Recorded at the beginning of a set at The Garage, London, in May 2004 - this was a short "come hither" track to give the punters a chance to get out of the bar, and into the main room. Video edited from various handheld cameras in the audience, with audio mixed from the sound desk, and other live recordings. On this outing, the Citizens were Marty Grant (guitar and vocals), Ben Herbert (guitar and backing vocals), Ian Chisnall (bass), and Jan Enkelmann (drums).
So – to kick off this Citizens reboot – “here’s one I did earlier“.
Actually – this was a preliminary working edit I was playing around with, at the time the original archive stash of digital material was first set aside. All I had to do this time round, was output a new video for YouTube from the original project files, and then compress to the latest (2023) recommended standards. To work with – We’d originally been given four different digital camera source files from various members of the audience – all with camera recorded audio tracks of differing quality. We also had an almost comprehensive soundboard recording from the FOH engineer on the night. Unfortunately – almost all of the camera sources had various other “holes” or otherwise unuseable segments – so synching together the video and audio, (let alone trying to stitch together the whole gig), was a bit of a challenge. Consequently – while some edits are planned – others are the result of what, (useful) material was left… Ultimately, I had to abandon ideas of salvaging the entire gig, since incomplete takes for a couple of the tracks coincided with either the soundboard dropping out completely, or where alternative, available camera audio was distorted and unuseable.
Synching this first track of the set, however, was quite straightforward – and I was able to quickly stitch together a couple of the video streams, and dub over a mixdown audio track using the soundboard take, with a little bit of camera audio added in for ambience. Video edits were done with Adobe Premiere, separate wave mixing with CoolEdit2000 Studio, and digital output for 2023 YouTube using Shotcut. (All PC/Windows). The original video files were, originally, 4:3 aspect ratio, but when prepping the files for YouTube this time around, I experimented with upscaling the video here to the more “modern” 16:9, letterbox format. Consequently – the resolution is a bit grainier than the original source, (and a long way away from “4K”. Not too shabby for “Indie” though…)
The track itself was never a “barnstormer” in itself – and was an idea which probably only featured in our live sets for a short while. However, it proved ideal for the opening number of a support set like this. On the night – the Citizens supported “Frantik“, so we had the middle set of three. Since The Garage is quite a long hall – a track like this sometimes helps to prick up the ears of the punters, and encourage them down and away from the bar. That was the theory anyway…
Looking at the rest of the archived digital files – it looks like I might be able to cobble the streams together, and synch a few more of the tracks from this gig, so – although I’d originally planned to work through the material in a more logical, chronological manner – I may just see what else I can shake out from this gig, before I move onto the earlier stuff…
Garageland 