The Queen of Gob Squad

Bands are often used as examples of collective practice. The theory of whether or to what extent this really happens is not the foremost concern of The Queen of Gob Squad, but rather practised as a series of one-off bands that exist for one night only. In many Gob Squad pieces a song by Queen has an important role. For Be Part of Something Bigger, Gob Squad have asked a variety of people to cover and newly interpret a Queen song. On two conditions: The choice of song should be kept secret and each song should only be covered once. Rules are there to be broken after all...

Why this song?

Missda Vast

Four and 4. Earth. A good starting point. A journey from the centre of the earth maybe? The quarters. The four quarters or the hind quarters? It’s not so easy choosing any song let alone a Queen song when there’s four of you doing the choosing. The mind plays tricks. Fear grips and then abates. What, er, what, which, was, what, who, when? The sun rises, the sun sets, night falls, the sun rises again. Finally we settle on something. Here is something with a lot of space in it. Space and air, the fiery part of air?  Earth, wind and fire… and water. We can play with the structure of the original. The track’s form is ideal for tinkering and sculpting. Well suited to our live constellation... elusive, alchemical, like mercury.

Scout Niblett
There's a time to celebrate our triumphs. There's a time to look back and acknowledge our journey through tough times. There's a time to give ourselves a break, and realise we're all in this together, and however hard it gets, the fact that we're still here together is something to celebrate.

Peaches

I have gone through major emotional changes in the last 6 months. Expressing myself through dramatic song is the ultimate release for me. Singing relevant songs for an audience helps me to know I am not alone in my struggle. I need to sing this song. I need to experience its power firsthand and from the inside. I need to make it mine!

Damian Rebgetz & Paul Hankinson

1. During the making of Gob Squad’s Western Society  Rebgetz sometimes awkwardly took on the role as the unofficial Zeitsau (timekeeper); 2. Paul and Damian remember watching this song on TV Hits on Channel 10 on Saturday mornings as children before they met or even knew they were gays; and 3. because sometimes at birthdays it’s good to look forward as well as back.

She She Pop

She She Pop is a skinny lad with odd taste. His leaning takes him to very different places and he says its made grow. She She Pop is grateful. He sings an anthem to the love of his life: Heap big woman, you made a big man out of me!

Showcase Beat Le Mot

Maybe we'll try one of the complicated songs of the band, because we learned so much in perfomance art in the last 20 years. Or we choose a rather simple song as We will Rock You and make it complex like the Bohemian Rhapsody. Or we just do it like Freddy Mercury and Michel Foucault, we put on our leather boots, lean on the bar and listen to the great Gob Squad, doing their job, saving the world from sadness and megalomania, leading us to a brighter future with more music and less market thinking. Let them save the queen...

Nina Tecklenburg & Molly Haslund

We have taught each other swear words in each others languages. We have worked our asses out of our trousers and laughed our asses out of our trousers together. We think we know each others languages, but we don't, and we don't know that many swear words in English - then, we always end up singing – in English!

The 100 Year Old Band

We only have 5 minutes not 14 hours. There are 10 of us and we only met last week so no heartbreak and not too many chords. One song with no ending and one with no beginning...

Masha Qrella

This song was a gut decision... I only had a few lines in my head when I decided that it was the one. At the beginning of the year it seemed to me the perfect soundtrack for the situation I was in: I had fallen head over heels in love and wanted to get out of a long term relationship at all costs. I wasn't aware of the sarcastic side of the song at the time, it was not clear to me that I'd find myself a cliché. I don't yet know how I'm going to deal with it but I will play it nevertheless.

Christopher Uhe

It’s so difficult to choose one song from the oeuvre of such a varied and larger than life band as Queen, that I thought I'd ask my five year old son what his favourite Queen song is. The effort of searching his heart through all of Queen's diverse output resulted in a resounding "Do the one that goes Boom-boom kack, boom-boom-kack. We will Rock You..." Well, perhaps some other ageless classic would be better...

On the friends

Missda Vast is the live and recording project of Henry Sergeant better known in electronic music circles as the frontman for Wevie Stonder.
 Henry released his first solo album Grevious Bodily Charm on the Spezialmaterial label at the end of 2012. Tonight Henry will be joined onstage by The Straight Jackets: regular collaboraters violinist Mark Matthes and drummer Niko Kratzer plus a guest appearance from one of Wevie Stonder’s original members Chris Umney.

Scout Niblett
Scout Niblett has been making music since she was a kid. In 1997, she graduated from the Contemporary Arts course in Nottingham that some members of Gob Squad also graduated from a few years earlier. Her first album came out in 2001, and last year saw the release of her 6th studio album it's up to emma. She is based in Portland Oregon, and is currently working on her 7th album, as well as being a part time evolutionary astrologer.

Peaches, a legendary live performer and revolutionary figure in electronic music, has released four studio albums, and many EPs and singles, to name only one of her various forms of artistic expression. She is currently at work on her anticipated fifth full length studio album.

Damian Rebgetz and Paul Hankinson are Berlin based musicians who met studying at the Qld Conservatorium of Music in Australia. Hankinson is a pianist and composer and Rebgetz is a singer and performance/theatre maker. Rebgetz became a fan of Gob Squad after watching Are You With Us?  in 2011. He then met some of them in person on a bus in 2012 and subsequently became a guest performer in Western Society.

She She Pop (SSP) is a performance collective founded in the late 1990’s by graduates of the Applied Theater Studies program in Gießen. She She Pop see it as their mission to explore the social boundaries of communication – and transgress them in a purposeful and artistic way in the protected theatrical space. Aside from the individual shows – but also in the best parts of every performance – we define the artistic work as a collective to be our most fatal and greatest challenge.

Showcase Beat Le Mot is a four person performance collective, that was founded in 1997 from the applied theatre studies course in Gießen. Since then their collective heart has beaten for the outlaw. They celebrate the life of the pirate or send a lone shogun on a bloody voyage through mythic Japan in their Manga series Gomune. They threaten late mediaeval Münster in the guise of anabaptists and brawl in the bandit's wood as the Town Musicians of Bremen. Secretly these outsider fantasies are also always about the life of an independent theatre group wanting to divest themselves of the laws of conventional repertory theatre – they tell of the desire to become independent, of collective decision making and non-hierarchical working processes and the delight in unconventional forms of action and expression. This is why an evening with Showcase is always a patchwork of original songs, choreographies, videos, objects, narratives and occasional dialogues.

Nina Tecklenburg is a performance maker and scholar of theatre. She has been collaborating with Gob Squad, She She Pop, Lone Twin Theatre, Baktruppen and Rabih Mroué. She is a founding member of the group Interrobang who develops new performative formats for participatory work. www.interrobang-performance.com

Molly Haslund graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2000-2005 and Glasgow School of Art MFA 2003-2005. She incorporates musical compositions, sound, songs, lectures and sculptural objects into interdisciplinary performances and installation works, often in close interaction with the audience, architecture and urban space. www.mollyhaslund.com

The 100 Year Old Band is an artist collaboration between Sue Palmer, Joff Winterhart and Simon Roberts. Joff and Simon have a drum and bass duo Bucky and Sue is an artist working with people and place. We have known each other for a long time and do our own thing for most of the time, but once a year (or so) we collaborate to make something live, to make a band.

We find 10 people from a city or town to be in a band together – one person from each decade from someone under 10 to someone in their 90s – a pan-generational, multi-ability band. We write one song together, and perform once to a live audience. Usually the project runs along the lines of ‘one week, one song, one gig’. For Be Part of Something Bigger two exceptions were made: songs by Queen serve as musical material and Berlin based Annette Birkholz was chosen to find the band members for The 100 Year Old Band in Berlin. www.the100yearoldband.com

Annette Birkholz links people from various professional backgrounds (economic, science) with artists in order to open up new learning spaces and to develope artistic interventions for sustainable change in organisations. www.incendo-berlin.de

Masha Qrella is no stranger to cover versions. Be it Bryan Ferry's smooth love declaration Don't Stop the Dance, Komeit's sad Berlin song Saturday Night, Frederick Loewe's Broadway classic I Talk to the Trees or the often and perhaps over used Boy's Don't Cry, Masha sings them all as if they were her own songs. Now Queen is lined up...

Christopher Uhe spent the late 80s and the entire 90s of the 20th Century as a singer, songwriter and musician in a diverse assortment of Post-punk bands. After a number of outings as producer, arranger and musician in various noise, folk and rock bands, Uhe has worked for many years as a theatre musician with Stefan Pucher. Christopher Uhe was Gob Squad's guest in the production Revolution Now!.

 

Illustration: Andree Volkmann