Black Cab Sessions

Lightspeed Champion Theme Week - Day 3

Right before I arrived in London (in an airport in Minnesota in fact), Dev said he'd be back to his flat around 9pm on the day to let me in as he had ten million things to do during the day that would keep him away. Doubts he'd be able to leave his flat by the 10:30am time he was scheduled for entertained themselves in my head given his habit/penchant for only leaving the flat in the evening, not to mention an unabashed love of the internet. When I showed up with my too much luggage around 12-ish in the afternoon, he hadn't quite made it out of the Big Chill, so all was good - after a hug I instantly started boiling some water to make some Annie Chun as he further checked his schedule.
I assumed his appointments for the day were meeting up with friends before two weeks spent on the road, but oh no, I was wrong. My god was his schedule packed - with everything from business meetings with accountants and his management to press, press, and more press. And then more press after that - photoshoots, interviews, and videos shoots.
Just prior, he'd been in Europe doing near 80 interviews in 5 days. When he went to New york for two days in October, his schedule had been similarly packed - if not more - doing shoots and interviews with every publication including my book club read Nylon. One shoot was with the guy who shot the portraits in the Strokes' Is This It album booklet. Talk about perfect pairing.
This is in addition to endless online press commitments he's continually emailed.
Major hectic!

So on his schedule for the day (aside from the couple of appointments he'd missed) was a Black Cab Sessions filming - basically the equivalent to Blogotheque: Take Away Shows, but always in a cab. Because Dev's laptop doesn't carry the correct software necessary to open the schedules his manager Rene sends him, we misread it as shooting at 3. Um no - 1pm more like it. We'd already got on a bus to go by his management when he received a call from Rene alerting him to the correct cab timing and we headed off to the Old Blue Last where the cab was waiting.

We drove around the city getting a good view of London as the meter racked it's way up to 18 pounds. Dev did two songs: "Tell Me What it's Worth" and "Heart in a Cage," which I requested when he was searching for what would be the second song.

"Heart In A Cage" (live Strokes cover) Lightspeed Champion MP3

He ran through a couple chords in his flat before we left for about 30 seconds, but other than that - no other notes had been played by him before they pushed record on the camera.

Wanna watch the final product?

Also featured? The Kooks, St. Vincent and Eugene Mcguinness amongst many others.

Dev was still doing his daily video-blogging at the time, so I shot some of it with his camera which I dropped repeatedly (in the car, on the sidewalk, etc. hahahaha :(
Watch our DIY cinema:

Dev shot me in his kitchen and laughing hysterically in the cab too which is right before I took over in the video.