EXCLUSIVE: Helen McCookerybook Interview (Part Three)

Well the whole thing was supposed to tie in with Helen's new limited edition electronica album, Voxpop Puella, which is only available through http://mccookerybook.blogspot.co.uk/ but, as always happens when Helen and I start chatting, the whole thing got out of hand and will be run over the four days. 

Today is the third, (you can read part one HERE and part two HERE) I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did. We finished off yesterday talking about Helen's gloriously silly Club Artyfartle...

JON: I agree entirely.  So how often are you going to be doing them?

HELEN: Well, I’ve got no idea.......

JON: I am glad you said that, it would have spoilt it if you had said it is going to be on the second Sunday of every month and there is ample parking

HELEN: It’s like....I think I know where I want to do the next one but I haven’t been invited.  I might invite myself to do it but there is a collective in Deptford who used to be based in an ice cream factory, and now they’re in the Job Centre – an old Job Centre in Deptford – they’re called Utrophia (?) and I might ask them if I can do it there. I used to know them years ago and they just put on lots of silly things. They used to have a huge warehouse in Greenwich and I went to a party there once where there was just music everywhere you looked and it was all duets .. no duos rather. But all different sorts of music and the last thing of theirs I went to was an art exhibition, but they also had this vehicle outside that played music, but the music it played.. the engine was running buckets that banged buckets and shears that snipped and the  music was all these everyday items all hitting against each other <laugh> and all powered by the engine of the vehicle and so I’m hoping that sometime, possibly in January, that Utrophia might invite me down and I might do something down there, you know.

JON: That’s absolutely wonderful

HELEN: I love the idea of alternative things and hidden things, you know, and things that are just – oh I don’t know – things that are just there. Maybe the tiniest piece of graffiti that only one person knows about, that kind of thing. I quite like that idea.

JON: Yes so do I.  We do something every August,on the third weekend of August we turn the village I live in in North Devon into the weirdest village in the country and we have speakers on all sorts of Fortean and strange subjects turn up from all over the world and we have people from all over the world come take over the village for a weekend. And I try to make it as surreal and as much like the Magical Mystery Tour as possible.

HELEN: Things like that are brilliant, aren’t they?  That sounds lovely

JON: If you are free next August, come along

HELEN: Yes, yes....it’s magic isn’t it?  It’s putting magic into people’s lives and the unexpected and not what they’d read in a magazine, and just sort of....yeah

JON: I always make films with small children wearing animal masks chasing each other around the village and stuff and just for a little while each year I introduce a little surrealism and absurdity into people’s lives.

HELEN: Does everyone in the village join in, or is it ...

JON: A helluva lot of people do.  The wonderful thing is because the ticket sales and things go to support the work that I do with the Centre for Fortean Zoology all year, but all the money from the beer to the food goes to village charities, mostly with kids and so each year the Girl Guides, and the Tiny Tots and the over 60s and everybody...all these different village groups benefit and it makes a couple of thousand quid each year

HELEN: That’s really nice.  I was brought up in a village and there were horrible things about being brought up in a village, like how nosey everybody was, but there were nice things like at Christmas this really eccentric family used to collect up everybody in the village, house by house, and go carol singing so they’d turn up with a bell, ringing a bell outside your house, and they’d sing a carol and you’d go and join in, and by the time they had finished the whole village, practically everybody was there.  It was just really lovely because it was.... I don’t know, human.

JON: We have lost touch with humanity

HELEN: I think some people have.  I think a lot of stuff has become processing volumes of people hasn’t it, you know, and making money out of those volumes of people. Little things like village stuff like waht you’re describing you do where you live is ... it’s a really good way of reminding people that not everything has to come out at them through a screen..

JON: The other night my mate Richard and I were watching The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour on BBC IPlayer and we turned round to each other at the end and said ‘you know that’s what we do every year.  It’s all amateurish silliness with masks and things, and that’s what we do and I think it’s great.

HELEN: Amateurishness is great.  I mean in our village there used to be a village show every year and it was so haphazard, there was the primary school teacher – we used to have the primary school teacher’s choir and she used to wear really short skirts and all the dads used to sit in the front row and she was lifting her arms up to conduct and things, you know, and there was a ladies’ choir who sang really primly and stuff, and I was in the Girl Guides and we always did something and the school orchestra which was a really useless orchestra, and it was just ... it was like a variety show of really unprofessional .. <laugh>  Everybody was actually really proud of themselves for taking part, and it was a real celebration of what everybody did in their way. I just love things like that.

JON: That’s why I like the Portsmouth Symphonia so much

HELEN: Oh yes, yes.

JON: In fact anything Gavin Bryers did.  I like silliness and surreality of doing something not very well.  I think it’s wonderful. ...

and so we rambled on happily. Tune in tomorrow for the final installment.....and check out her Gonzo artist page