Channel 5's Andrew Callaghan Profiles Phish Lot [Video]

New wave journalist Andrew Callaghan brought his traveling roadshow to Phish lot in his latest Channel 5 video. The All Gas No Brakes creator took his new YouTube program to the ecosystem outside Phish’s one-off show at The Forum in Los Angeles, CA on October 24th, 2021.

Anyone remotely familiar with Callaghan can immediately identify him by three main characteristics: his ill-fitting suit, his boyish looks complete with acne, and his deadpan interview style. All three are present as he navigates the culture outside a Phish show, profiling the scene as well as the people that create it.

Like any good Andrew Callaghan video, this 16-minute mini-documentary is brimming with pull quotes, from the opening “They drop ‘albums’? It’s all a lie. It’s 100% one song,” to “Ronald Reagan got me hooked on crack in 1982,” and many, many more. And of course, no trip to Phish lot would be complete without nitrous mafiosos who make their presence known throughout the video.

Beyond his profile of the scene, however, the Phish video shows Andrew’s ever-developing style. His growing fame has made him less incognito, with one middle-aged man getting Callaghan to give a shout-out to his kids. Another younger interviewee was incensed—much more than Andrew, evidently–about the dissolution of his landmark channel, All Gas No Brakes. Per a New York Times article from March, Callaghan was fired from the channel he created by Doing Things Media after requesting a pay raise from the network. Callaghan and his two-man crew of Nic Mosher and Evan Gilbert-Katz then left and started their own program, Channel 5.

Callaghan’s shifting editorial style is present in a new element for his videos as he goes beyond the well-crafted edits and awkward or insane man on the street clips for a sit-down interview with Mars Sanford, a Phish historian. Sanford, a veteran of over 230 shows, provides some more mellow insights on the scene, away from the nitrous oxide-induced, Darth Vader musings of the lot. This is only an experiment, however, as the video soon snaps right back to the cringe with some frat rat freestyling about seeing Phish.

In the end, it’s Sanford who sums up the Phish community the best,

I also tap in to a huge feeling of, not to be dark or dismal, but of insignificance. Like, I’m here and I’m an ‘expert of Phish’ and I’ve seen 230-whatever shows, and I’ve spent all this money and seen them all over the place for so many years, so it’s like I’m tapped in and it means so much to me but in the grand scheme of things its not really that important.

Watch the new Andrew Callaghan Channel 5 video from Phish lot.

Channel 5 – Phish Lot