My Cameras - the Box Brownie

The first camera I ever used was a Box Brownie.  It lay neglected in the dark, concealed within the fusty old sideboard in our dining-room.  I remember its faux-leather casing and a huge convex viewing lens, long-scarred and dusted with a thousand memories.

As an excited seven year old it seemed ... immense!

It was loaded with film, a simple black and white emulsion, then passed to me with a greasy coated lunch-box that contained ham sandwiches, Smith's Crisps with the little twisted blue bag of salt at the bottom, an apple and a half-melted Kit-Kat. A school outing to Hadrian's Wall.  Nose pressed tight to the cold bus-window as the world flashed by outside.

I took just a few shots.  Random stones and hard-etched summer-day shadows.  How I wish I had the prints with me now! A simple box Brownie, a start to my journey.

We were lovers

And we were summer-field
exploring
the skin-deep feel
of teenage cotton.

We were.

Caressing ...

We slumber partied
and deep down
rooted.

We held hands on Grey Street
and would not be parted

And striding through the snow
and braving the cold
of wind-whipped beaches
hand-in-hand.

Thawing to the red-glow
of a twin-barred
electric-fire
falling asleep to the spiral scratch world
unfolding
before us.

We were lovers.

This might be ...

My Bloody Valentine .. at full volume!!

Dear Sheddists,

it's been a long time, been a long time ... but not a lot has changed. Friday evening sees a mild spume of rain on the streets of downtown Birmingham and a slow, but steady trickle toward the O2.  I'm with my youngest, fresh back from University for a long weekend and she's been shopped, fed and watered in readiness.

It comes as little surprise when just beyond the ever-polite door-staff a young lady with a tray-full of UV coloured ear-plugs hands out the freebies like neon-tinted prophylactics in a minor third world country. They will be needed.

We watch the support act, Le Volume Courbe, who feature a bearded drummer not unlike a youthful Dr John on amphetamines, a fiddle player and a melodicanist  amongst their serried ranks.  It was OK and no more.

We make our way front stage to await the arrival of mbv, our view obscured a little by the bulky form of a middle-aged denim-clad rocker with two foot braids.  Not a good look at the best of times.  And then at 8:32 precisely a roar goes up from the crowd as Kevin Shields walks on sporting that humble, but slightly confused schoolboy-lost look for which he is so famous.  The rest of the gang are here too, including a spritely Bilinda Butcher whose fey visage the years have not dimmed a tadge.

Drum sticks are raised aloft, a count-in of three and we're off on the most marvellous wave of corruscating feedback we could but barely hope for in our wildest dreams. The Valentines are back!  Number melts into number, as guitars are thrashed, coaxed, exchanged and retuned with Swiss precision regularity.  And all the time the noise mounts!!

It reaches an apogee with a ten minute feedback-fest that would do justice to a Jumbo-jet on heat and then all too soon it's over.  Oh my ... mbv at full volume .. what an experience!!!!

yours as ever,

electrofried(mr)