In March I MDed and performed at Robin Ince's School for Gifted Children. 

Music-wise this included arranging for and playing with Jim Bob and Darren Hayman as well as lots of musical bits and bobs with the other performers, ably helped by 3 great musicians: Magnus Dearness on trombone, Jeff Miller on sousaphone and Dave Smith on drums, violin. and pots and pans. Being called ‘Nick Griffin with a bugle’ by Bridget Christie dressed as an ant and playing my arrangement of the theme from Harry Potter as Alan Moore’s walk-on music were possibly the highlights of the musical side of things.

As well as the tootling I did a 20 minute comedy set which was great fun. The crowd at those gigs are so friendly, and doing a set after people like Josie Long, Bridget Christie, Alan Moore and Stewart Lee is exciting and intimidating in not quite equal measure (more of the latter, in case you were wondering).

I tried out some material that I’d been working on for the Edinburgh run of my show Steve Pretty on the Origin of the Pieces which seemed to go down pretty well – encouraging! Only problem was that I couldn’t resist using the band to help tell the complete history of pop music from 38,000BC to 2010 in 20 minutes, and I was quite aware that life was going to be a bit more tricky when I was by myself in Edinburgh…