Last monday I went to the British Music Experience, an interactive museum of popular music packed with information and memorabilia from british bands and artists. I got passes from Oliver (Ross’ son) as we wanted to go and take pictures of some of the shots Ross has on the “Gibson Through The Lens” exhibition, which features over sixty fine art prints from some of the world’s most respected rock photographers including Baron Wolman, Neal Preston, Mick Rock, Jim Marshall and of course, Mr. Ross Halfin himself.
The exhibition is quite good and there are some really really nice classic shots in there, if you have the chance to go, please do. It’s free and will run until February 29th, 2012. Then we got inside the actual museum, which holds an overwhelming amount of information that is difficult to process all in one go; pictures, memorabilia, short documentaries, interactive installations… there’s just too much going on and, to be honest, I felt like the way it was presented didn’t help me much. Maybe I just wan’t that keen on spending hours reading every single bit of text or listening to the millions of audio clips available, anyway. I just couldn’t be bothered.
I spotted, however, a few cool stuff in there, like Ozzy’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” cape (which I wouldn’t mind wearing on a daily basis) and the Spice Girls’ classic outfits, which made me think how hot Geri Halliwell should have actually looked in person back in the 90’s, her Union Jack mini-dress was pretty short and narrow. While being in front of the outfits, Alex (a friend who also came along with us), asked us which Spice Girl we would fuck if we had the chance. My first words after the enquiry were: “do you mean now or back then?” He replied: “well, I don’t know. Now and then, I guess”. I only could answer half the question as I don’t know how do they look now but assuming it was back then, making up my mind was quite easy. What I present to you now, dear reader, is a reenactment of my train of thought at the time, which developed in a couple of seconds: Ok, let’s see, I was always scared of Sporty Spice, Victoria Beckham has always been way too skinny for my taste and although Melanie B was kind of hot, I never quite liked her, so, final answer is: Geri and/or Baby Spice. Back then I would have been more than happy to fuck them both, no doubts about it. We pondered our individual answers for a second and in the end we all agreed those were the most shaggable ladies in the band, if you can call that a band, that is. Or ladies for that matter.
Anyway, after our little sex poll, we kept walking around the museum, trying to take as much information as we could but without really trying too hard; we would stare at some random collection of objects for a moment and then moved on to the next one and so on. We wandered around the Gibson Interactive Studio (which is quite cool) and ended up our tour at The Finale, a “thrilling 5 minute visual and sonic montage of life-size-scenes from the best concerts and acts from the last 60 years features the likes of The Stones, Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Oasis, Radiohead, The Clash and more”, at least that’s what they say. The montage is very well done in terms of editing, with nice light effects and sound, but I have to admit that it failed to deliver that live show excitement they promised, partly because they are just snippets neatly edited one after the other, which really don’t give you the chance to inmerse yourself in the experience and that could easily trigger an epileptic seizure on anyone with a pair of fully working eyes. If they were full songs or just longer fragments of each show, maybe it would be better. Or maybe not, no one would ever know, I guess.
So, all in all, a nice monday afternoon spent looking at pictures of famous people with their guitars and walking around in a museum that it’s a bit expensive for the average joe looking for some light entertainment. Maybe it’s worth paying for it if one is willing to spend a whole day reading, listening and watching to every single piece of information in there but then again, I seriously doubt a sane person would want do that.
In any case, I really don’t care. I got in for free.
Failure is Fuel 