Why we made This Is A Film About A Band

Fundamentally, we are inspired by the core ideals of punk, but rather than learning 3 chords and forming a band, we acquired some film, a laptop, some software, and we made a movie. It all started back in 2009 on a tour of Europe to promote our debut album ‘Bob & Veronica Ride Again’. New York based Nikelodeon cartoonist, and long-time Morton Valence fan, Mike Pearlstein, decided he wanted to produce a ‘Morton Valence live in concert’ DVD - remember them? - Coming with us on the road and filming much of our tour with an old colleague of his, Mike Levy. Upon returning to New York, the 2 Mikes took the footage to a variety of people who dismissed it as being “unusable”, due to the quality of the raw footage. Meanwhile, live concert DVDs went out of fashion and the project procrastinated. Fast forward 10 years, and we acquired the footage. In terms of conventional production values, it is most certainly rough-and-ready. But rather than making us recoil, it had the opposite effect. Paradoxically, its graininess, gritty sound and anachronistic video format seemed to essentially capture a DIY spirit of rock n roll that we've always found exciting. Over a period of about a year, we patchworked a narrative around the live performances, footage from the tour, archives from our own film experiments and moments from some of our favourite public domain B movies. Out of the chaos, somehow, we were finally looking at a cohesive piece of work, which not only told our story, but no doubt, the story of many a struggling artist. Our film, was of course, about a band (albeit that we’re actually a duo), and only one film title seemed to suffice, and therefore we proudly present... ‘This is a Film About a Band’.