October brought an Editors tour and with that, the chance to experience some new songs played in person. It was the debut of Ben as a live musician in the group, and also marked the return/disappearance/return of Justin Lockey on guitar. For the first couple of dates he was there, and then on the 5th, 6th and 7th Nic Willes cut short his month long retirement from the bleakest of all musical assignments to retake his position on the six strings of sorrow. Then in Hamburg on the 9th of October, Justin came back and Nic returned to enjoying sunshine and exercising his smile muscles, a task he would never be allowed to do whilst in Editors. No official announcements were made about what went down, so speculation flourished in the vaccuum. It happened, it wasn't discussed or explained and so there's not really a lot else to say about it.
There was a lingering curiosity about what Blanck Mass would bring to Editors when they played live, and from all the live recordings we have the most obvious asset is the ability to expand their sound. Everything has a bigger impact, which you would expect given they now roll 6 people deep when they are on stage, but I mean more of the way the music is put together. If you want to check out some of the engagements from the past month, I have a few of them here:-
The tour ended in Belgium and from now until January there will be no more shows...unless something changes. You never know, they have squeezed in some end of the year events before. Like when they showed up at the Glass House in Antwerp to do a special set for Studio Brussel in 2010. Or who could forget the Xmas Jumper Jam show in 2014 where Tom made a seasonal underwear confession? Failing any last minute big reveals, the next round of road work will be based here in the UK.
On the 28th of October it was announced that Editors would be returning to Pinkpop in 2023, and that is definitely one to look forward to. They have quite the history there so that one should be a lot of fun.
Right at the end of the month there was a personal milestone for the Archive, and it looked a little something like this:-
For the first time since I opened the Archive's current YouTube profile in August 2018, there have been over a million views of the content there. Because of the nature of the channel, being exclusively one band and not a lot else apart from maybe the occasional bit of Smith & Burrows, that means it's been a million views of things relating to Editors. This, was the entire purpose of the blog and everything attached to it when I started it 11 years ago, to get the music of this group out to as wide an audience as possible. This humble statistic in the photograph above suggests that I might just be going in the right direction. Thanks to everyone who's taken the time to stop by.
I should warn you that given the scale of things happening this month, there was a monumental amount of memorabilia generated. There's over 700MB of photos and videos in this zip file, which is insane. If you're OK with that then cool, but if it's off-putting for some of you that's also fine. As with everything here at the Archive, simply take what you want and leave what you don't.
Enjoy the wreckage of October 2022 ;)
Editors Instagram - October 2022
For all of Editors' previous Instagram posts, go here.
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
