Storm Bugs - Table Matters (1980)

Table Matters is a super 8 film made in 1980 to accompany the Storm Bugs EP record of the same name. For many years it was presumed lost, but resurfaced recently and has since been digitally restored with a 4K scan by nanolab (https://www.nanolab.com.au), and reunited with its original soundtrack. The film, shot on location in Chatham, Kent, in early 1980, echoes the themes of grimy mundane consumerism explored on the EP through songs such as Eat Good Beans, Window Shopping, and Make Customers Matter.

Chatham, 1979

In his review of the recent Storm Bugs's vinyl compilation Supplementary Benefit in the new Sound Projector magazine, Ed Pinsent writes:

"...they have rendered unique visions of the psychic underside of England, visions as palpable as the monochromatic photograph (by Ball) on the back cover which celebrates the horrors of suburbia with an enquiring eye."

While I think that "horrors" might be overstating it ("quotidian monochromatic melancholia" might be closer), I think that Pinsent has identified a zeitgeist that resonates in the Storm Bugs tracks and the black and white slides I took as a young art student living in a rented bedroom on a grim housing estate on the edge of Chatham. Here is that photograph and others from the same roll, more or less as they came off the slide scanner, with their speckled patina of decay and age.