David Quantick

It’s c***s like you that are ruining this town!

A preview of The Summer Music Season as programmed by David Quantick.  By John Knowles

It’s not much of a welcome to the town you have chosen to move to “It’s c**ts like you that are ruining this town” but, for David Quantick the comment from a “local” on David’s thoughts on the Jerwood, which were by and large positive, seems to have been enough to make him stay, which is lucky for us. For David brings with him a love of music and film which he has combined to create the Summer Music Season for the Electric Palace Cinema, a collection of movies ranging from the hit documentary “Last Shop Standing” which tracks the rise and fall of the independent record store in the UK, to his own film “Snodgrass” based on a short story by Ian R. McLeod. David describes reading Snodgrass for the first time, as like being “shot at close range… I knew it was a film that I wanted to get made and it was the least blasé piece of work I have ever done”. Snodgrass imagines a 50 year old John Lennon living on the dole in Birmingham whilst his former mates continue to tour.

Also in the season will be documentaries on Neil Young: “Journeys” (Sun 11th of Aug) and “Beware Mr Baker” (Sat 31 Aug). The season runs throughout the summer on ‘occasional weekend nights’, culminating in the screening of the Talking Heads concert “Stop Making Sense” on Sept 7th. Stop Making Sense is one of the best rock concerts ever filmed, it begins with the fabulous David Byrne walking onto a bare stage with just a portable music system and a guitar and playing the fabulous “Psycho Killer” and slowly builds layer upon layer to reveal the band in its entirety, stripped of the usual pomposity of most concerts this is music on film and not a film about music.

David comes to Hastings from London where he spent 15 years on the NME, the paper that most of us, of a generation, thumbed for affirmations that our band was still were it was at. For David his time was marked by a mix of fleeting famous names and faces, smoke filled back rooms waiting for an interview and bed sits. “Most of the photographers had cars, kids and houses, but most of the writers couldn’t even drive… I lived off subs from my editor”. So not the life of glamorous star filled cocaine fueled parties then, though David did recall ending up behind a sofa on which the Cocteau Twins where having a furious row, though he had “no idea how he got there”.

Asked if he still goes to gigs David admitted that if he did it was a list which well and truly reflected his age and that the idea of watching new young bands made him feel like a pervert. Like many of us, David lamented the fact that to see any of the major bands, you had to go to London or Brighton and that now with a ten month old child the idea of crawling in at one a.m. was less appealing. I was among the lucky few who saw Nick Cave on the pier before it’s sad demise and now the town is reduced to an endless parade of look-alike, bands on the main venues, whilst our true artists play on in an ever decreasing circles. David and the other DFL’s must have a strange idea of us as music lovers if he looks at The White Rock or St Mary’s.

David’s most recent work has been on VEEP, for HBO, following on from his writing on The Thick of It. He has also been commissioned for Radio Four to create “52 First Impressions” a look at his first impressions of famous people, members of his family and friends. I pointed out that this seemed to be a good way of reducing his Christmas card list by 52 people, which David admitted was a strong possibility, though hopefully following this opening season of films he can replace them with 52 more from Hastings.

The Summer Music Season runs from the 3rd of August to the 7th of September and opens with  a double bill of Last Shop Standing and Snodgrass. See here for full information on the season and for tickets for all events.

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