Jo Bartlett releases her new album, The Cut Up on the 30th of September. Featuring the voices of Shaun Ryder (“keep Britain drug free, move to Aldershot”), Bobby Gillespie, James Dean Bradfield, Huw Stephens, and Gideon Coe, the album is being released on Jo’s own Indie Through The Looking Glass label as an album in its own right and also as a companion piece and the culmination to the Buzz Club section of her blog of the same name.
Today we are debuting the video for ‘Camden‘ featuring the voice of broadcaster Gideon Coe. The visual is a black and white collage of Jo’s cut and paste footage of her time promoting and performing, intercut with found footage. Watch it below.
Jo Bartlett says:
“The singing vocal is myself, headphones on, mic in hand singing what came into my head – a kind of ‘what if…?’ type thought running through my mind. Musically, I just had lots of fun and went with whatever happened. The acoustic riff is in the DADGAD folk tuning.”
Jason Glenister, video director says:
“I have always loved working with Jo – she is such a creative force of nature – and hilariously brilliant person to boot. This video was worked out and inspired by Beat-style ‘cut and paste’ format, using found footage and borrowing heavily from classic French 60’s new wave cinema. Merging the Super-8 staccato effect and clips from Jo & Danny’s previous footage put a time and place in the here and now.”
While still a teenager and along with being part of the C86, early indie movement as a musician, Jo started to put bands on at her Aldershot based, Buzz Club. From November 1985 to December 1993, she ended up promoting gigs by, The Stones Roses, Primal Scream, The Happy Mondays, Blur, The Manic Street Preachers, The Charlatans, Suede, and many more. (Jo and her partner, Danny Hagan – It’s Jo & Danny – later founded the Green Man Festival in Wales).
“I put the word out via Facebook in 2007 that I was looking for any flyers, photos or memories people had about The Buzz Club. Over the years I have been sent not only plenty of flyers and pictures but also a couple of incredible live video recordings, lots of live audio recordings and so many people getting in touch with memories.”
Jo has been writing about these gigs, including any artefacts she has, on her Indie Through The Looking Glass blog.
“I decided to add another dimension to my writing, so started cutting up cassettes of old band rehearsals, radio interviews and live Buzz Club recordings and putting them into Logic. I added drum machines, synths, guitars and vocals and had an enormous amount of fun along the way.”
An early version of album track ‘Camden’ was played on BBC 6 and by Andrew Weatherall on his NTS show in 2019, and The Cut Up will be released to coincide with Jo’s final Buzz Club post – Dodgy and Shed Seven, who played there on December 1993.
As recently as June 2022 Jo was sent an incredible, previously unseen artefact. A live video recording of Elastica who played The Buzz Club in October 1993. This is thought to be the earliest footage of them and will also be made public to coincide with the album’s release on 30th September.
This year, Jo provided the vocals to The Hardway Bros. dance track, ‘This Is Something’ which also features Andy Bell (Ride / Oasis) on guitar and made it to No.1 in the Balearic chart in May 2022.
Album pre-order :https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/jobartlett/the-cut-up
