Radio Hour Past

The Radio Hour just doesn't feel the same without my producer Harry. I mean, I still get the guests - and if Harry had seen the number of people in the studio during my interview with 85a, I am pretty sure he would have had a few choice words. But my rambling meditations on the nature of art and music, as well as my epic fail musical choices, don't have the same enthusiasm without Harry's polite words of condemnation.

Despite it being Friday the 13th, the show went well: Howie Reeve is an engaging interviewee, and he seems to be on a one man crusade to encourage cross-platform art across Scotland. He left me a copy of the latest Tattie Toes' album - he refused to play any tracks from it on air, so I slipped them in after he left - and talke about his various improvisation and promotion projects. I felt rather lazy after realising that he was currently involved in ten different activities.

85a have become one of my favourite... now, what would I call them? Visual art collective - but that ignores the cinematic aspects of their Big Nights Out. Extended Cinema Crew - but what about the mechanical opera they did last year? Post-soviet industrial surrealists? Any way, they turned up in force and left me a patch for my denim jacket, advertising Chernozem.

Chernozem has been the secret project that 85a have been developing in the past few years, running about various wastelands and dressing up in all manner of outfits - I imagine that is like what would happen if the Soviet Union had gone into making monster movies. And even though Judd Bruke has spent all his time and money on directing, the rest of the collective just had to make it into something more.