Tour Dates
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26th – 31st October 1998
Broadcast from Nottingham
So Bring Me Down was commissioned by NOW 98, Nottingham’s annual performance festival for their radio station NOWFM.
Spread over the six days of the station’s licence, these short programmes,many of them only 30 seconds long, combined to tell the astronaut story from Ocean of Storms. Scattered unannounced through the station’s schedule, the programmes central conceitwas that the NOWFM frequency was occasionally shared by Jo, an astronaut lost in space and contemplating a suicidal attempt at re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere,and Al, her mission controller. Working in a fake ‘real time’ the programs started to work as their own trailers, building towards Jo’s attempt to return home.
The joy of being comissioned by an experimental station was a freedom to play not just with scheduling, but with static, silence, distortionand unpredictability. A year or after So Bring Me Down archive recordingsof the first Apollo moon landing were broadcast on British television in a similar fake ‘real time’.
Credits
Jo: Sarah Dawson
Al:Amanda Hadingue
Text / Direction: James Yarker
Production: Brian Duffy & Jony Easterby
Music by kind permission: Duffy & Easterby plus Richard Chew.
Commissioned by: Andrew Chetty for Now98
