BLOXX GO BACK TO COLLEGE TO FILM NEW VIDEO
BAND BLOXX FILM LATEST VIDEO AT UXBRIDGE COLLEGE
UXBRIDGE band Bloxx are back at college. Or at least they were – including two former performing arts student members – while filming the video for their new release ‘Everything I Ever Learned.’
Former Gazette reporter Liz Driscoll, now part of the college team, got a chance to interview the indie rising stars during their lunch break…
EARLY in March, two former Uxbridge College performing arts students, Fee Booth and Taz Sidhu, along with the rest of the band, Paul Raubišis and Joe Kinton, trooped into Hayes campus with their major production entourage in tow, to record the video for Everything I Ever Learned.
The almost-silent corridors of lockdown were suddenly banging and crashing, as one gigantic wheely case full of camera equipment and associated stuff after another was humped in by a succession of cool-looking crew from Head & Wrecker production.
The sounds of the song echoed around the walls as the band leapt, shook, and threw themselves – and plenty of other things – around one of the 1940s-built classrooms of Townfield wing. The well-staged chaos was later carted out in an equally well-organised succession of black bin bags and trolleys.
Room L116 was re-designated the green room and stacked with oranges and lunch bags, and earmarked for bag-dumping and hanging about.
And five current performing arts and music students got costumed up as extras – ironically in the shirt and tie that college students so gleefully escape – with another pair winning roles as two rather business-like teachers. The lucky seven are first and second year students on UAL Level 3 Diploma courses at Praxis, the name given to Uxbridge College’s School of Performing Arts.
For my part, I was lucky enough to interview and grab a few more photos of Bloxx during the lunch break, as they snarfed their rolls, drank their cokes, rolled their rollups, and got themselves covered in gallons of fresh hairspray in the Praxis hair and make-up studios.
The Chess Club Records signatories share details of their former favourite hangouts in the area.
This included the glamour of hanging about on the seats outside Uxbridge Tesco’s, wasting time in nearby Fassnidge Park skate park, and gigging in the Crown & Treaty pub half a mile away.
Whilst playing their first show there – before deciding on any band name whatsoever – they were inadvertently announced as Ophelia Booth, which is in fact Fee’s full name.
Getting interviewed by Hayes FM radio was also part of local band life. Vocalist and songwriter Fee – who lives in Cowley – shares her happy memories of working behind the bar at Uxbridge Wetherspoons, aka The Good Yarn. This was where she met fellow-barperson and now Bloxx bassist Paul.
Perched on a hair and make-up stool, vocalist Fee nods her head in
Paul’s direction: “He didn’t speak to me for three months – then you heard my song, didn’t you.” The rest is history, as they say. Taz – who, like Fee, studied at Uxbridge College from 2014-16 on the Level 3 Extended Diploma in Music – pipes up: “I remember when they wanted you to wear a dress.”
Clearly the suggestion horrified Fee, and it is hard to imagine would go down any better now. She – like the rest of the band – is currently got up in black jeans as a cross between the cast of Misfits and a sulky teenager on detention, looking for all the world as if she is just sporting her normal wardrobe.
As well as releasing the new single, Bloxx, who have toured with the likes of indie giants Two Door Cinema Club and The Wombats, tell me are coming up to their bandiversary – five years on March 29 since they made it official. Bloxx’s debut album Lie Out Loud was released in August 2020.
Fee gives Uxbridge College some major credit.
“The band wouldn’t be a band if it wasn’t for this college,” she said.
“So much happened here to make our careers. It’s brilliant to be back and coming back here is to be feeling that gratitude. I loved it at college.”
Taz agrees: “It is a really big part of our band. But I just wanted to see Ray [Griffin, his music lecturer and now section manager in performing arts].”
Fee adds: “Being here adds a bit of sentiment to the song, which is about tough lessons in life.”
As well as being where she and Taz met, Uxbridge College is where they learned the music, production, and teamworking skills that have helped them get to where they are today.
Fee tells me that their first song Coke (formerly called Block) “was recorded on tape” at college. As the penny slowly drops in my 50-year-old brain at this apparent novelty, I have to remind myself I am talking to a digital native. When she moves on to ‘using Logic’ I eventually twig that she is talking about some sort of music production software.
Northolt-based Taz cheerfully joins Fee in describing the joy – and the challenges – of making music.
“People give you all sorts of advice and you can listen to it. But if we had taken that advice we wouldn’t be here today - we are living the dream. None of us would be sitting here today if we didn’t have that feeling of wanting to do it. My advice is just **bleeping** do it.”
Former Cardinal Wiseman pupil Fee continues: “I failed my AS-Levels at school and then I begged my mum to let me come here. If I hadn’t come here I would never have done music. I learned everything about music and Logic at college. And I learned that I can sit in my bedroom and write songs.”
Taz, who’d studied at Dormers Wells before coming to Uxbridge College, makes a point I’d never thought about, that a few group-working skills are necessary for successful bandspersonship.
“I learned to play with a band here.” he says “As a musician you learn to play by yourself, but then you have to learn how to play with other people.”
Fee tells me the new song was written during lockdown. “It was purely just a bedroom song.”
Well, it isn’t now. And now Uxbridge College and half a dozen of its current performing arts students have a starring role in its video too. Happy days for Uxbridge College and some of its talented students past and present.
The single was due to be featured on Annie Mac’s Future Sounds on Radio 1 on March 24.