Session.

‘It’s a Brighton vegetarian cafe. It’s not like the one on London Road – it’s like...a Brighton Vegetarian Cafe. It’s hateful and awful but it’s also pretty amazing.’

I’m trying to arrange the day with the woman. There is a vegetarian cafe in Brighton that a friend once took me to that I’ve been meaning to let her in on. They have these wraps (I’ve forgotten what was in them) that taste like [I’ve forgotten exactly what they taste like]. (They probably taste like exactly what was in them.) I’ve also forgotten what the name of the cafe is.

One possible cause of my cognitive uselessness is last night’s post-shoot ‘celebration’.

They started work at about 9am, shifting gear around and setting everything up for the arrival of the very talented and excellent Alice Humphreys, who would be shooting us for the day. She worked with us a week or two ago on a new batch of press shots, and we thought it would be fun to get her in again to shoot a good time fun live session for the benefit of the internet.

I turned up well behind the stated schedule, following a mishap with three tins of WD40 and a caffeinated whooping crane.

So we set everything up, we got what lighting we could, sterilised my infected wounds, and tried to make sense of this feeling of performance in front of one person. That was very odd – to perform for one person while performing for everyone. We knew that we were no longer in a practice session, but at the same time we were not playing a concert.

There are various levels of performance, and ways of performing. You do not perform the same onstage at the London ICA in front of a thousand people as you would at Delila’s 85th in the dining room of Restful Pines Retirement Hotel. They simply don’t appreciate what you’re trying to do and I think knocking out the back wall to make space for the lighting rig caused more problems than it solved.

No, you have to adjust your performance to the occasion.

So what is this occasion? A hovering camera. There is no air moving, there is no crowd. There is focus on yourself and focus on the music – and it’s all being taken down; it’s all being noted. There is no transcendent moment, here. There is no ether into which you throw yourself. It’s all being taken down like courtroom portraits – here’s a man in his emotion, now scrutinise him. Here’s a man in as much vulnerability as he can take. Here is a man projecting every fibre of himself onto the world – now watch it forever. Forever and ever. NSA watch it. GCHQ keep it. Look at their faces look at their little eyes darting around in uncertainty. They’re play-acting. They’re fakes. Are we? Are we overdoing it? No. How do we know? We’re underperforming. Are we? We’re overperforming. No. None of it ain’t going nowhere. Nothing’s disappearing, is it? Nothing’s getting forgotten. Nothing’s lost...nothing’s gained…how does my hair look?...oh god…

So we had a few beers to lighten up, and that progressed into a party of us heading down to a Brighton pub to start the night early and end the night upside down, strapped to a tofu kebab and being dragged home on a skateboard by a kindly fox. Sunglasses Indoors was the theme of the night. Also the band game Five Card Rocket, to which – once they have been officially codified by the Phoria Occupations Organisation - I will one day explain the rules.

All in all, while the difficulties of red-light syndrome do exist, the day seems, from my current slanty angle, to have been a success. We did lose ourselves in some of the performances and we did try and create a nice little package for people to enjoy, as we always try to do. You'll see it once it's all been cut together nicely. It ain’t anything like suffering, this malarkey – but there is something in there that asks to be shared, so we try and share it.

So today, being Saturday (as it is), and that being after such Friday (yesterday), I need some vegetables. I need vegetables and I need love.

Don’t we all?

Do have fun, in whatever mischief you may partake.

Tim

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