From the archive: Dean and Britta's COVID shows
On the fifth anniversary of Dean & Britta's first full live streamed show I look back at how their online appearances became a comfort during those strange and scary times
This week is the fifth anniversary of the first full online show that Dean & Britta played during COVID. This is the first post of a series (of possibly just two!) looking back on 2020.
I started this post as a history of Dean & Britta’s live streamed shows during those awful and frightening times, but the more I jotted down notes the more I found it was about me and Dean & Britta’s live streamed shows so apologies as this is turning into a more personal story of how I, and my family, made it through 2020, and how important Dean and Britta’s appearances over the course of the year became - not just for the music, but for the opportunity to engage with them and other fans over our shared, but quite varied experiences of dealing with COVID. I’d love to hear if you had similar feelings, or of how the shows had an impact on you, so please leave a comment.
Lockdown - March 2020
The beginning of 2020 seemed to be quite normal, we’d heard about this virus but didn’t see how it would or could reach us. We’d been through these scares before (bird flu, sars, cjd, etc.), and this was surely just more media tricks to sell papers, and get clicks.
Adam, our son, had been unemployed for a while but in March was offered a job as a customer service assistant for Network Rail at Charing Cross station. Before the pandemic Charing Cross was the 15th busiest station in the country - his first day at work was the 23rd March. On the morning of that day the UK prime minister announced a “stay at home order, effective immediately” … Adam started work at Charing Cross station as a customer service assistant on the very day that there stopped being customers to assist! As it was important to keep public transport open and running to ensure that essential workers could make it to work, Adam went to work that day, and worked through the entire pandemic. On that first day Hazel and I were terrified for him… “you don’t have to go” - but he went. Over the weeks the initial fear we had for him turned to jealousy - he was seeing London the way we had never, and would never see it!
There’s a phrase we use in the UK where we would describe something or somewhere that’s really, really busy as being like Piccadilly Circus - this is Adam’s picture of Piccadilly Circus in April 2020:
My job at the time was the Webmaster at The National Archives (TNA) and, since it was very much an on-line role, and since TNA already allowed occasional working from home, the transition from being an office worker to a home worker was pretty smooth - we had the tech in place and most of the time it was working. We reacted quickly enabling free online access to resources that were normally only available on-site and ensuring that the web site was capable of coping with the increased use. My job hardly changed, just the office and how I communicated with my colleagues. Hazel worked for The British Library at the time and her transition was less smooth - but we managed to get on with our work.
In April Dean Wareham was scheduled to tour the UK but these shows got cancelled and were rescheduled for January 2021 (and subsequently postponed again, eventually happening in October 2021) - my life has very rarely gone that length of time without seeing Dean since my first time in 1990. It seems very selfish with the world going through this nightmare to whine about not seeing a band you love, but… music, and the connections made through music, were one of the things that were important, these were the things that we needed to try and live a halfway normal life through a completely abnormal time.
On the 25th April Dean & Britta played Tugboat and Moon Palace, live on Instagram from their home in Los Angeles, one of a number of ad-hoc live appearances on social media platforms over the year. Sadly the time difference between Dean and Britta’s Echo Park home and mine in London meant that I very rarely was lucky enough to catch these live.
Los Angeles was in the midst of a heatwave, and Dean played the set topless. It was also the first opportunity we had to see that Dean was going down the route that many of us did in those early days of COVID of growing out some facial hair.
These little add-hoc performances were of course a treat, but never experiencing them live was a little heartbreaking, every morning before a daily work Zoom meeting I’d scour Dean and Britta’s socials to see if they’d got up to anything while I slept.
Live stream #1 - 14th May 2020 - RAA benefit (YouTube)
At the beginning of May the duo agreed to do a full live show as a benefit for the proposed Rental Affordability Act an effort to limit rent increases in California (the proposal was defeated in the November 2020 ballot). While they had seemed happy to do the little ad-hoc streams playing one or two shows, they had never intended to do a full live stream:
I didn't want to do it at first, but then we were asked to do a benefit — for rent control in Los Angeles — which is a good cause. We did that, and it was a challenge, but also it was fun connecting with people.
Dean Wareham - Far Out, May 2023
The show was at 7pm Los Angeles time, that is 3am during a British summer… in the early hours of a Friday morning… on a work night. But, this was during the times of COVID, no one needed to know how tired I looked at work the next day - “sorry my camera doesn’t seem to be working”. And, who would notice if I had an early-afternoon meeting with my pillow? I stayed up.
The show was wonderful, sounded great, the sun in the room caused exposure problems with the video but in retrospect looks better for that and seeing the shadow of the camera on Dean’s forehead was quite funny.
They opened the show with Tugboat and played a lovely balanced mix of Galaxie 500, Luna and Dean & Britta songs and threw in a new cover of The Bee Gees’ Massachusetts. Their cover of The Rutles’ Cheese and Onions, was a particular high - mainly thanks to Britta’s backing vocals. But the whole show was wonderful and it was great seeing them seemingly fit and healthy and getting on with their life as well as any of us were managing. They finished with a cover of Joy Division’s Ceremony that someone had requested… shouted out for it in YouTube chat!
Dean explained at the end that Britta had engineered the whole shebang and she replied “I wanted to learn it because we’ll probably be doing more of this because… we can’t go anywhere”.
Just after 4am I slipped into bed and slept for a couple of hours before work, I don’t think Hazel noticed me coming to bed but she did look at me next morning with you’re-such-a-sad-sack eyes.
The following week Dean’s newsletter arrived announcing that they would be playing another full show from their living room…
Live stream #2 - 30th May 2020 - Veeps
Next Saturday evening May 30 at 9pm EST, 6PM PDT. Britta and I are going to do another stripped-down performance from our living room. After researching the many platforms out there (Facebook, Youtube, Stageit, Instagram) we have decided on a new site called VEEPS that seems to offer a high-quality experience and you don't have to be on Facebook or watch Youtube ads. If you are in Europe and fast asleep, you can watch the show when you wake up; the link will remain active for a week. And for those of you down under, 6pm PDT means some time Sunday morning, depending on your time zone.
Dean Wareham newsletter (25th May 2020)
6pm Los Angeles time is 2am so, once again at an ungodly hour in the UK, and while as Dean said in the newsletter - “if you are in Europe and fast asleep, you can watch the show when you wake up” there was no way that I’d miss the chance of watching the show live - and it was a Saturday/Sunday, so this time not on a school night so… I got dressed up, no, really…I did and sat in front of my computer, tweeting, posting to Facebook and Instagram, and waited until show time…
and then…
Britta: “Thanks for coming over”
Dean and Britta talked a little bit about the current situation and then opened the show with a cover of The Clash’s I’m So Bored With The USA which segued into The Carnival is Over. The show was a lovely mix of songs spanning Dean’s career (and Britta’s cover of Drive), and Dean threw in a couple of poems (Edward Lear’s The Jumblies, and Bertolt Brecht’s On Thinking About Hell). The show finished after 3am again with their cover of The Bee Gees’ Massachusetts… I crawled off to bed - happy.
I’m listening back to the show now, hearing Dean and Britta talking about the how COVID was going for them. In the opening intro Dean mentions that “here in Southern California […] they say that things are getting back to normal” which turns out to have been nonsense of course, we had had similar teases in the UK, but things were far from normal and wouldn’t be for a long time… and I’d say even if we have arrived at normal by now, it’s a very different normal than pre-COVID.
The following week Dean & Britta’s cover of The Carnival is Over was released as a single, both digitally and as a transparent square, lathe-cut 7” - Dean talked about The Carnival is Over, and The Seekers, for the Möistworks blog:
In 2008, in Jersey City, Britta and I attempted to record the song. We had gone into the studio to try a few covers, including the Cure's "It's Friday, I'm in Love." We finished the Cure song but gave up on "Carnival"—it was probably in the wrong key for Britta's voice. But when the pandemic hit and the world ground to a halt, the titled popped back into my head and I urged Britta to try singing it again. We opened the old ProTools files and discovered we had the percussion (by Anthony LaMarca), electric 12-string guitar, and a mellotron by Britta—all ready to go. Still, it took Britta more than a couple of attempts to figure out how to sing it. Sometimes when tackling a cover it takes time to get the original singer out of your head and deliver it in your own voice. Sometimes you have to admit that you and the song are not suited to each other at all. But not this time.
The Carnival is Over by Dean Wareham (Moistworks, 18th June 2020)
The song was then sent to Kramer to finish it off - “he came back to me a few days later with a beautiful arrangement and mix”.
I ordered two copies of The Carnival is Over - which, with shipping came to an eye watering amount - one for me and one for Andrew which saved a little on the postage.
On the 14th June they performed a couple of songs for a “Silver Studio Session” for the Andy Warhol Museum, playing The Velvet Underground’s Ride Into The Sun, and The Incredible String Band’s Air, and the next week they appeared on another benefit show, this time playing Massachusetts as part of a five hour benefit live stream in aid of the London pub The Betsy Trotwood. Both of these were pre-recorded (and presented in black and white).
At the beginning of June the UK Government had started relaxing restrictions so on the 22nd June Hazel and I took a train into the West End to see the city before most of its people returned, I guess it wasn’t as quiet as it had been when Adam had started work at the end of March, but it was still a strange and haunting experience. We wandered around Trafalgar Square, stood outside the locked gates of Hazel’s workplace, and wandered around Kings Cross and St. Pancras stations, before getting the train back to Hanwell.
Live stream #3 - 27th June 2020 - Veeps
Dean and Britta were obviously happy enough with the 30th May show that they scheduled another for the 27th June - this was pitched as Dean & Britta performing Luna. They trailled the show beforehand with some noodling that turned into the first airing of their cover of Donovan’s Sadness on Instagram Live (so not a Luna song).
The show was again scheduled for the early hours of a UK morning and once again I stayed up. It was preceded by Sean playing Broken Chair on Luna’s Instagram (the song also put in an appearance during the main set with Britta taking Sean’s vocal).
Another lovely set, this time of Luna classics, a couple more poems, and the show finished with a cover of Mercury Rev’s Car Wash Hair which had become a Luna song a few years before on their A Sentimental Education covers album.
In July I cycled into Hammersmith and sat in a churchyard with Andrew and handed over his copy of The Carnival is Over that I’d been holding on to for a couple of months. One of my pals from work lived by the river in Hammersmith so later I sat with her on the riverside drinking tea and trying to understand the strange world we were living in. These were rare face-to-face encounters with anyone I wasn’t related to, and was a joy to see them both.
In the next part of this post (in a couple of months) I’ll talk about the later Dean & Britta live streams, and more of me wittering on about my life and my family!