One of two links to Youtube Chieftan Mews sent out on the same day both linked Youtube videos of BBC Test Card F titled ‘BBC Test Card F (1978)’.
“The time now very nearly 3 o clock, the next program on bbc1 Songs of Praise follows at 3.15 after a trade test transmission…”
A Youtube commenter names the piece of music as ‘Finally, swing-time’ by Pit Fontana’s New Sound. According to TestcardCircle.uk that song was used during the 2nd half of 1978 to early 1979.
Mew’s tweeted a 2nd Testcard after this one ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SmOBxP9-g ; Test 2 ), however the second tweet was not deleted until the 20th of March 2012. You can read more about it, and the history of Test Card F here.
Songs of Praise is a weekly religious program first broadcast in 1961 early on Sunday mornings. Consisting of church hymn’s it still runs today and is broadcast in a number of countries.
In 2007 Adam Buxton uploaded a parody of Songs of Praise providing his own subtitles to the program with amusing results:
Adam Buxton is British DJ and Comedian who in 2007 helped Radiohead with their Thumbs_Down webcast to celebrate the release of In Rainbows.
A fan of the band he wrote a nice long detailed blog post about the whole thing here on his website, and later in 2008 entered his own (rather hilarious) remix for the Reckoner remix competition:
On the 29th of November 2011 Adam Buxton ran a live BUG Music Video’s special evening focusing on Radiohead’s career, during which he screened some behind the scenes footage of the recording of Thumbs_Down, Previous video clips from the band and a interview with Jonny and Colin. Described as a ‘one off’ Adam repeated the event in Los Angeles on February 2nd 2012.
A Silly Blog carries a nice review and description of the event Here.
One of the most interesting bits of trivia from the program refers to a In Rainbows Scrapbook mentioned in the Bug Program notes as a ‘proposed but ultimately unreleased DVD ‘scrapbook’ from the In Rainbows period’.
(Source: Attributed to Ian Davies by Auntie Nubbins of A Silly Blog )
Adam Buxton is on twitter as AdamRealBuxton and is one of the accounts Chieftan Mews follows on Twitter.
@ChieftanMews: At 0:36 I appear in the Zigg only to disappear and reflect to the dark side of the moon. http://t.co/Qw0PTnn stuck help #10 of 10
@ChieftanMews: #10: Please @ 1 song that makes you feel energetic & write about it in 1 sentence. (1 answer only, #10 expires August 11, 2011 at 00:00 GMT)
On Facebook this read as:
#10: Please message me 1 song that makes you feel energetic. Write about it in one sentence. (1 answer per person or disqualified/blocked. #10 expires August 11, 2011 at 00:00 GMT)
Chieftan Mews first tweets a link to a video Servo posted to Chieftan Mew’s Facebook wall on August 1st:
Screenshot of Mew's Reply to a question on Facebook, August 1st, 2011.
Servo took the video loop from www.the-ziggurat.com and posted to Youtube on July 31st 2011. The link takes you to 0:36 in the film where a head can be seen to the bottom left of the picture outlined in green and blue.
On the 3rd of August Chieftan Mews replied to the video with:
My face emerges at the 30 second mark at the lower/central portion of the screen and then disappears a short time later. Please call a plumber or a lumberjack immediately.
The Dark Side of the Moon is the title of Pink Floyd’s eighth album released in 1973, a album compared to OK Computer it also happens to show a prism separating a rainbow out of white light on it’s cover. In Rainbows being the band’s previous album for which the moving rainbow blocks video where made.
( Original cover for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon – Source : Wikipedia )
Similar to the Ziggurat film was a videoclip for Videotape made for the end of the 2007 Thumbs_Down webcast featuring Thom Yorke’s face turning into a mess of coloured blocks.
Thom ended up uploading the video to Dead Air Space on the 12 of February 2008 with the following message:
RED BLUE GREEn +
had a niggling feeling that this never really got seen much.
Its a kind of video thing to go with Videotape using lots of wierd techniques we were messing with.
Nigel and I really enjoyed making it at the end of last year.
It appeared at the end of a webcast which i think was lost due to transmission problems.
So here it is (roughly) for you to see again.
x
Thom
The original video on DAS is gone but you can still watch it on Citizen Insane.
The #10 of 10 suggested that there was a series of 10 tweets to come, this proved to be correct as it was followed by the first of ten weekly questions asking for fans to respond with their own answers.
Fan’s where given a choice between responding on Facebook or Twitter, two of the most popular Social Networks as of 2011.
@ is a symbol used to direct a message on Twitter therefore requesting fans to tweet him directly with @ChieftanMews.
With Facebook it seemed he wished to receive the replies as Private Messages, of which he would take only 1 per person on threat of banning them so they could no longer send him messages or view his Facebook page.
The difference has to do with a design limitation that on Twitter you can only send messages to people who follow you. This means that while Chieftan Mews was able to send Direct Messages (DMs) to fans following him they would not be able to reply or send their own without Mew’s following them first.
While ’1 answer per person or disqualified/blocked.’ on Facebook seems to suggest a competition to date there’s been nothing suggesting that Mew made direct use of the answers offered to him by fans, or that there was any organized prize for answering his messages correctly.
Though he has been known to Directly Message or reply to peoples Facebook Posts on his wall from time to time it’s unknown if Chieftan Mew’s replied to any of the suggestions given to him in response to his questions.
Dead Air is the name for a unexpected gap in Radio or Television broadcast usually due to a operator error or technical fault. In a era of 24 hour news-cycles and broadcasting Dead Air is the one thing media organizations strive to avoid.
It is also the title of a 2002 novel by Iain Banks.
The Guardian review of it states that:
Dead Air is narrated by Kenneth Nott, a shock-jock on commercial radio who takes a swollen pride in his contrarian opinions. We first meet him at a drug-fuelled loft party in the East End of London, where everyone, for some reason, starts chucking fruit and furniture off the balcony. Ken’s girlfriend, Jo, does PR for a snotty young British indie band called Addicta; he is also sleeping with a woman called Celia (or “Ceel”), who happens to be married to a dangerous gangster.
You probably wouldn’t like to meet Ken. He is one of those annoying, professionally opinionated people who are never off duty. Large portions of the novel are dedicated to expounding his reactions to the latest topics of media discussion, whether he is on air or just chatting in a pub: gun control (“Guns for nutters only; makes sense”), American imperialism, CCTV cameras, Euroscepticism, the death of Diana (“put on a fucking seatbelt”), all get extended libertarian rants. It is a tribute to Banks’s chatty prose skill that these discussions are largely entertaining, if superficially argued.
For all his hard years of service Chieftan Mews has only gotten this brief mention by Ed O’Brien on Dead Air Space on March 5th, 2005 in a post titled ’1 2 3 4 …. Chieftain Mews anyone?’:
For those who don’t know or remember, Senor Chieftain Mews,as he likes to be addressed now, was our slightly disturbing host on ‘the most gigantic lying mouth of all time’ …. Well, his comrade in arms and occasional masseuse, Chris Bran (who has also been hugely involved in our webcasts since we started them back in 2000), has a pilot out of his new comedy called ‘This is Jinsy’ .. it went out last Monday night on BBC 3 and you can still watch it on the BBC iplayer, but only for a few more days… hurray whilst stocks last… Go check it out .. It’s mental:
@ChieftanMews: Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.
On July 6th Mews tweeted that he was stuck the Ziggurat (http://www.the-ziggurat.com) a old part of the Radiohead website that since In-Rainbows is nothing but a full screen flash video showing a colourful loop of blocks. After repeated pleas for help Mews said that he was ‘set free’ by Supercollider.
Servo states that the contents of The Ziggurat has changed since July 2011 when Mews was said to be in there. You can read about it on Ims Menoo here
It could possibly relate to the fact that The King of Limbs – From the Basement was released on November 9.
While fans had been expecting a webcast of some kind the DVD/Bluray came as a surprise.. though nobody was really that surprised to discover the previously unaired recording of Supercollider as a bonus feature.
Chieftan Mew’s tweeted the following image with ‘Seasons Greetings’ followed by a message to Stay Crazy and the usual Stay detuned / End of Transmission
(Source: @ChieftanMews on Twitter)
Thanks to Google we know the image is of a Photomontage by John Heartfield titled “O joyful, o blessed, miracle-bringing time.” made in 1935.
John Heartfield originally coined the phrase ‘The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time’ as Thom explained during a online Q&A in response of a fan asking for the meaning of TMGLMOAT:
It’s after a John Heartfield collage. He was a German artist in the 30s and 40s he changed his name to disown himself from the rise of the Reich in Germany. It is a title of one of his collage paintings which were all cut up, subverted propaganda from the Third Reich.
You can read the rest of the interview from 2003 Here.
Art for a Change gives us a interesting rundown of what the ‘Christmas Card’ Mew’s tweeted is about.
The anti-militarist Christmas message from John Heartfield published on December 26, 1935, in the German magazine, Arbeiter-Illustriete Zeitung (AIZ, or “Worker’s Illustrated Paper”).
The title of the photomontage, O du fröhliche, O du selige, gnadenbringende Zeit (O joyful, o blessed, miracle-bringing time), was taken from one of Germany’s most popular Christmas carols.
Heartfield made a number of photomontage works that touched upon Christmas and how its message of peace was being subverted by the forces of war and fascism.
For instance, in the 1934 Christmas edition of AIZ, the artist published his photomontage, O Tannenbaum im deutschen Raum, wie krumm sind deine Äste! (O Christmas tree in German soil, how bent are thy branches). The artwork depicted a Christmas tree with its branches twisted into the shape of a swastika.
The cover of the 1933 Christmas issue of AIZ featured a photograph of an American battleship with the headline, “And Peace on Earth!” When opening the magazine the reader would see a Heartfield photomontage on the first page – its message read, “Peace on Earth? No peace on earth, as long as the poor become poorer!” Heartfield’s artwork depicted hungry Germans peering into an upscale shop window that was bursting with Christmas merchandise they could not afford.
Mew’s current status image on Twitter and Facebook is a inverted screenshot of him from the Thumbs Down Webcast in 2007 titled afp.jpg
Returned to it’s original form it looks like:
It’s not the first time Mew’s has toyed around with his display picture.
afp is the initials of Atoms for Peace the band formed by Thom Yorke, Nigel and Flea from The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Nigel was reported to be mastering their album over the holidays.
I always thought this to be a original Mews quote from the end of the Thumbs Down Webcast
It turns out that the phrase “Life is the name of the game, and I want to play the game with you” belongs to the intro song of a cult BBC TVGameshow from the 1970s named The Generation Game.
