The Desks: The World

About six months ago I was listening to FBi 94.5, a great independent Sydney radio station. A song came on called “Making Plans”, it was a man and woman singing charming, funny, sweet lyrics about a relationship in which schemes go awry (“We’re going to run a marathon/Are we?/Let’s get in training./I lost my headband./Sorry!”).  I loved the song, and the fragile and vulnerable voices of the singers, so I tracked down the musicians, Jeff and Beth.

The Desks: Elephant or Lion

Turns out Jeff runs an indie label called Cabinet Pin out of his bedroom, where he also records all his songs.  “Making Plans” is by one of his projects, Commas and Dots, but Jeff and Beth don’t really perform as Commas and Dots (“We don’t know how to play those songs live”, they told us). Jeff did have a separate band, The Desks, and he was happy to do those songs – short, playful, and idiosyncratic – so we planned a shoot.

The Desks: To the Supermarket

It took us a while to arrange a date, and when we finally did, it nearly turned disastrous!  We had found a fantastic burnt out house right near Jeff and Beth in Summer Hill, and when we met them, they turned out to be very much like their music. We took our equipment, our instruments, and a trusty red milk crate and got set to film. But before we’d even set foot in the house – we couldn’t get the microphone working.  We tried to fix it with everything from a foam earplug to a plastic bread clip, but nothing worked.  Finally, just as we were packing up and apologising to our new friends, the microphone started working again!  We headed into the house fast as we could, a bit afraid that we were going to get kicked out and a bit afraid the mic would give up on us at any moment.

Neither of those things happened, and we were able to record some lovely songs.  Hope you like them as much as we do.

– Jonathan & Shoot The Player

www.thedesks.net
www.cabinetpin.com
www.myspace.com/desks

Podcast