Kill the Wabbit
Videos Discography About the Band Ken & the Cowflops Artless Heralds of Cheese CKO Radio

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About the Band

You can also see some other videos on my Coughlan House Video Site


Q&A with Kill the Wabbit

Q: Where is Kill the Wabbit located?

A: We originated in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, but more than half our catalog was recorded while living in St. John's, Newfoundland. Several tracks do not appear here because they got rained on. I now record from time to time in my home in Korea, and I involve Mark when I can.

Q: How did you come up with the band name Kill the Wabbit?

A: It comes from the Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", where Elmer is a theatrical Viking singing a song about hunting. The band members decided on Kill the Wabbit after vigorous market research. Actually, I remember coming up with the name suddenly during our first recordings. As police reports say, alcohol was likely a factor.

Q: What happened to Banjofish? A: Our original band name in 1993 was Kill the Wabbit, but the name was switched to Banjofish in 2006. My thinking was that I could have problems with Warner Brothers. In 2009 I changed my mind and reinstated the old name. As all the music and video here is free and non-profit I believe it falls under fair use.

Q: What difference does the name make? How can you be a band when you don't regularly record together.. and you don't actually play live.. and no one would ever pay good money for your music anyway?

A: Wait a minute! I'm the one writing these questions! They're supposed to be fawning and complimentary to the band. Okay, Q & A over!


The Viking Song
What does the yell in The Viking Song mean?  This is from "The Battle of Maldon", an Old English poem about a battle between the English and the Vikings in AD 991. 

Hige sceal þe heardra / heorte þe cenre 
mod sceal þe mare / þe ure mægen lytlað! 

("Our resolve must be harder, our hearts keener, and our spirits greater, by as much as our strength diminishes!")

 

About the Videos
Making a rock video is ten times as much work as I expected, and I sympathize with those poor bands who spend weeks on their video and end up being made fun of on Much Music's Video Fromage the next year.

I ended up spending about $170 on my first computer-edited video, the Viking Song.  I was able to do this because I had help from the Education department at MUN, which lent me a camera, and from the Arts & Culture centre in St. John's, which lent me some costumes.  I then spent two weeks on Adobe Premiere editing five gigs of video files (that was a lot in October 2000!) and trying to keep my computer from dying under the load.

My later videos have been somewhat less ambitious than the Viking video, as I no longer have access to a large cast of friends I can bribe with cheap beer to put on goofy costumes. I also don't have the luxury of spending a month building costumes and assembling harps. Nowadays I tend to just use clip art for props. If you're going to cut corners, don't go halfway.




To make a rock video, you need a video camera, a color screen, and a program like Premiere that crashes every five minutes.
You need friends to act in your video too. The sillier the friends, the better. Rock videos are not Shakespeare.
Danielle, Michelle, and Tammy, my Viking babes, with some homebuilt costumes and about four minutes of dance choreography.
Myself burning my harp, a la Hendrix.  The harp wouldn't burn, so I had to ignite newspapers.  But the fire was real, and I did get singed.
Morphing images together in software is fun, although it will take all day to render on your computer.
And sometimes women might dance in their underwear in the video. Hey, it was artistically meaningful to the song, alright!

 

E-mail Kill the Wabbit for weddings, bar mitzvahs, or Olympic theme anthems:
© 2012 Ken Eckert / Moldy Rutabaga Music, inc.

Not that I am expecting a problem with this, but the music and media on this site is free for personal use only and may not be sold.