A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
Substack
Dean and Britta's COVID shows (part 2)
Back in May I wrote about the first months of COVID in 2020 and how important Dean and Britta’s live streamed shows had been during that scary and difficult time. I finished that post with their third live-streamed show at the end of June this post will pick up where I left off.
By July we were all slowly becoming experts at living in the COVID age. The governemt had relaxed the rules and people were allowed to travel and make visits… maybe the end was in sight? Perhaps it’d all be over and we could return to normality.
On the 10th July Dean teased the release of a lathe-cut single containing covers of The Bee Gee’s Massachusetts and The Incredible String Band’s Air:
… that day they also announced that they’d be playing another concert from their living room at the end of the month, and this time at a sensible time for the folk on this side of the pond.
On the 15th July it was my dad’s 80th birthday and before COVID he’d been talking about a party (possibly even two parties, my dad is very popular!) but the virus came along and kicked all of that into touch. My sister decided it would be a good idea if all of the family would make their way down to Arundel and we’d have a little surprise get-together. So Hazel, Adam and myself - fully tested and masked up - made our way down from London to West Sussex. my sister and her family made their way down from the NE. and my brother and his partner from Middlesex.
We surprised my dad at a local park, walked around the lake and took lots of family pics and then stood outside his house and had a small COVID-age party.
Possibly the biggest surprise might have been just how ridiculous my COVID-moustache had become!
On the 19th July I shaved!
Live stream #4 - 24th July 2020 - Veeps
This is the review I posted the following day to AHFoW.
Last night Dean & Britta played their third fourth live streamed concert since lockdown and the first one at a sensible time for European fans. For this one they also roped in Roger Brogan to help with the sound and to play drums.
The duo have decided to use the Veeps platform for the concerts which consensus seems to suggest was a wise decision as the sound quality is pretty good although for the first ten minutes of last night’s performance you wouldn’t have known that as the show started without sound. After a couple of minutes of their opener the message that the only people who could hear the show were the three folk in D&B’s living room the event ground to a halt. With some knob twiddling and a call to tech support things were finally resolved and the concert restarted with My Rifle, My Pony and Me from Dean and Cheval Sombre’s album of cowboy songs from a couple of years back.
Once the sound was restored it became clear that this show was a step-up from previous ones, the addition of drums and Roger’s hand at the engineering wheel was certainly making a difference - next up was Galaxie 500’s Leave The Planet followed by Opal’s Hear The Wind Blow.
The set continued with a run of Galaxie 500 tracks with Dean & Britta’s You Turned My Head Around slotted in the middle (always a joy to hear and see Britta during that one). Dean also gave a couple of poetry readings and threw in some banter and told some stories.
Among the Galaxie 500 tracks was a beautiful rendition of Sorry - written by Damon and a heartbreaking insight into a band crumbling - “Seems it doesn’t make a difference, and were sorry all the time” - it was beautiful to hear and probably hasn’t been performed live by any former Galaxie 500 members since their last tour in 1991 - the late Tom Rapp covered it at a Terrastock show back in 1998.
The show finished with an encore of a cover of Donovan’s Sadness and then a perfect Ceremony.
Definitely the best of the three shows so far - and an absolute joy to see them live. The Veeps platform has a chat that was quite active during the show and was nice to have some level of interaction with other fans… lovely to see so many familiar faces in there.
The one thing that was really missed was band/audience and inter-audience feedback.
- the band tried to keep an eye on the chat but it clearly isn’t possible in any meaningful way - the delays and the silence of it mean that they aren’t really reacting at all - this was most blatantly clear during the silent rendtion of the opening track - the fact that it took two minutes before Dean & Britta realised that nobody could hear was telling.
- audience interaction with each other, while better, was also hard. Chat went past too quickly at times - the Veeps platform didn’t allow @ comments or private comments or for the audience to break into smaller groups (not sure if this would work at all).
- the inability to actually hear an audience made things feel a little off, it’s almost as if you want a second stream so the audience and the band could see and hear each other - again not sure how/if this would work but I missed that probably more than anything else - I’m not a social person but I do miss being among fans!
Full setlist (posted to Dean’s Instagram):
- My Rifle, My Pony and Me
- Leave The Planet
- Hear The Wind Blow
- When Will You Come Home
- poem: The Canoeing Trip by Russell Eldon
- King of Spain
- Parking Lot
- Snowstorm
- You Turned My Head Around
- Blue Thunder
- poem: Extract from The Lichtenberg Figures by Ben Lerner
- Sorry
- Victory Garden
- Don’t Let Our Youth Go to Waste
- Sadness
- Ceremony
On the 14th August the previously teased lathe-cut single was decalred to be part of a seven disc box of lathe-cut singles, the first release of Dean & Britta’s Quarantine Tapes.
On the 22nd August I decided that what the COVID shitshow needed, or at least what I needed during it, was another AHFoW tribute album so I put out a call for contributions to an album and booklet commemorarting the 30th anniversary of the release of Galaxie 500’s last album. Given the short notice and ridiculous ambition I didn’t really expect it to come to anything - but it turns out there were other folk hoping for a distraction, and contributions soon started arriving.
At the end of the month I cycled into work for the first time since the shit-show started… although it wasn’t really work we just sat in the TNA pocket park eating, and catching up - it was nice to be among my work colleagues again… although, clearly we were all keeping our distance. I assume that things had started to go bad again!
On the 7th September Dean & Britta announced a couple more live stream shows for the end of the month.
Before COVID messed things up Hazel and I had been planning to sell up and move out of London, most likely to the North East of England… by September things seemed like things might be getting better so we planned a few days in Tynemouth to see the lay of the land. On the 17th September we masked up and took the train out of London.
We had a lovely few days of wandering around and getting the feel for the place, walking along the beaches, drinking coffee and eating chips - we even got up stupidly early to watch a sunrise. We even managed to go and see a football match (Whitley Bay 1 Newcastle Uni 4 - attendance 254) it was the most normal thing we’d done…
… and then back to London and back to the new normal.
Live stream #5 and #6 - 26th September 2020 - Veeps
On Saturday Dean and Britta played what they described as ther last live stream shows of “the season” (not entirely sure what this means but… more on that later).
They played two sets once again using the Veeps platform and, once again, were enhanced with the addition of Roger Brogan on drums, SFX and technical support. Both sets opened with a video of various clips of Dean & Britta (some I’d not seen before) playing while Roger DJ-ed for half an hour before show time.
On time, and without any noticeable technical issues this time (save for the slight annoyance of the video struggling with autofocus) - Dean and Britta took the stage - and, this time, the stage didn’t involve a sofa - the shows were to be played standing up.
The first set opened with The Incredible String Band’s Air followed by Night Nurse and Galaxie 500’s Pictures. The duo seemed relaxed and were on good chatty form and the periodic dip into the chat-room didn’t seem as intrusive as it sometimes did in earlier shows. That chat-room was lively and fun and added to the enjoyment of the show. The show continued with more dips into the catalogues of Luna (Tiger Lily), Galaxie 500 (It’s Getting Late), and Dean & Britta (We’re Not Supposed to be Lovers). A highlight came mid-set when Dean mentioned that they’d had a request for Slow Song and demonstrated the similarity between that and Scott Walker’s Duchess by playing a beautiful cover of the latter.
As has become a key part of these shows Dean read a couple of poems - a baseball one by Rodger Kamenetz and John Betjeman’s Hearts Together which contains the origin of the phrase Emancipated Hearts.
The show wrapped up with another treat - a beautiful/perfect cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound - a track that the duo had last performed ten years previously at a benefit show in Central Park.
A couple of hours break and 1:30 am (UK time) came around and the second show was on! Another lovely DJ set from Roger, was followed by the set openers Air and Night Nurse again - this was followed by Galaxie 500’s Flowers.
As it was now evening in the US Dean & Britta shared a drink and were, possibly even more relaxed - most likely because of how smoothly things seemed to be going… that, and the drink!?
The set continued in similar vein to the first show - with a few changes. Duchess was still there and tracks that hadn’t been heard in the first show included The Silver Jews Random Rules and Luna’s Bobby Peru.
Homeward Bound was reprised and the show finished with Galaxie 500’s Tugboat (as requested by Roger).
Both shows were wonderful - the sound was, again, excellent; the band were having fun and the lack of the occasional technical hitches that had affected previous shows made the whole thing a fine way to spend a few hours and made staying up until 3:30 in the morning seem a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
So, I have no idea what Dean & Britta’s definition of the season is but in the chat at the end of the first show I threw out the suggestion that they do a Christmas show, after all there are so many tracks that they’ve recorded over the years that would fit so perfectly in there.
Britta seemed up for it…
Andy: Sad this’ll be the last one of the “season” - you should do a xmas one! Start rehearsing Wonderful Christmastime now and you might have perfected it by December :) - thanks Dean & Britta!
Britta: Hi Andy! Already thinking about xmas songs we can play for a xmas time show
ahlicake: He’s Coming Home!
EggNog: Egg Nog?
itunongar: Listen the snow is falling…
Britta: @ahlicake HI! Yes! “He’s Coming Home for sure!
Andy: Oh you have to do it now Britta!
chriscecil: Superfreaky Memories..I always listen to that around Christmastime.
Britta: Eggnog for sure
Britta: Yeah, super freaky is a nice dark xmas song
Phil & DaraL “It’s winter in New Jersey…”
Britta: I def wanna do Little Altar Boy
Andy: Snowstorm – Old Toy Trains – Stille Nacht - you’ve already done so many seasonal gems
Britta: Hey, that’s almost a full set!
… so… fingers crossed! Feel free to keep up the pressure on them on your social-media platform of choice :)
On 5th October I went into work… I can’t really remember why, probably just because I could, although the pictures that I took suggest that very few people were coming in to work so being at work to see people wasn’t really a success.
Less than three months after putting out a call for submissions for a tribute album/booklet This Music Is Ours was released in early November
https://aheadfullofwishes.bandcamp.com/album/this-music-is-ours
During November COVID was back on the rise, with a new variant causing more lockdowns… and more people dying - it seems we were a long way from being out of this nightmare.
Early in December Dean & Britta announced that they would indeed be having alive streamed “holiday party from their living room” - now, I don’t want to take the credit for this… but, I’ll repeat this snippet from the September stream chat…
Andy: Sad this’ll be the last one of the “season” - you should do a xmas one! Start rehearsing Wonderful Christmastime now and you might have perfected it by December :) - thanks Dean & Britta!
Britta: Hi Andy! Already thinking about xmas songs we can play for a xmas time show.
… make of that what you will.
So, in the early hours of the 20th December…
Live stream #7 - 19th December 2020
It looks like I never wrote a post/diary about the last show so… I’ve just re-watched it - and I imagine this is what I would have written if I had!
The show started, once again, in silence and just as Dean was about to get on the phone to tech support Britta noticed that she’d forgotten to unmute! Dean and Britta were once again standing for this show, and once again Roger was helping out from behind the camera. A small Christmas tree was set up behind the sofa and Dean and Britta were dressed in seasonal black polo necks! They opened the show covering John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over) and then into Silent Night.
Next up was Britta singing Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown, a song from the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service which Dean describes as “not the best Bond movie but the best soundtrack” - although, not particularly being a fan of Bond films I’d have to say that it is the best Bond movie because it sas the best soundtrack… and it has Diana Rigg, also, it’s the only Bond film that’ll make you cry at the end! Lazenby is however a complete plank!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1EdMwyj8cM
I think this might have been the show highlight… although it was all pretty special!
The show continues with more songs, some banter, some Qs getting Ad so we know that Dean’s favourite childhood Christmas memory involved the stormy waves and a bicycle and that Britta’s favourite food if her Nana’s sugar cookies.
The show finished with a run of Snow songs and then Happy New Year and for the last time of the year we have the absolute joy of Dean or Britta (or both of them) trying to end the stream!
We then retired to the chat room, and then to bed!
There was one more live streamed treat - an ad-hoc live Instagram appearance singing Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mgMlLoxcU0
And so COVID year 1 came to an end but without an end in sight - but Hazel, Adam, and I (and all my family) made it through pretty much unscathed and Dean & Britta’s scheduled and unscheduled appearances helped to make things better!
