I did some tootling for the amazing immersive theatre show thingy You Me Bum Bum Train in December and January. Was lots of fun, albeit slightly surreal playing the same 4 bars of music over and over again for hours at a time. Despite being a part of it I didn't actually manage to be a 'passenger', but from the universal 5* reviews it sounded pretty amazing.
We took a bit of time off gigging in winter 2012 to get lots of new material written and rehearsed, but we couldn't stay away for long, so ended up doing a few choice gigs playing a mixture of old and new stuff.
My favourite was at the Hootenanny, Brixton, where we played a raucous late set to a capacity crowd. It was my first time playing this venue, and it's got a really great vibe, so if for some reason you live in south London, get down there immediately.
We also did some ace wee gigs elsewhere in town, including another sell-out gig at the superb new venue the Hackney Attic, a bar and performance space at the top of the new Hackney Picturehouse. Top that off with a fun set at the revamped Floripa (formerly Favela Chic) and a double set of entirely new stuff at our regular(ish) haunt the Trinity in Borough and it actually wasn't that quiet a winter of gigs.
There's lots of great stuff planned for 2012, including what I think is some of our most exciting material yet, so keep an eye on our website for details.
I was cast in a Hyundai advert. I had to wear a sumo suit for three hours and wrestle a stranger on a green screen. I had to sail a tent in a high wind and then let it go in a quad biker's face.
This is the result.
Two days of my life, that was.
Now if that isn't a news post that excites your interest, I don't know what is.
Yep, in January I was featured as part of the Bollywood Brass Band in a BBC Radio 2 documentary about the international brass band scene. They came with us on one of our many India jaunts and you can hear some (what I think is) interesting stuff about the development of different international brass traditions, as well as interviews and music from the BBB. Well, you could if the programme were still up. Which, you know, it isn't.
But if enough of you demand that this landmark piece of brass-themed radio documentary making is repeated, it will happen. Believe, people!
In the meantime, here's a video I took when we were interviewing the excellent Jaipur Kawa brass band in Rajasthan.
In mid-January I did a couple of great sell-out shows of a reworked version of my 2011 solo show Perfect Mixtape at the Leicester Square Theatre.
For want of a better title, and because I had to come up with the name when I was hungover one morning in mid-November, I decided to call it How I Attended My Own Wake and Have a Mixtape to Prove It. It's broadly speaking the same show that I did in Edinburgh, but I re-scripted some fairly big chunks of it in order to concentrate more on the (true) story at the heart of the show which is about how I went to my own wake.
I was really happy with the show in Edinburgh, but one of the quirks of fringe shows there is that you have to write all the blurb and all that before you know the final shape your show is going to take, so I was quite conscious from pretty early on that there were some structural changes that I wanted to make in order to concentrate on the telling of the main story and some of the musical bits and pieces.
So, long story short, this was a kind of preview of a new version of an old show. I'm making some more tweaks and am hoping to have a decent period of re-development at some point; either way I'll be doing quite a few more performances of this in its new form during 2012, starting with the Machynlleth Comedy Festival on the 5th May (where I'll also be doing ACMS and some other bits and pieces).
As well as doing a couple of sell-out shows of my reworked 2011 solo show, I also did some great fun comedy type gigs this winter.
The first ever School Night, a superbly-conceived new night run by techie extraordinaire and now producer James Lowey, was absolutely ace. As you may have guessed, it's a school-themed night where each performer gives a 'lesson'. Inevitably enough, I gave a music lesson which featured, as all good music lessons should, two 'students' smashing another 'student' over his (helmet-encased) head with tuned, coloured sticks, and also a once-in-an-evening opportunity to insult Matthew Crosby live on stage whilst an idiot (me) played a teapot into his ear. I was in very illustrious company indeed as the other 'teachers' were the likes of Humphrey Ker, Steve Mould and Helen Arney.
Speaking of Helen, I also did her 'geeky new material' night Domestic Science in January, where I did some fun new stuff about Cliff Richard and ancient Mesopotanian songs, featuring some failed looping and an iPad synth.
Oh, and I did a couple of Forgery Clubs and ACMSes in my role as resident Music Monkey/occasional alter ego Steven Briggs one-man-colliery-band-slash-grime-mc. Was a bit of an odd few months, being as Forgery Club was the last ever night at the Albany on Great Portland Street, and ACMS was the last ever night at the New Red Lion on City Road: both legendary comedy venues and fantastic rooms to play. Both of these great new nights have had to find a new home, and the scene is much poorer for having lost these great venues. Alas!
Ironically enough, I never feel festive until this annual festival of Humanism comes along. Curated and presented, as ever, by the indomitable and borderline insane Robin Ince and featuring the usual parade of amazing scientists (Andrea Sella, Marcus Chown, Ben Goldacre), comedians (Alexi Sayle, Mark Thomas, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring) and musicians (Grace Dent, Neil Hannon, Scroobius Pip) it was, as ever, an extraordinary week. For my part, I did my usual tootling, including a teapot micro-solo on Neil Hannon's National Express and also played a teapot which Andrea Sella filled with dry ice in Martin White's epic new song How I Take My Tea.
Happy Christmas, or, to quote Robin Ince, 'as we atheists say, Happy Christmas'!
