By Our Selves

  By Our Selves' The trailer for 'features the track 'Suffer' from MacGillivray's fourth album 'Horse Sweat Chandelier' which comprises part of the soundtrack alongside 'My Heart is in the Highlands' and a piece specially composed by MacGillivray - 'O John Sing Thy Songs To Me' released on Watermarked in Flame (Antigen Records). MacGillivray appears in the film as Mary Joyce - lover of the brilliant and enigmatic English poet John Clare - who burned to death in a house fire. MacGillivray was asked to perform the role of John Clare's dead lover both as voice and presence, acting opposite Toby Jones. 'By Our Selves' has been performed by Iain Sinclair, Jem Finer, MacGillivray, David Aylward and Andrew Kötting at the Whitechapel, Dilston Grove, Battersea Arts Centre and Colchester Arts Centre.

                                                                                                                                                                        

 

 

MacGillivray has also contributed an essay to the forthcoming publication which accompanies 'By Our Selves' with Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kötting, Simon Kovesi and others surrounding the making and meaning of the film . . . an excerpt:

   "Iain reads, I wander, Toby types, Alan recites in rivers, graveyards, shopping malls, park benches, woodland and the back of a white transit van so that the whole concept of road movie becomes nineteenth century English pastoral road movie with more madness than Burroughs could cook up, twisted a bit by the Scottish Highland inference, the consumption of grass, the intensely tragic love story and the back-story of the contemporary figures that wend in an out with their own presences and histories; David Aylward and his pounding drumming; Anne Caron-Delion lithe in her frock as mother to the young boy on set who asks Jones whether life is good bad or indifferent and runs off through the fields. And then the road - or track - or forest ditch - movie goes on tour and the journeying through gloaming galleries, soft-lit spaces with Freddie Jones's once-in-a-lifetime delivery and Kotting's lurching avian rhythm and blues and Jem Finer's whistle-stop bird-bank table alongside Aylward's impressive percussive collection of gongs, singing bowls, chimes, drums and snares which make the tables look like a beggar's banquet - dining trestles to devour the very piles of beleaguered instruments, oral manifestations of the woods of John Clare's descending, descending, descending madness. Above us, larger than us, like technicolour back projected ectoplasm, our own screen life figures loom around so that I sing to myself wandering in Northampton, so that Aylward drums in time to himself, pounding hard with ribbons and a Clockwork Orange styled boiler suit, part menace, part derailed heart beat."