Into October and on Sat 11th, a day at the Banbury Folk Festival. The Morris part of the day had been organised by Adderbury, and featured them, ourselves, Bloxham and Ducklington. The festival has been running for a few years and used to be known as the Banbury Canalside Festival, but now has spread to other parts of the town. The main base is The Mill Arts Centre, on the (Oxford) canal very close to the town centre, where we started the dancing, followed by spots at other venues around the town including the new covered shopping mall where we successfully blocked people getting in and out of Woolworths for a while. One of the features of our day though was that for much of it we were being followed by a 2 man camera crew (the legendary Marty Elsh and his mate, known as Marty’s mate) who had asked us for permission to film us for a music video being shot to accompany a single called ‘The Good Life’ from Reading based band Saloon (‘silky sleek electro robot folk pop’ according to their website). Of course, pointing a camera at our performers is like waving fresh red meat at a peckish lion – it tends to make some of the boys rather ham it up. However Marty appeared to get what he wanted from us, and we had a really good day anyway on a very pleasant and sunny October day.
We got to see the results of Marty’s efforts the next week when he brought the semi-finished video down to our practice. We were pleasantly surprised and actually quite chuffed with what he had done, as the video consisted of a number of upbeat segments from the dances we had done during the day, which somehow he had got to accompany the music track really well. As publicity for BB it was excellent (some great action shots and good close ups, especially of smiley Simon and his brother wassername) – however we will wait to see if it finishes up being used by the band or if it helps them shift any singles. We hope so, as the track is actually a strong and hypnotic piece of music in its own right. It will be good to see the finished video being played on Top of the Pops or MTV, when the whole world can view the ‘leap into the middle sequence’ in the Mazurka featured several times over, and also the ‘Rob-going-the-wrong-way-in-the-rounds’ sequence in Sucking the Monkey. Good luck Saloon and Marty!