"I wish that there were many more, of those little indy record stores who wanted decent music more than cash / Little stores with their wooden floors and giant posters of The Doors, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan and The Clash..."
We love The Cavern in Mermaid Beach. In fact we love it so much we’re doing a free impromptu show there tonight. They are giving us free beer in return. Jake won’t be there because he’s at a video game night thing in Brisbane where he and 29 mates hook up computers together and play games all night. Jake is a gay nerd.
banG is a photographer right, so he has hook-ups with studios and gear and cameras and photographers. He decided we needed some more pics. So we went to a studio, well, it wasn’t a studio, it was a hi-rise building where they were shooting big brother people (with cameras, not shotguns, I wish), and we’re starting to put the photos up about the place. Check out our MySpace for some of them.
I just realised it’s been a couple of months since the last blog post. Funny how that happens - time flies. We just got back from a little mini tour with Kate Miller-Heidke, who, despite being a big Sony-powered, ARIA-Award-Winning rock star, is totally lovely and completely down to earth and cute and drives a little white hatchback.
Thanks to everyone who came and saw a show, especially the kids in Newcastle, and the Sunny Coast who turned out in droves. We would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Kate for:
Although we would like to point out that it was to be expected.
If you haven’t bought Kate’s CD, go and do it. She’s loverly.
X
A friend just asked why the BMRC logo has a building in it and we get asked that from time to time, so I might as well put the answer here… This is it in a nutshell:
The year is 1964 and in England bands like the Rolling Stones and The Beatles are discovering bootleg recordings of American blues artists like Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters which are being illegally imported and distributed around London on the black market. What if, rather than having to illegally import these recordings, someone started a secret factory deep in the woods which drew on the recipes written by Robert Johnson and re-manufactured the music on home soil, bringing those blues-influenced sounds directly to the purveyors of pop. Naturally, the name of the firm that owns the factory producing the rhythm and blues/pop for black market distribution would be… The Black Market Rhythm Co.
It’s a summary of our influences: American blues and British pop. The red font is actually a Russian creation from the cold war era. In fact, when we were developing ideas for some EP artwork a year or so ago we were looking up pictures that were black market-related (as in, the underground trade in illegal goods, not the band), one thing lead to another and we found an archive of old Russian socialist propoganda and this poster nearly became our logo:
We were going to take the three guys out and just use them, but because there are four of us in the band it looked a bit weird. We went with the factory instead, for the fore-mentioned reasons.
And that’s the story of where the logo comes from. We actually thought of the band name long before we had a logo, it was Chris’s idea actually, and I’m not sure where he got it from, we wanted to have a name that suggested we were a collective, like Thievery Corporation, I think Black Market Rhythm Co. just sounded cool. In fact I wanted to call us ‘The London Underground’, but that was kind of already taken. And we’re not from London. So that kind of killed that.
I’ve got a whole bunch of photos I want to put up on here as a visual essay on last night’s show but I can’t get them off my camera. I’ll describe them instead. I am, after all, a highly trained journalist*. I will work backwards, because that’s how the phone works…
Photo One: The band van (Toni) is parked outside the SolBar in Coolum at 3am. No one is on the streets, the full moon is shining and we are hiding our Coronas from the Police, wondering if they will help us pack up our gear, thinking they probably won’t.
Photo Two: We are signing some CDs and a girl has brought over the sweaty tea towel she stole from us which we stole from Coolum Budget Accommodation (that’s the name of the place, and a rather generous description of it, don’t tell them) and she is asking us to sign it.
Photo Three: The SolBar has had so many noise complaints they can only let bands play with all the doors and windows shut. Their air conditioning is broken. There are 150 people inside a room the size of Imelda Marcos’s shoe closet. It’s the second hottest day of the summer and the SolBar is in Queensland. The photo is of Jake and I immediately after we’ve walked off stage having played for an hour and a half. We are in the giant food refridgerator, and we have raised the temperature from 4 degrees to 19 degrees with our body heat alone.
Photo Four: The Rocketsmiths, who we love.
Photo Five: It’s the wall where they stick up pieces of paper that state what bands are playing in the coming months. They don’t have posters for some reason, just pieces of paper printed in Times New Roman font. They have misspelt our name so they’ve cut out our logo from a Time Off ad and pasted it on the paper, so we are the only band in colour. Also written on the wall are Operator Please, Youth Group, Custom Kings and The Fumes. I am wondering what Operator Please would be like at the SolBar, probably hectic.
Photo Six: It’s a sign on the wall at Coolum Budget Accommodation warning us to behave ourselves or we will be kicked out. This is funny because when we arrived the manager looked at us, looked over to Toni, looked back at us and all he said was”SolBar?” We said yes and he then went off on a five minute rant about how he hates the SolBar and how everyone in Coolum hates the SolBar and how we weren’t allowed to stay at Coolum Budget Accommodation because he hates bands because they’re too noisy and we should go away and stay somewhere else because we’re noisy and bad and evil. He finally lets us stay and says that if anyone complains about the noise he will charge their room to my credit card. The f#$%^*g c@#$.
So we got back to Chris’s house after letting the banner dry for a week and it looks like a liquid paper factory exploded next to a communal festival toilet used exclusively by seagulls. We’ve paid a lighting guy an exorbitant, but reportedly worthy amount of cash to put on the world’s best show for us at The Zoo tonight so hopefully no one will notice our missing banner in all the smoke and fireworks and dazzlement. I’d put up a photo of the banner but Bluetooth isn’t working for some reason. Can’t wait for tonight’s show. We even get to program an hour of music on ZzZ this afternoon as a promo thing. I’m thinking Tool and 1960s soul.
Today Chris and I are going to attempt to paint a backdrop for our live show. It’s going to have our logo on it, so we have to go to Bunnings and buy some bright red paint. I think we will come home via a bottle shop because all great artists did their best work pissed. Van Gough for example, that man was mad for Absinthe, he did cut his ear off though… I wonder if Chopper drank absinthe…
Anyway, Chris’s dog is probably going to help with the painting, so there might be paw prints on the canvas. Dolphins can paint, elephants can paint, chimps can paint, I’m sure Henry (that’s Chris’s dog’s name) has it in him too.
Triple J’s Home and Hosed program aired an interview with us (well, me) last night, it’s just a 30 second grab but it’s a cool little slot. If you missed it you can stream the show from the Triple J website - the interview comes in at about 17 minutes. Low-Fi Records, Hi-Fi Radio gets a spin after as well…
I can’t believe Iron Maiden have their own jet. I want a jet. And their lead singer flies it! Fuck that. Chris drives like a Nanna, we’d never get anywhere. I’d have to fly. Can you drink and fly? Probably not, unless you work for Garuda.
Ben says I can have a jet.
OK so an hour and a half ago I came home from a party and decided to start the Black Market Blog, because I’m the one with the journalism degree and too much time on my hands near a computer, but I had to make it look pretty first, so that has been achieved, but it’s now too late for me to be arsed writing anything and no-one’s going to read it this evening because no-one else in the world knows about it, except for my friend Susannah, and her friend Sarah who were watching a movie on the couch next to me as… Oh fuck, here we go, mindless drivel already… Jeez. This was a bad idea. I’m not going to write anything else now, except:
Goodnight Internet, please be there when I wake up in the morning.