a bit of the other

were you as disappointed with the pastels video as i was?

i remember mark flunder telling me he'd been putting it together and i couldn't wait to see it.
it eventually came out on glass records in 1988 and was more than just a bit rubbish.

mark didn't like it either - supposedly the pastels had been really unhelpful in making it.
it really shows in the lack of interest they display in every scene of the video.

there's a scratchy black and white version of baby honey (that damn song was on every pastels record for 10 years! or so it seemed), and the "crawl babies" video was on there - that was probably the highlight.
poor mark - that's the one video he didn't make.

the rest of it is the pastels moping about, occassionally holding bits of plastic fruit while eugene and frances vaseline mope about in the background.

for the anoraks amongst you, stills from all this nonsense were used in the artwork for the "up for a bit" LP.

anyhow.
i recently watched it again.
i'd not sat through it in about 15 years.
it was even worse than i remember.
the music's fine - of course it is, it's a bunch of songs from "up for a bit" along with "truck train tractor".

at around the same time i got hold of a copy of this:



now this was more like it!

this video captures SWANS at their most brutal.
once described as "the sound of a man chained to a pole walking in endless circles" (sorry - can't remember who i'm (mis)quoting there), the live set on this video is intense and huge and frighteningly wonderful.
there's a couple of videos stuck on the end - the one for "a screw" is particularly fine.

and so i threw my hand in with the noise brigade.
i had loved the pastels, i really had.
soon after the video came the "baby, you're just you" single and the pastels had lost a fan.
from stephen pastel © haircut to burning my anorak over the course of one 4 minute pop song.

shame.