Turd Class - Hugh Metcalfe Live at the V:NM Festival

Hugh Metcalfe is a performance artist, filmmaker, poet and 'dubious musician.' He has performed since the late 70s in a number of guises: bands including Fuck Off Batman, Small Faeces, Bicycle Clip Sex and BirdYak (with sound poet Bob Cobbing), as well as numerous solo projects. He also ran The Klinker - a night of experimental music, film, performance and other unclassifiable oddities - for nearly 30 years. A key figure in promoting experimental and improv work in London, Hugh is simultaneously something of an outsider figure in the scene with his chaotic, and sometimes crude, performances.

Taking his battered, back-less guitar, several notebooks of poems (typically four or five word lines which are repeated in different permutations), his teddy and, of course, Cabbagehead, Hugh went to Graz in Austria earlier this year to perform at V:NM, an annual festival for New Music, backed by Michael Pinter-Koschell, Gernot Tutner and IOhannes Zmölnig, a combo christened Turd Class by Hugh shortly before they went on stage.        

Filmed over the weekend of the festival, Turd Class weaves between footage of the soundcheck, Hugh reading poetry from his hotel bed, shooting Super-8 around the town (he has made hundreds of films over the last 35 years), and the funny, ramshackle and intense performance itself, which was broadcast live on Austrian radio.

Turd Class will be screened at the Sallis Benney Theatre on November 12th, as part of the film programme of Colour out of Space festival in Brighton. More details on Colour out of Space can be found here.