The Jesus Bolt: Essoldo In Lights – video premiere and the story behind the track…

plus the earlier one, Everlasting Report.. 

The Jesus Bolt are Hazel Winter and Gerard Starkie.  Principally, two of the very best songwriters within the UK – previously members of Blue Aeroplanes and Witness. The observe as much as The Child Obtained Electrical album, entitled Machine Gun Nest is out in September.  Hazel additionally directs nice movies to go together with her bands key songs during which clues to the again story are enacted.

Ged Babey talks to Winter concerning the two new songs and their video diversifications.

A number of the Jesus Bolt songs are about recollections and shadows.

Essoldo In Lights is a curious title.  I had by no means heard of the Essoldo Cinema chain which was energetic within the UK from the Thirties to the Nineteen Seventies. They have been recognized for his or her luxurious interiors and high-quality projection and sound tools. I solely had Odeon and ABC’s regionally.

When you hearken to the track and watch the video first, you would possibly agree that, though it’s pleasurable, you’re left eager to know extra concerning the background or the back-story.

It’s positioned in what appears to be a Northern or mining city.  The late sixties, maybe early seventies appears to be the time-frame.  Cinema and childhood: Arabian Knights and Pinocchio. An usherette with a beehive and Biba blue eye-shadow. However a sinister ‘Baby Catcher’ determine…  Have a hear/watch… see what you suppose.

When you don’t need full exposition click on away now.

(Hazel Winter) I had all these recollections of going to the Essoldo cinema within the 60’s and 70’s and the way thrilling it was. Strolling alongside Crossgate Moor, the place we lived, down Redhill’s Lane with the view of the cathedral and the medieval metropolis down beneath, then onto North Rd to The Essoldo, which was an enormous gothic Mining Corridor which within the 60’s had a neon flashing gentle saying ‘Essoldo’. It was like getting into some impossibly magical fairyland.

At house we solely had somewhat black and white TV, so seeing movies on a giant display screen, in color, with what then appeared like an enormous sound system, was stupidly thrilling.

Until I’ve imagined it, there was a bloke who used to play the organ on the entrance earlier than the present and he and his organ would type of stand up from underground and play, wreathed in fag smoke, then slowly sink again down. There was a selected odor of smoke and popcorn and the musty odor from the chairs which had ashtrays on the again of them.

We noticed all of the early Walt Disney motion pictures like Snow White and Bambi, and because the track began to come back, I began writing down recollections I had.

My poor large sister taking somewhat fish and chip queue of smaller youngsters to see Pinocchio, and one of many lads (who clearly had a responsible conscience) changing into hysterical when the naughty boys grew donkey ears and having to be taken to reception to have his mum phoned. My sister was endlessly cross that she by no means acquired to see Pinocchio all over.

She acquired clobbered going to illicitly watch an X rated ‘Enter The Dragon’ when she was an adolescent. She acquired into a lot bother (we have been Methodists… we didn’t do issues like that).

Fifty years later she requested me to personal up. She’d thought for all these years that I’d grassed on her (I hadn’t).

Then that factor occurred whenever you’re doing one thing artistic, and it boots off tangentially and veers you in a path you hadn’t anticipated. And I realised I saved coming again to remembering the usherette.

She was this stunning lady who was a fixture of my childhood and early adolescence. She was murdered in 1976 strolling house after the late exhibiting. Durham is tiny so all of us knew her. And we knew the bloke who did it. It wasn’t some goblin from the silver display screen, some alien monster. He was only a bloke. His household ran a widely known enterprise on the town, and he’d gone to my faculty.

I used to be 14 on the time. The scariest factor I’d encountered up till that time had been Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The small print of what occurred to this lady have been broadly broadcast and so they have been devastating.

Because the track appeared, I chatted to outdated family and friends in Durham and everybody remembered what had occurred all these years in the past however once I put Essoldo Homicide in Google, nothing got here up. Fairly lots of people have been conscious that it had been vanished off the web. So, Starkie and I went to the reference library in Durham and searched via the outdated microfiche. It took hours however we discovered the newspaper clippings. And there she was. Her identify was Angela Mawson. There was a photograph of her, trying simply as I remembered.

We traced her closing stroll from the cinema to The Sands, the place she was murdered, on the outskirts of city by the outdated graveyard. There have been solely a few routes she may have taken It might have been effectively lit via town centre, however extra secluded and darker down by The Sands. She almost made it house. The bloke who killed her ‘pretended’ to find her physique behind the graveyard wall and known as the police the subsequent morning. After he’d given a press release, the police grew to become suspicious. The small print of the assault have been so atrocious he was sectioned. Apparently, he was quietly launched a couple of years later.

Watch the video once more and it places an entire new, extra satisfying perspective on it.

Just like the Chris Broderick/Stuart Turner album And One Pink Mitten, the main target of the track is on the principle character not as a sufferer, however as somebody whose life was vital and visual to the kids of the small city.

Essoldo in Lights is a examine of childhood innocence and pleasure and creativeness – and the way on a regular basis horror can shatter it.

Durham and its mining heritage is represented by footage shot on the current Gala and household cine movie shot by the Winter sisters late father included to recollect him and heat childhood recollections.

The Usherette is performed by actor Megan Eliza Ley Curtis,  an awesome understated debut efficiency and the home with its sunburst orange wallpaper belonged to her grandparents.  Her mum Vic (who labored on costume/make-up/hair design) informed me.

Mum died in 2012 and Dad died in February so I’m more than happy the home is being immortalised as it’s, earlier than it’s sadly bought. The mirror within the make- up scenes is my mums. She was so stunning… everybody mentioned she may have been a movie star, however she raised 4 youngsters as an alternative, and for Megan to have this function, is a tribute to her and all her loving care. It’s filmed from the precise spot each my dad and mom died and I used to be born, which is form of poetic. 

Hazel is such an all-round artistic and good film-maker. Gerard made an awesome youngster catcher!

He’s a knight in shining armour within the Jesus Bolts different video for Everlasting Report -also from the forthcoming album however a lighter piece – primarily based on recollections from later in Hazels life – but in addition the place a person appears to fuck issues up with deceit.

The idea for the video is (clearly) Botichelli’s The Start of Venus (somebody defined to me) … and excuse for Winter to fearlessly get bare and unashamed within the identify of artwork.  (Her on-line male musician buddies appeared to be extra within the make and mannequin of the guitar used to cowl her modesty than the blow struck for veteran feminist freedom of expression…)

The track was impressed by…

My partner-at-the-time’s mates have been working a Karaoke in a crowded pub and acquired me as much as do a track with this lady who he was having an affair with. Which all of them knew however I didn’t . The track was “ Venus” by Surprising Blue . It was a long time in the past so I’m serving this explicit dish up chilly.

and the video…

Barely miffed at being so magnificently upstaged by the goat. Which was pregnant on the time , including a soupçon of horror to proceedings . I spend lots of time on my allotment on the Metropolis Farm so having a chance to movie Starkie wearing armour getting pulled across the web site by a big pregnant goat was a bonus.

The Jesus Bolt album Machine Gun Nest is out 29 September 2023. 

Sat, 30 Sept 2023 –The Jesus Bolt album launch is at La Ruca 89 Gloucester Rd, Bristol BS7 8AS

Jesus Bolt Web site

Jesus Bolt Bandcamp

All phrases Ged Babey besides the place italicized