untold blisses

I have been trying to get tickets for Adam Buxton’s BUG for such a long time.  I’ve either been out of the country, away for work, or the tickets have sold out before I got to them, and for a while it felt like I was destined to never see BUG live.  So when my BFF emailed a couple of months ago asking if I wanted him to get tickets for BUG 41, I quickly scrambled to say YES PLEASE.  And success – tickets were bought.

And then we found out Adam Buxton wasn’t going to be hosting.  OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!

The BFI announced a couple of weeks later that they’d drafted in Doc Brown who I think I knew from somewhere (a panel show maybe?) and I hoped that he’d be doing the show with a similar humour to Dr Buckles.

After a spicy dinner at the new Wahaca in Waterloo, we made our way through the rain to the BFI and found our seats in NFT 1 amongst the many bearded men.

Doc Brown (also known as Ben Bailey Smith) alluded to the fact he couldn’t rip off Buxton’s YouTube comments review, so came up with his own thing – Singalonga Shitbags.  I giggled insanely at his lyrics to instrumental music in films such as Jurassic Park, Last of the Mohicans, and Face Off, and I would quite happily pay to see him doing two hours of this.  He showed a clip from a Bollywood film called Singham which garnered cheers from the audience, and his comment on Oneohtrix Point Never amused me greatly (“That’s his name, because hipster is out of control”).

The purpose of the evening was music videos though, and I was actually looking forward to seeing music from bands and artists I previously hadn’t heard from before.  In particular, I have become a little obsessed by Rudimental‘s Not Giving In and I’m going to spend the weekend looking into them.

Some of the videos were a little pretentious and I did roll my eyes on a couple of occasions.  Ben interviewed Josh Cole who directed the above video, plus a whole bunch of others, and what I mainly got from the interview and videos was dude needs to calm down with the helicopter use.

I really loved the Elbow video Ben showed – I thought it was really beautiful despite not being a Elbow fan

I also really loved the Grace Jones vibe from Julio Bashmore‘s Peppermint ft Jessie Ware

We got to see videos for Burning House, Fidlar, Louis Mattrs, and The Last Skeptik amongst others.  And this is probably the only time you’ll read those names on my blog as I am far too untrendy for this music.  But that’s partly why I enjoyed BUG – I wouldn’t come across these short films in my day-to-day life, so it was really good to be exposed to something new.

The audience did feel a little cliquey – not sure if this happens at other BUGs, but it seemed as though everyone behind us was connected to one of the music video directors.  Unfortunately, this did mean that a couple of people WOULD NOT SHUT THE HELL UP.  It was an odd atmosphere, partly because of the Chatty Cathys at the back and because people were constantly in and out of their seats – it kind of felt like a gig or something.  It was a bit difficult to fully appreciate the videos with those distractions.

Overall, I did enjoy my first BUG, and I don’t think it’ll be my last.  Hopefully my calendar will be clear for the next show.