Thu
22-Sep-2005

trachtenburg family slideshow players

Alex gave me two tickets to see the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players for my birthday - they had been up at the Edinburgh Festival and were now playing in London at the Pleasance Theatre, quite near our place in Kentish Town. Matt and I went to see them last night.

We enjoyed it a lot. The band is basically a family unit - Jason, Tina and their 11 year old daughter Rachel - which makes for a really nice family vibe in their performance. Jason specialises in a kind of Woody Allen style babbling, while his daughter and wife gently take the piss out of him. He is the main prophet of the band, describing them as an indie rock conceptual art band based on "the slideshow concept". They take slides they've found at car boot sales and junk shops and write songs based around them and show the slides during the course of the songs. It works very well. We particularly like one song - Look At Me - which follows these two women, Jeanne and Cathy, and their lives in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, including their drinking and camera wielding sessions and their visits to the 'Gas Museum'. If anything, we would have liked to have seen more slides of their lives, and gone into more depth. Really very enjoyable indeed.