From March 16th to May 11th, France went into a general lockdown due to Covid 19, as experienced by a large part of the world. Like many, Lille based fast hardcore punks JODIE FASTER got surprised, and were separated for 2 months, wondering what to do with all this free time on their hands. They have managed not to go crazy, somehow wrote a couple of songs and counted the gigs getting cancelled one after another. Today, we’re giving you the full stream of their quarantine live video “The Show That Never Was”, bringing back some of the memories of raw, noisy and gritty hardcore shows we miss so much these days.
Comments the band: “The idea of shooting a live video that would be a bit more than traditional live performance emerged by that time. We thought it would be cool to play some songs we don’t play live, and call it “The show that never was”, since we play those never-played-before in an empty room. We decided to shoot 3 blocks that would be aesthetically different from one another, using typos and lettring for the first, a sequence-shot for the second, and some video-projections of french police violences during demos these past years for the last one. We added some inside jokes, a new song, special credits and tried our best to play our own music decently after a long pause.
We got help from really nice people on that one : Paul Ellis and the Collectif Parasites first, a group of people that not only does cool videos but also works to regenerate the countryside near Lille, through social and solidarity economy, which is some dynamics that we can only support.
Jesse James, from Studio Apollon XIII did a great job capturing our live sound with a couple mics, and a tremendous job by mixing and masterizing the songs on a full analogic set-up.
It was also a cool occasion for us to support La Brat Cave, an independant venue in Lille that really raised the bar high when it comes to help touring bands and DIY promoters.
We hope that you’ll enjoy this, so grab a cold one (or do it like JayJay and grab an alcohol-free one), sit back, relax and blast this at full volume like it’s 2019, for fuck’s sake”
Extra: Top live sessions of other artists, by JODIE FASTER:
A bunch of bands did some rehearsal videos or live sessions, including our pals in Rash Decisions and Gummo.
We played an online festival, Global Bandemic, organized by Jones In The Fast Lane Promotions (AUS), which had a lot of cool bands playing from all around the world. We enjoyed a lot CÚT LỘN from VietNam who did a killer set:
Asked about their perspective for live shows in 2021, JODIE FASTER concluded:
“Things are pretty bad, as a lot of venues are going through difficult times and are shutting down. We’re worried about the psychological effects the lack of social and musical times will have on all of us, so we’ll probably try to play as much as we can : house gigs, rehearsal rooms, outside gigs and so on.
But we’re also convinced that we need to protect ourselves and other from spreading the virus, and don’t want to put people at risk, so we’ll adjust our position depending on the conditions of the gigs.
It is also really hard to plan in advance like we usually do, with local restrictions changing daily everywhere. Nothing’s certain really, except we’re craving to play live again
