Coal's Trees

I couldn't tell you now how we settled on the idea of creating little forests for ourselves at every gig, but the subsequent concept has swiftly become inextricable from our band identity.

A lot of hard work goes into making our trees, some of which we've documented so you can all get a little backstage view of everything.

It is incredibly tricky to make something that is aesthetically pleasing, easy to transport and poses very little hassle in pre-gig setup. The tree banners we painted for our launch gig achieved only 2 of the 3 criteria, and took more time to setup than we'd anticipated. Cathy and I spent a good few hours the day before the gig ensuring that the banners looked good, and didn't interfere with us too much on stage.

The trees we constructed out of cardboard for our 2nd gig, at Kunskafee, were far more successful as far as setup was concerned, but my flat looked like a team of professional paintballers had been through there when we were done, and I'm still cleaning tiny bits of clear packaging tape off the floor!

Regardless of the amount of effort that went into both sets, we had an extraordinary amount of fun creating them, and they were a great additional creative outlet for all of us too.

So without further ado, here is a link to some of the behind the scenes shots of the trees, via our flickr photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/embersofcoal/sets/72157620896485267/

x Helen