Cone Beat were a 1980's Irish band, a politically-oriented 4-piece, led by front man Mich Faighlty, ("nicknamed Moto"). On 15th April 1982, the band were travelling to film a video for their song, Ascension Day, when the private aeroplane they had rented was forced to touch down for an emergency landing in a remote expanse of snow in Poland. Although the video shoot was supposed to be filmed at Lublin Główny train station in the city of Lublin, Poland, Dave Moreign, their video director, decided to film it in the snowy hills where they had landed.
"The song was, well, OK," Moreign said in 1998, in an interview with Sight and Sound magazine, "And Moto's being a diva like always, so I says to the fellas, 'is there anyone here who wants to drag this bollocks out for another 3 days, or shall we just get it done while they're fixing the feckin' plane? An the vote was 3 to 1, so, yeah, we ended up making a bit of music history, if you want to call it that.'
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Cone Beat fans meeting at the Snow Muzyka Skifarm, a Ski Resort set up by a local entrepreneur in order to capitalise on the annual pilgrimage of fans to the spot where the Ascension Day video was filmed. On 15th April every year, fans meet in order to re-enact the video. Since the addition of the chair-lift in 2000, some fans have used it to also re-enact the emergency landing of the plain, carrying papier-maché replicas of the entire plane, or pieces of the fuselage and wings. Photograph by KT Bell. ©2013 James Mathurin |
