Soko: Why Don’t You Eat Me Now You Can

I hope we haven’t seen the last of her. Her sensitivity to the world gives her a warmth and sincerity that is instantly lovable. Her spirit is infectious and her ability to connect with people is endearing and turns you to mush. You kinda want to take her home and bake cookies (vegan of course) all afternoon. Hopefully she’ll resurface and continue to sing songs about dicks and periods and cowboys and dead girls and sex up against a wall and little baby cats; right now no one else makes me laugh and sing so wonderfully at once.

Soko: It’s Not Going To Work

When we suggested the graveyard Soko was instantly into the idea. The location was dramatic and spooky, but also very Sydney and close to Bondi where she was meeting friends. While I drove, we all giggled and ate chocolate cookies from a health food shop on Crown St, Soko filled us in on life and the tour and her friend Julie interjected in French from the back seat.  Funny in a way that we filmed in a graveyard and that her myspace page now states that she is influenced by ‘all the dead people, the living world is not so inspiring’ and that she sounds like ‘a ghost, gone forever’.

Soko: Goodbye Paris

At the time of making these films Soko was living in LA and and as the song Goodbye Paris suggests, she had poetically renounced her French citizenship and rejected the oppressive grip of old world Europe in favour of the sunny skies and animal-friendly ethics of the American west coast.  Heartbreaking then, to read that she’s back there, in “HELL: FRANCE” and to read her About section on her myspace is far from Goodbye Paris; it’s just Goodbye.

Soko. Come back!

- Amelia & Jonathan

www.myspace.com/mysoko

As we’d arranged, we knocked on the door of the apartment where Beach House were staying in the early afternoon of a warm Sydney day, ready to film. Pretty soon it became clear that there had been a miscommunication: turned out Beach House weren’t traveling with acoustic instruments. (Victoria says too often acoustic music sounds like reggae!)  After mutual faffing, umm-ing and ahh-ing, Amelia ducked home and picked up a guitar she’d often heard her flatmate gently strumming in her room. (Yes you may recognise this guitar, we had to borrow it when we filmed An Horse too.) We all piled into the car with renewed enthusiasm and headed to the beach.

While she drove, Victoria sat in the backseat thumping two novels together and warming her vocal chords with TLC’s Waterfalls. The heavy paperbacks made a nice deep sound but were abandoned when we got to Tamarama Beach.  So the guitar problem was solved but we still needed a drum. Amelia rummaged through the boot of her car; a pair of heels, a tennis racket, an old coat and a pile of books and paper. The boys headed off in search of something else they could use.

Meanwhile Victoria and Amelia poked around and found an empty bottle of alcohol and an abandoned lemon, and Jonathan tried to figure out how to shoot the band without slipping and falling on the wet rocks.

Eventually returning with a sandy bucket, the boys nestled into a small space Victoria had spotted between boulders.  With the rumble of the ocean behind them, and surfers in the distance, they began playing a new tune.

Used To Be has become one of our favourite videos, one we could watch over and over again.

*photos by Jefferton James

- Amelia

www.beachhousemusic.net
www.myspace.com/beachhousemusic