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Official remix of Bertie Blackman's single 'Run For Your Life' courtesy of Melbourne producer Chiefs. 

Connect with Bertie: 
www.facebook.com/bertieblackman
www.twitter.com/bertieblackman

Connect with Chiefs: 
https://www.facebook.com/onechiefs
www.twitter.com/one_chiefs 
soundcloud.com/onechiefs

Run For Your Life (Chiefs Remix)

Written by Angela Ford and David Jenkins
All instruments and voices by VIGILANTES

Produced and mixed by David Jenkins
@ The Echo Creative
Mastered by Karl Cash

Copyright © VIGILANTES 2014

Circles

Also written in Chicago, with its handclaps, programmed and steel drums “Accordion Boat” tells the story of the loneliest vessel in the world. “There’s no one living on the boat, it just moves around the sea by the puff of the bellows. The barnacles are the song’s vocals. If you hear the sound of the boat – this airy, clacking thing – as soon as you think of it your face becomes imprinted on the boat’s side, which is where the human part comes in... in my head anyway!”

Pope Innocent X

Accordion Boat

This “raucous” number is about a robbery Blackman endured as a child. “My mum was tied up, phone chords ripped out of the walls. It wasn’t physically violent, but quite terrifying. I had to save my mum. It’s about being a kid, lying in bed, and playing hide and seek – peeping through your eyes to see someone coming into your room. I turned that into something playful, used the voice of the intruder in the verses. Mum likes it.”

Hide And Seek

Blackman’s most tender track is about her relationship with her father, internationally renowned painter Charles Blackman. “It’s about not really having a ‘normal’ father/daughter relationship. Because of who he is, the art world, me spending so much time in studios... I guess it’s about not having so much of a nurturing relationship, it was always more of a friendship.” Horns were added by Adam Simmons, who brought in flute, baritone saxophone, clarinet and more, plus two handmade music boxes which were played live.

Shadow Chasers

More spine-tingling noise from Kirin J. Callahan. “This is the tale of two people who were born with maps as heads. They’d stand at each edge of town, wondering why people kept coming up to them and pointing at their faces.” Eventually, the characters meet. “This stuff just comes out,” Blackman laughs. “I’m always like, ‘Ooh, imagine that!’”

Maps

Bertie dropped onto the bench and took a swig of, what?  Could have been whiskey, could have been juice. She’d peeled all the labels off a long time ago. Dusk. It was her favourite time: the orange eye of the sun, bored and falling fast, the empty streets, the smell of the dark winding round her legs. She curled her spine and pressed deeper into the wooden slats of the bench, like an attic ladder against her back. She settled in to watch. This was the time for shadow chasers, when hurt was in the air and the bins overflowed with silent hopes and crumpled dreams. 

She flicked through the menu on her iPod. Headway, The Only One, from the soundtrack of Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger, Black, Secrets and Lies and a cover of Peek-a-boo by Siouxsie and the Banshees. And this new one, Pope Innocent X.

Her thumb hovered over the button, one cracking eye to unleash the loneliness of everything. She hesitated. Took another swig and winced as she swallowed. Probably not juice. She pressed play and reached inside her coat for the book she’d stolen last time she went home, A Travel Guide for Foundlings with Nowhere To Go. On the title page, in red pencil, someone had scrawled ‘2009 ARIA Breakthrough Independent Artist of the Year’ and ‘2009 ARIA Best Independent Release.’ Bertie laughed as she tore out the page, flicked her lighter open and set the paper alight. She pulled out her bookmark - a dog-eared card embossed with ‘Francois Tetaz – Producer at Large’ – and started drawing the mourning light of the looming stars onto the pages. 

It was dark when she’d finished. And cold. And she was thirsty. Out of the corner of her eye, she could feel the world come alive with the fiends of the night. She fixed them with her unblinking eye and whispered I know where you’re hiding and I’m coming to get you.

Accordion Boat

bertieblackman

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