Music and film review: Admiral Fallow, Glasgow

We ARE Ten, the flagship live event of the Glasgow Music and Film Festival, was a joint celebration of sorts, marking the tenth birthday of the Glasgow Film Festival (my, how it’s grown) and the ten years since the members of Admiral Fallow converged on Glasgow and formed the band.

Admiral Fallow formed ten years ago and marked their anniversary with ten short films. Picture: Gordon Burniston

Admiral Fallow: we are ten

Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

***

As a party, it was pretty muted and respectable but as an audio-visual experiment, it was thoughtful and nicely executed.

The first half of the show took the band out of their comfort zone, but allowed them to make a virtue of their diverse instrumentation. Using the idea of anniversary as a jumping off point, they had selected ten short films, no more than brief sketches in some cases, from up and coming filmmakers, including their co-conspirator Tom Harrison, which broadly conformed to their theme, depicting birthdays, weddings, life landmarks, and composed new music to soundtrack the visuals.

So a rolling backing track complemented the rolling camera angles of Alan Cameron’s and Ben Cowie’s More You Turn Me, while blithe woodwind and handclaps accompanied the wedding footage of CineMate’s Solemn Vow. There was musical whimsy to go along with some sentimental footage of an old folks’ tea dance and an earnest elegiac score applied to Michael J Ferns’ Letter From An Old Boy about First World War soldiers writing home.

Gabriella Watson’s Mugs was the most engaging short of the bunch, featuring girls and women of all ages checking their face and fussing with their hair as though the camera were a mirror, while frontman Louis Abbott delivered the mantra “and you grew conscious of the world around you”.

After the relative intrigue of the first half, which finished with the band mirroring video footage of themselves performing new song Carousel, the remainder of the evening was more prosaic concert, with an opportunity for fans to hear some familiar material, such as the haunting and fragile Bomb Through The Town, played to clips from the 1951 documentary No Mean City.

Elsewhere, absorbing footage from the British Council archives provided some stimuli when the band’s own music lacked interest, colour or a hook to hang on. Politeness prevailed onstage and off, despite Abbott’s assurances that the time for respectful silence was over followed by the sound of comedy shushing from audience members.

FIONA SHEPHERD

Seen on 01.03.14