Neil Brand: Going Underground

It seems like only sixteen months ago that I was at the 2009 London Film Festival watching Underground, Anthony Asquith's quite brilliant 1928 silent film about a doomed love quadrangle set in and around some of London's most recognisable landmarks. The screening was accompanied by The Incredible Suit hero and interviewee Neil Brand and his five man band, The Prima Vista Social Club, and if you need further proof of how great the evening was you can find it in this post.

Branders, as he probably doesn't like to be called, gave me and nearly two thousand other lucky punks another memorable evening when Alfred Hitchcock's silent version of Blackmail was screened at London's Barbican last October, with a full and tear duct-troubling score performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Further gushing can be found in the aforementioned interview if you like that kind of thing.

Like you, I've often lain awake at night wondering what would happen if those two events were to meet, fall in love, get married and have a baby; what heavenly form would that baby possibly take? Well, the answer has presented itself in the form of what I believe I may be entitled to call An Exclusive, which is a first for The Incredible Suit and no mistake.

So get your diaries out and write all this down underneath where it says Wednesday October 5th:

Only try not to spill over to the next day.

That's right, The Brandinator has been commissioned by The Barbican and the BBC SO to write a new, full orchestral score for Underground, to be conducted and orchestrated by shit-hot baton-waggler Timothy Brock. And as if that wasn't enough, it's due to show up on BFI DVD soon after, and possibly have a little cinema run all of its own.

I just thought you might like to know. See you there.