Everyone has their claim-to-fame story and mine is that I was in the video for Funeral for a Friend's This Year's Most Open Heartbreak (I have another story about finding Neil Morrissey from Men Behaving Badly passed out behind my tent at Glastonbury, but that's slightly less cool. He eventually woke up and we had a nice chat with him. My friend Tom was particularly pleased with himself for acting so cool in front of a celebrity).
The night before the video shoot Hugh phoned me because he'd seen on one of the forums he read that Funeral were recording a video in London the next day and wanted some people to come up and be extras. Mary-Ann Hobbs had played the band on the Radio 1 Rock Show a couple of times and we thought they were pretty cool so signed up and went along. It was a Friday so we slacked the afternoon off college and got on the train to London (I'd been able to make it to my maths class in the morning but had to excuse myself from my English class in the afternoon. Our college was basically run by hippies and the rule was you could miss as many classes as you liked provided you told the teacher first). The video was filmed in an abandoned brewery somewhere in London (it was next to a small bit of river, but that's all I remember) and the plot was that we'd all be running through the streets trying to get to where Funeral were playing but when we got there the band had disappeared. It sounds like a shitty plot and it kinda ended up being pretty shitty. In the final version we were all edited out, but the original made its way onto YouTube and I can just about spot myself in a couple of frames. The band were all really nice and we all had a good chat to them at the end of the day. Afterwards Hugh and I went record shopping on Berwick Street for the first time (I picked up a Manics' 12" and The Fake Sound of Progress LP), got all-you-could-eat Chinese and met all our friends in the pub in Winchester when we got back. All in all, it was a pretty fun day.
So none of this has really been about this record, but it does all link up. That day I watched and heard Funeral play This Year's Most Open Heartbreak pretty much on repeat all afternoon. You'd be amazed how many times one band can play the same song in one day. Two months later Funeral put out the Four Ways to Scream Your Name EP and I found a copy of the double 7" in HMV in Southampton. The first song was This Year's Most Open Heartbreak and I was still a little sick from hearing it all day two months previously. Even now I picture the band playing in that brewery when I hear that song. Still, I enjoyed the record (Escapes Artists Never Die was another huge song on there) and we watched Funeral get massive very quickly. I'm pretty sure this record was worth a lot of money for a while but I never had any plans to sell mine - it's a nice reminder of that day in London.
Format: Double 7", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 4
Cost: £4.50 new
Bought: HMV Southampton
When: 03/05/03
Colour: Transparent red
Etching: none
mp3s: no
