I lived in Paris for a year and my newest single 'Paris' is a patchwork of memories of that city.
I had a culture-packed year and with my 'Etudiant d'histoire de l'art' card I got in free to virtually every art exhibition: The Louvre, Musee des Arts Decoratifs (where you can sit on all the chairs from all the Bond films), Versailles, Palais de Tokyo, even an exhibition on Yves Saint Laurent. My favourite thing to do was to wander down little cobbled streets and find strange cafes, or sun myself by the Seine, listening to buskers. Quelle cliché. Here I am busking on the steps of Sacre Coeur... Unfortunately the guys on before me were singing Ob-la-dee Ob-la-da which seemed to be better received by the crowd!
A year or so after moving back I was suddenly struck with a sense of overwhelming understimulation and missed everything I had seen and done in Paris. So one night I wrote the lyrics to my song 'Paris.' A while later, myself and my friend Adam Pryce who illustrates for Walker books, began work on an animated video for it.
We both have different drawing styles but they combined really well in the animation. We were looking at music videos by Kate Bush and Andrew Bird which had used similar animation techniques and Adam looked at the drawing style of Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans — you may remember the cartoon series — whilst my drawings are fairly realist...
The spasmodic dancer is me. I was trying to be fee and whimsical like a silent movie actress. I felt a bit of a berk whilst filming it.
We filmed and animated in an attic room in the dark. It was sunny outside, but inside we were getting engrossed in a world of green acetate. The acetate kept curling up in the heat of the overhead-projector which we used for the stop-frame. This is the reason my hands are in the film so much, as I was trying to unfurl the images!
The song 'Paris' in it's live version has had around 80 thousand plays on soundcloud, mainly through the app 'stereomood'. I am big in Italy apparently...
The single 'Paris' was recorded at Bowerman Studios in London at the end of 2012 with Colin Browne on bass and accordion, Joe Browne on drums and me on vocals, piano, violin and wind chimes! Thea Gilmore tweeted that it would be 'the best £1 you'll ever spend' — which was nice.... If you'd like a copy, you can wait til the next album is out, or download it from BANDCAMP — www.heidiemmapeachbrowne.bandcamp.com
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