Stuff You Gotta Watch: Bee Keeper Bands #01 Everground
"Make your little riot happen and do it yourself" was the main motto of Bee Keeper, a Lisbon-based DIY label run by Elsa Pires and Luis Futre in the mid-’90s. It might have started as a "joke," but in a landscape dominated by majors that left virtually no room (or money) for the alternative scene, Bee Keeper managed to cause a decent-sized stir in the underground of the Portuguese capital.
Fifteen years later, Bruno Simões decided to preserve the story of Bee Keeper and some of its bands for posterity through a series of short documentaries that detail the labor of love and dedication of Pires and Futre. Bite-sized and informative, the short films are a marvelous little time capsule of the indie '90s in Portugal with the bands themselves at the center of the narrative. The inaugural episode is about Portuguese riot grrrl band Everground, an all-female quartet fronted by Suspiria Franklyn (later of Les Baton Rouge, Kiute Loss, and Suspicious), whose self-titled EP and Acid Candy cassette were among Bee Keeper's first releases.
Review by Ana Leorne. Check out the full archive of the Stuff You Gotta Watch column.