What do you get when you fill a field with the most fashionable, funky and downright genius teenagers in the country, give them wigs and glasses and point a camera at them?
Well, in a word: MAYHEM!
We had a great time spreading the word about what we do here at SB to everyone at Underage festival on 8 August.
We pitched up the Spinebreakers tent on Friday morning, slapped on our (very fetching) Spinebreakers t-shirts and awaited the 7000 music lovers who’d come to enjoy such diverse acts as Care Bears on Fire, Foals and Dizzee Rascal.
In return for the use of our impressive stock of wigs, hats, capes and comedy sunglasses, and as many free sweets as they could eat, we wanted stories on giant post-its for our Papercuts comp: one hundred words on the theme of ‘What Matters to You?’ for the chance to be published in a Penguin short story anthology.
It’s fair to say that our tent was buzzing all day! Quiet periods of pen chewing were followed by bursts of frenzied fancy dress activity as we filmed their Papercuts for the showcase on spinebreakers.co.uk. Some hilarious, some harrowing, the stories were as diverse as the people who wrote them.
Not only did our tent attract many curious minds, but we were in full effect throughout the arena; leaping around to House of Pain in mass formation, grabbing slightly nervous-looking camera crews, handcuffing ourselves to anything that kept still long enough and even infiltrating the Gibson bus to get exclusive interviews with loads of different acts for a special SB podcast (stay tuned!).
By the end of the day, we had loads of excellent entries for the competition and had recruited many more book fanatics to the cause of spinebreaking. It was really exciting to meet so many likeminded people (and stick wigs on them).
Keep your eye on the site to see some of the masterpieces in motion!
