This is happening.

BRISCOE GIG #1 
The Lansdowne Hotel - 19/01/12
The Owls
Briscoe
Jimi Linton (Solo)


I can see the Lansdowne from my office. I looked at it a lot on this day.

We were actually supposed to play our first show on a Thursday in mid December, but Jacob was hospitalised with gallstones on the tuesday night. He admitted himself after a rehearsal spent looking (but not sounding) particularly pale and disconcerted. He's a committed bastard godluvim.

We practiced our arses off leading up to that December false-start but with Yak in hospital and the standard xmas/new years absences, we didn't play together again until this Lansdowne gig.

But it was amazing.

I play with Jimi in Ranger Spacey so i know how good he is. If you see his solo stuff, pay attention. Listen to the lyrics. Hear him strap a vocal to a chord progression like an angry patient to a bed then administer the morphine til it sinks back into the covers. Heavyweight songs. Raucous rock'n'rollers from the north, The Owls played after us and they smashed it too. Plus they are total gentlemen. We've since shared the stage with them in Newcastle and if we never play a gig without them again i will be a happy kid.

____

Well. What a fucking thing your first gig is. What an absolute mess, what a jumble. You're brain trying to untangle your stupid fingers while recalling and spitting out lyrics in the right order, and close enough to in-key that people can listen to it. Then you look around at your friends, concentrating hard, sweating onto their instruments, making noise to join with your noise and occasionally acknowledging each other - brother and sisterhood in extremis. We knew the songs, no one else did. We were shouting secrets, we were letting cats out of bags, we were the only ones in the cabin who knew how to land the thing - it's the crazy rush you can only have at the beginning.

The shambles, though, is something I never want to lose. I don't think i ever want to be tight, when shit is on the brink of falling apart that's when you feel alive. It's also why i like a big band with lots of elements, SO MANY THINGS CAN GO WRONG IT'S THE BEST. I have this image in my head of the six of us at the top of a hill with our jackets caught in a car door. Handbrake: off. You'd wanna watch that right?

A message from the CEO.

Since the last time I wrote a proper post, we’ve played five gigs – our first five gigs. Each of them represents a co-ordinate on an ever-steepening learning curve for me, and there has been plenty of data to process over the past few months. The bulk of the data has related to the management side of things. I’ve received a lot of advice, and testament to the tailspin our industry is in, all of it has been wildly contradictory. It’s reinforced the truism for me that no one knows what the hell you’re supposed to do or who the hell you’re supposed to do it to.

Far from being cause for despair this is actually really liberating. It says to me that pandering and compromise have been completely stripped of their usefulness– to whom do you pander? Towards what ideal or audience should you compromise yourself? Fuck it, this is license to be yourself, because if success remains elusive as it's likely to do anyway, integrity maintained is surely the best second prize.

For all its frustrations, I think this is why I’ve actually enjoyed managing the band up to this point, no matter how limited my capacity. As band members one of the only things you have control over is yourselves - you can’t control how people choose to see or portray or reproduce you but you can make sure that the source material is honest. It’s a lot easier to keep this on track when you are the nexus through which the info comes and goes.

Also, I don’t know if it’s getting older or having been crunched through the machine once before but my irrational sense of entitlement (which was raging in my youth) has pretty much been ground to dust and lost to the breeze. Every week I hear just as many new bands that inspire and awestrike me as disgust me, so who the hell are we to claim any special right? I’m not saying I’m above shouting “YOU’VE GOT TO BE FUCKING JOKING!” at the radio every now and then, but having an atrophied entitlement gland makes it a lot easier to manage the frustration and resentment of working your arse off while your wallet empties.

As you can see from the first line I actually intended for this post to be about the gigs but it went some(probably more boring)where else. Apologies, I’ll write about the gigs next.

Briscoecorp AGM 2012

Animal the video.

CREDITS: 
ACTING: Dee Pask, Caroline Dale, David Anderson
SHOOTING: Ben Pask
DIRECTING: Bart Denaro
EDITING: Bart Denaro

Briscoe: steadily achieving real band status.

There's a lot to tell, and I will tell it when I have a second but til then... here's the setlist, looking like I felt, the day after our first full gig.

The Lansdowne, 19 January 2012

Dig us up please.

CLICK IT!!

Friends ago.

Here are the first two songs from our soon-to-be-released rekkid, enjoy!

Day Job by briscoeinyourears


Animal by briscoeinyourears

I am your master.

Sealed for freshness.

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale.

Briscoe Gig #1
Saturday in Design 20/08/11
w/ Kate Gogarty and Ben Walsh

yes, i have a student melodica.

Kate (our pianologist) works for a company that puts on aesthetically pleasing events in unexpected places and gets excellent bands to play at them. Hence this sweet design exhibition at a carpet tile showroom featuring Briscoe.

This was, as far as I was concerned, the ideal first gig scenario for a few reasons.

Reason 1: It was a stripped down line-up - only me on acoustic, Jacob on electric and Dave on bass. Fewer instruments means less potential for gut-wrenching technical f*%k-ups, fewer gut-wrenching technical f*%k-ups means reduced risk of teary-eyed post-gig instrument incineration.

Reason 2: I got to sit down. I have never played a gig standing. I’ve either been drumming or keysing, always seated, so this was a welcome transitional opportunity. I am actually nervous about standing- i once strapped on a guitar in a Kid C rehearsal and Ray pissed himself laughing. "You only move from the waist up", he said, before launching into a withering (and dickish) imitation of me-as-inflatable car-yard noodle man. This shame was branded into the rump of my self-confidence that day and it's been festering there ever since. If Ray hadn’t done so much to build my confidence up in other ways i’d probably still be sore about this.

Reason 3: It was (kinda) anonymous. Aside from a few creepy Briscoe stalkers, no one there knew us from pile of carpet tiles. This was good because personally, I had no idea how shit or otherwise I was going to be at fronting a band. I still have no idea really, but i at least know now that i can get through 30 minutes of frontmanship without spewing everywhere and offending everyone. This was an important revelation for me.

Thanks to all the aforementioned stalker-types who made it despite my attempted cover-up job, in the end we were stoked that you managed to hack my email account to be there. We're playing in this format again in Canberra in September – the 24th at Phoenix. Dusker and Ranger Spacey will be playing too so DEF worth a road trip. Look at me! Promoting gigs like we are a real band!*

SETLIST 20/08/11:
The New Tragedy
Someone’s Wall
Triggers
Uh Oh. Mexico
Philadelphia Shangri-La
Break My Word
One Man Show feat. Student Melodica
Animal


*we are a real band.

Monday, May 30 2011... almost.

Briscoe. the album on compact disc, in all its pre-mp3ed glory

1.12am tracklist

The Mixing Process pt 2.

Luke Bertoz (left) of guitar sound on 'Animal':
"Sounds like angels pissing in my ears"

dave & kate listen in disgust to luke's simile