A Blackburn punk rock band have created a film celebrating a concert on the River Thames, but had to overcome several hiccups along the way.
Having initially set out to make a movie of their concert on the River Thames in 2023, Medusa, led by frontman Julian Molinero, had employed four cameramen to capture the 120-capacity party boat.
The concert in itself came with its own issues, as despite a year’s worth of planning, the sound engineer pulled out at the last minute, requiring the band to search around London in the middle of the night to find one.
Julian said: “I am very happy with it [the film], my general opinion is that I want to play music.
"I had some ambition to be a filmmaker in some ways, and I had some idea, but it took three and a half years just from the start.
“It has been four years since we planned it, that is too long to do anything it is ridiculous. Anything seems easy compared to this.
"We made four albums and thought that was hard, but this has been harder than anything I have ever done.”
Booking out a nuclear bunker, the band had another go at capturing footage, but this was also unusable due to a fan smiling and cheering the camera at the concert for the whole gig, distracting from the fact that everyone was meant to be there to watch the band.
They then rented the Dublin Castle, a legendary venue in London, but the owners of the pub had double-booked it for a meeting of pub owners from across the city.
This meant that with very limited time, they were only able to capture a short amount of footage.
To fill time in the production, Julian acquired a marionette puppet of a mime, which he modified over six months, as well as including footage from their trips to Canada and the United States.
To maintain the puppet, Julian took it on trips to the barber shop, which kept refusing to cut its hair, and had to purchase a miniature guitar from a maker in Lincolnshire.
"Necessity is the mother of invention, and it [the marionette puppet] became necessary because it became too hard and too expensive to keep filming the band.
“You can't do it cheaply, even when the puppet bits of his hair kept sticking in the wrong direction, and if it looks ugly, you've got to get rid of it; you just can’t use it.”
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However, the brilliant film has now been completed and has attracted attention from the British Film Institute and Sky Arts, who are considering taking it.
Despite its success, Julian does not recommend that anyone try to make a concert film.
He said: “I don’t recommend anyone in music ever does this, it is an absolute mistake.
“It was plagued with disaster from beginning to end, with something going wrong at each stage of the filming.
“The experience was absolutely awful. Steven Spielberg is an absolute idiot; he does a film and then gets around and does another. It was absolutely awful.”
To view the film, visit Medusa Live in London: The Motion Picture on YouTube.
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