, the band’s ongoing allure (apart from the inventiveness of the music itself) could be embodied in the German concept of the ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, the ‘total work of art’ that synthesises multiple art forms. In Donwood and Yorke’s case, intense, emotional songs and playful, cryptic visuals combine to create a ‘Radiohead world’, given literal form in the KID A MNESIA video-game simulation on display in one of the galleries. (The recent collaborative production of ‘Hamlet: Hail to the Thief’ took this world onto the theatre stage.) Donwood summed up this synergy between art forms in the exhibition:

I don't think art is as strong as it would be alone. I don't think literature is alone. And I don't think music is alone, but when you put them all together it makes a fourth thing. It's a 4th dimension.

It’s this “4th dimension” that is celebrated in ‘This Is What You Get’, a cross-fertilisation between art and music, combined with a maverick interdisciplinary creative spirit, that encourages fans to fully immerse themselves in the Radiohead landscape. Though they didn’t start collaborating until at least a year after graduating from Exeter University (in 1991) the ‘combined’ nature of the English Literature and Fine Art degree that Thom and Stanley jointly undertook sowed the seeds for a uniquely successful creative partnership that has cleverly navigated art and commerce across three inspiring and game-changing decades.

A blurry still from the KID A MNESIA videogame simulation on display at the Ashmolean

Bloke on the Water..

Earlier this week, I visited the Cariad IV narrowboat to record a few Goldfinches songs for The Narrowboat Sessions. For those of you unfamiliar with these sessions, they are an initiative run by Mark Holdsworth and his crew, offering “the biggest platform for unsigned, original acoustic music videos in the UK”. Every year, the Cariad crew travel “thousands of miles of the British Canal system recording different artists every weekday of the summer”, raising money for Cancer Research along the way. It’s a very cool and unique project. I took part in a session with John Slattery in August 2022 when we drove up to Shropshire and I remember the silencer fell off my exhaust pipe on the way! We sounded like a tank as I pulled up to a quiet canal-side location to make our recording in the remote countryside.

This summer, Mark and his crew had intended to wend their way down to Bristol (where Goldfinches would’ve joined them) but ill health, followed by a major canal breach in Cheshire, put paid to any ideas of travelling very far from the source. It was not possible for Goldfinches to drive up to Merseyside so, rather than cancel altogether, I decided to attend the session at Ellesmere Port on my own as I needed to drop off one of my daughters in Manchester anyway.

Cariad IV ‘stranded’ at the National Waterways Museum

It was great to see Mark again and revisit his tales of depping on keyboards for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band and Gentle Giant (among others) and to learn more about his maritime past. (Bristol readers will probably know that the Bonzo’s Viv Stanshall brought the iconic ‘Thekla’ ship – when it was called The Old Profanity Showboat – from Sunderland to Bristol’s floating harbour during the 1980s, so there is a kinship – though a big difference in scale – between Mark’s snug floating studio and Viv Stanshall’s vision of a cabaret theatre on the water.) Working on the crew with Mark on this occasion were Cerys and Eli, of the Manchester-based horror-rock duo Body Water, who’d just discovered their latest single had been played on Radio 1! (Gosh, the talent on this boat!)

And then it was time for me to record my three songs: one brand new one and two from the Goldfinches album ‘Shanti Time’. I started with the new one, ‘Attenborough’, an homage to the broadcasting icon ‘Sir David’, played on my ukelele. This was a debut performance as Goldfinches haven’t had the opportunity to play it live yet and it was a challenge to remember all the words. However, I think I got away with it and the crew seemed to enjoy the performance! I then followed ‘Attenborough’ with ‘Queen of New York’ and ‘Shanti Time’, songs which I’m more familiar with, both performed on Mark’s lovely Washburn ‘Tahoe’ acoustic guitar.

To conclude, it was a shame Goldfinches never got to squeeze into the snug studio to record a set for the Narrowboat Sessions this year but I was happy to take one for the team! We hope to join Cariad IV next summer when the meandering musical journey will hopefully happen once more.