The Big Push covering Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," last summer in Bristol. This video just dropped last week on YouTube. The Big Push formed in 2017, in the U.K., and is made up of Ren Gill, Romain Axisa, Gorran Kendall, and Glenn Chambers. Ren, Romain, and Gorran switch off on lead vocals and backing vocals, depending on the song. Most of the time, Romain plays lead guitar. Ren plays lead guitar on occasion, as well as rhythm guitar and bass. Gorran plays acoustic guitar, rhythm guitar, and bass. These guys are best known for a whole bunch of great street performing videos playing a really wide variety of cover songs, with many millions of views among them. Simply put, they rock. This post will link a few of my favorite videos from The Big Push, as well as some of Ren's solo and duet work, mind blowing videos, and raps, and Chinchilla's work. If you like any of these, there are many more videos on YouTube, and probably elsewhere, to check these amazing musicians out.
And to all the salty, crusty, old geezers like me, The Big Push, Ren, and Chinchilla are proof that not all new music sucks.
Ren
This mind blowing original song and video changed my life. An old BMX freestyle friend in England, Alex Leech, shared this video on Facebook, shortly after it came out on YouTube. I think it had less than 3 million views when I first watched it, about three years ago, this video has over 65 million views now. After watching this video, and several other of Ren's videos that night, I started writing poetry again. I had only written 3 or 4 poems between 2008 and 2022. I managed to lose all copies of ten years worth of poetry, 165 of the best poems I've ever written, in 2008, when I got pushed out of California and wound up in living in North Carolina for ten years. After losing that much work (and all my video master tapes and raw footage), the poetry in me just left. I had no urge to write poems.
The utter brilliance of "Hi Ren" motivated me to try and start writing poems again. I haven't written that many, but most of the new poems I've written since (like this one) have been pretty decent, long epic poems. I also took a break from the kind of Sharpie drawings I had been doing for years, those based on classic photos of musicians, and I drew a couple of big Sharpie Scribble Style drawings straight out of my head. I did that just to get out of my personal rut, and challenge myself a bit creatively. Seriously, this song and video had an incredible creative effect on me. Thanks Ren. I still watch this video sometimes to get into a deep, creative vibe.
Ren X Chinchilla (Ren duets with Chinchilla- about 2021-22)
Ren X Chinchilla- "How to be me" live This is a fucking incredible song and performance.
Chinchilla-
These five young people from the U.K. are all incredible musicians. If any of these tracks piqued your interest, dig into their work on YouTube and anywhere else you find music, there's a lot more out there.
I do most of my writing on Substack now, a platform created specifically for writers, check it out:
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