TRAUMA/DRAMA EAST/SOUTH LONDON 1985 – 2013
City of Tales LIVE on 22 JUNE 2013 at Limehouse Town Hall
Tickets available from wegottickets
Cast: Tam Dean Burn. Lights: Jonathan Quarterman. Camera: Inga Tillere. Director: Johny Brown.
Post production: Inga Tillere. Location: Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery, London
FRAGILE AND PRECARIOUS AND DON’T KNOW HOW TO ARTICULATE THE DISGUST AND WONDER…
A REQUEST FROM BAND OF HOLY JOY... It's a mystery of a sort.We were out on a session in Kings X and picked up a scabby purse come tired handbag in our drunken haze by stupid mistake in the lobby of a hotel there.
We opened it, as curious curiously would, only to find nothing but some random bits of unspooled tape. Later on in the interest of Holy Joy and Strange Art we edited these untold strips together. We were taken aback by the brutally anonymous footage that emerged.
We'd like to make contact though, almost feel that we have to, and solve this unsettling mystery, if just to put our own troubled minds at rest, so if any one out there has information on who these protagonists might be or what they are about, please don't hesitate to get in touch and help us crack this mystery.
Joanna Pickering, William Lewington, James Stephen Finn, Peter Smith, Inga Tillere and Johny Brown
Chance manifests in the shape of a BLACK SWAN CHOKED ON DIRTY CASH…
Summer 2012, London: the hyperreal cityscape seems permanently lodged in a fresco forged from David Peace’s worst nightmares. Anxiously compelled by their own relentlessly restless daemon Band of Holy Joy ditch the streets and hit the studio to sculpt a trash electronic sequel to their lost never-released 1985 cassette City of Tales. Brechtian cabaret is displaced by cheap Casio shamanism, beat machine, string screech, found sound, an extended scream – abject fury and world-weary vulnerability spun from endless late-night orbitals, riding the 149, their own strung-out history never once quelling a sense of murky misadventure. JOHNY BROWN, CHRIS BRIERLEY, JAMES STEPHEN FINN, JON CLAYTON, INGA TILLERE. Ladies and Gentlemen we present: Band of Holy Joy - City of Tales (Volume 2).
City of Tales double cassette is SOLD OUT.
Digital download available from iTunes, Amazon, Juno, Boomkat and other online retailers.
We get excited. We think cassette double pack. 100 only. Inga Tillere visualises stark fetish - hand prints booklets out of recycled 20 quid notes, ties up booklet-postcard bundles with the original tape. Business cards are made. Tales nailed.
2 volumes of disgust of bile of tenderness of lives lived, fucked over, redeemed, eternally lost . 3 decades of unflinching vision - Accumulated Accounts of the financial jackboot making miseries of mavericks. The song remains the same whilst Capital Gains.
Time to balance the books redress history really LOOK at the food at the end of that fork see the Naked Lunch.
www.punkonline.co.uk, January 2013
Den Browne, Mudkiss Fanzine, March 2013
Some of the sharpest social commentary you’ll hear all year.
Transpontine, April 2013
One of Margaret Thatcher's many reported contemptible utterances was that '"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure" (though actually there's some doubt exactly what she said, when, or even whether she said it all!). Was it prophetic that just two days ago The Band of Holy Joy posted a refutation of this sentiment on youtube, with a film to accompany their gorgeous song 'I have travelled the buses late at night' (from their album City of Tales): 'I have seen the rich take the goodly fight, to drive the poor neatly out of sight, I have seen the poor chase the shadows of the rich, they want to scale the Shard but they end up in Shoreditch'.
The Band of Holy Joy are arguably the finest band to ever emerge from New Cross.