The Sheffield Scenester

We arrived at The Lescar on Sharrow Vale Road, to meet up with The Unfortunate Incident ahead of their video shoot of the song ‘Fools’, we also had the prospect of being in the video itself to look forward too...so it looked like being a fun day! Two of the band members were there, brothers Russ and Daniel Palmer, along with them were film-makers Carl and Ben, director Ciaran and the world famous band mascot Jonny Sock! A small group of fans had turned up as well to appear in the video, so we all gathered on the set itself. This was an old outhouse of sorts, called The Lescar Project Space, on entering, half the room was taken up by cabling, a camera, a few spotlights and an old BBQ, whilst the other end was decked out in all manners of cardboard constructions, leaving the back wall festooned with what could only be described as a low budget Austen Powers 60’s backdrop, amidst all this was a drum kit, a guitar and a bass, and papier mache – half comical, half creepy in a surreal way!

The director Ciaran explained how the day would unfold, detailing the filming times and even where to get coffee before going on to clarify the concept itself. In his own words “This is the crazy cardboard universe of The Unfortunate Incident, I was just going too use the resources that were available to me which is this space here and tons of free cardboard. So we built this cardboard universe and it’s kinda about when the band put on these papier mache effigies of themselves weird sh*t starts to happen in this mad cardboard universe!”

Whilst the film crew sorted themselves out I took the opportunity to question the band on how this idea came about. Neither of them seemed ready to answer...but eventually it was Russ that spoke first, “We don’t want to be in it, me and Daniel don’t like doing camera stuff and being in a band really! Ciaran and these chaps wanted to do a performance video of us miming, but we don’t look like people in a band and yes we’re funny looking, still they wanted to film us playing and we said we didn’t really want to do that...so we came up with a bit of a compromise, saying we can play but we didn’t want to be in it. We’ll make some papier mache versions of us and other people can be in it instead of us...so we don’t have to do anything. I was working nights last night so...I’ve had like an hours sleep and didn’t want to come here miming. So yeah we thought we’d just rope other people into doing it.”

Daniel came in at this point saying “I was happy to go along with anything as long as it requires me not to being in a video – that’s the main thing really, I don’t want to be in a video...it would be embarrassing to see my face on the screen. Having said that the papier mache version of me is very unflattering, they’ve accentuated all my worst features, thanks for that!!”

Russ then elaborated on how the whole project started; “It’s a competition called ‘Two Weeks To Make It’, basically they team up film-makers and musicians and then you’ve got two weeks to make a music video. They’re all going to be screened at The Showroom on April 28th and the winner gets £1000. A lot of them are film students, but some are professional companies with lots of gear and expensive stuff. They’ll be like all proper with CGI and explosions and stuff but we’ve made papier mache heads...so I don’t know if we’re in the running for the thousand quid!”

By now drummer, Tom Wilks, had turned up and it was time for the band to film their scene, so along with the other extras we sat in the beer garden and waited for our call. Finally the time came for us to do our scene, which consisted of taking the place of the band and playing their instruments while wearing these papier mache heads. Wearing a mask with limited visibility and trying to play the drums is no mean feat, but it is great fun. There was one small problem though, as you’d expect they played the song during the actual filming but since I was sat there beating the hell out of anything in sight I had no idea as to when I was supposed to stop. It was only when I heard someone shout out something that I figured it was over but on lifting my mask realised they had switched to a hand held camera for some close up action shots. So donning my mask again I started banging away again only to hear a second shout, this time however it was “Cut”.

All said and done it was a fun day out....how many people can say they went and appeared in a music video that weekend? One thing I did find out though....was that playing a drum kit makes for great stress relief and even if you can’t play them there will be some simple tune out there you can carry – as Russ said afterwards “You seemed to have a ‘George Of The Jungle’ thing going on there!” So thank you to The Unfortunate Incident, Ciaran, Carl and Ben for allowing us the opportunity to take part, we are looking forward to April 28th when we can view our efforts on the big screen.

For more details on the ‘Two Weeks To Make It’ go to

Interview/Photos by Geoff & Gail Buckthorpe