Feeling My Age

Bathtime in Clerkenwell by (The Real) Tuesday Weld
2002 animation by Alex Budovsky

From the St Petersburg Times:
“Alex Budovsky, the award-winning St. Petersburg-born, New York-based animator, appears to know how to make music and cartoons go together, using modest means to great effect.Budovsky, who came to Russia earlier this month to supply some video backing to a pair of shows by The Real Tuesday Weld, has been collaborating with Stephen Coates’ London-based “antique-pop” band since he made his first video for them in 2002.”

First came across Alex’s howling mad, and midly disturbing video above around the time of the Real Tuesday Weld’s “I, Lucifer” album. As The Guardian put it back then: “a cuckoo-clock bird gets medieval on a tardy commuter’s ass. Before long a whole phalanx of little feathered fascists are marching on London, in a Metropolis-inspired production line. Buoying the whole thing up are Stephen Coates’s bouncy oom-pah acapella harmonies, full of Jazz Age jump.”

Stephen himself keeps a fascinating blog as The Clerkenwell Kid, where in a 9-years-later update to the above, we learn that Mr Budovsky has now moved to Bogota and recently directed  a surreal short animation by Olga Gonina called Once Upon A Guest – on which SC contributed both the music and the voiceover. Read all about it and watch the video here