About the Film

This live music film follows Lulu James and Martin Longstaff of The Lake Poets performing a cover of “Spooky” aboard ~Flow on the Newcastle Quayside, released ahead of both artists’ appearance at Evolution Festival that June. Both were confirmed on the same day’s bill as Dizzee Rascal, Maximo Park and Miles Kane, one of the North East’s biggest music weekends, and the film doubled as a way of pointing festival-goers toward ~Flow itself, free to board on the Quayside for the rest of the summer.

Two North East Voices, Early in Their Careers

Lulu James was born in Tanzania and moved to South Shields as a child, where she discovered music through a development course and began her professional career in 2012, the same year as this film. She went on to work with Gorgon City, Jon Hopkins and Kidnap Kid, and to play Glastonbury, WOMAD and Coachella.

Martin Longstaff, performing as The Lake Poets, is a Sunderland singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who took the name from a poetry collection he read at university. His debut EP, Honest Hearts, arrived in 2014, followed by a self-titled debut album produced by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, and he’s since played Glastonbury, T in the Park, the Roundhouse and the Sage Gateshead. This ~Flow session, like Lulu’s, caught him well before any of that.

This isn’t really the kind of film I’d usually make. Most of my work sits in documentary, arts and heritage rather than live music, but as someone who genuinely loves music, being trusted to film two North East artists together at such an early point in both their careers, before either of them had any real idea where things were heading, felt like a real honour.

What ~Flow Actually Was

~Flow was a tidemill, a floating structure on the River Tyne generating its own power from a 4.5 metre tidal water wheel, built by Owl Project and Ed Carter with architecture by Nicholas Kirk Architects. Inside, wooden musical machines and electro-acoustic instruments responded to the changing state of the river itself, so no two visits sounded quite the same. It was commissioned by the UK Arts Council as one of twelve large-scale public art projects marking the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, moored on the Quayside from March to September 2012, free to board, and visited by more than 40,000 people over that summer.

Filming Live Music Spontaneously, in Strange Places

Filming a performance aboard a structure that’s actually being turned by the tide is a different job to filming one on a fixed stage. ~Flow was never quite still, and the wooden instruments inside kept their own rhythm underneath whatever the musicians were playing, so there was no clean separation between the performance and the room it was happening in. Getting a live set to feel intimate on camera usually means staying close and simple, and here that meant working with a structure that had its own sound and its own slow movement built into every shot.

This is the kind of live music film I’d happily make more of. There’s rarely time to plan a shoot like this properly, a single afternoon, an unusual space, a performance that will only happen once in exactly that setting, and the job becomes reacting quickly rather than setting anything up in advance. Music filmed somewhere genuinely unexpected, a tidemill, a workshop, a place nobody would normally think to bring a band, tends to hold up better over time than a performance filmed in a studio or on a conventional stage. If you’re a musician, a venue or a festival with a space like that and an artist worth capturing in it, I’d love to hear from you.