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.
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!
The London leg of my Origin of the Pieces World Tour* was great fun.
I did a couple of shows at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden, which both pretty much sold out, thanks in part to a recommendation from Lauren Laverne on BBC 6Music.
(download)
Was really good to get the show up on its feet again, and more than anything very useful to remember which bits worked better than others in advance of my new solo show, which I'm working on at the moment.
So Origin has been put to bed for now, but there will be lots more musical comedy shenanigns with my Brand New Show this Spring and Summer.
Details to be announced soon (including previews dates etc - though I have one confirmed in Eastbourne on 28th June as a double header with Dan Antopolski) , but know this: it will be fun.
* Tour included: Edinburgh, London. In fact the tour was just: Edinburgh, London. And the dates were 6 months apart.
The autumn was pretty much dominated by rehearsing and touring with Songs From a Hotel Bedroom for the Royal Opera House, New Wolsey and Watford Palace theatres.
This was a very unusual cross-genre show featuring Nigel Richards and Frances Ruffelle, dancers Tara Pilbrow and Amir Giles and Neil Charles, Clive Deamer, Charlie Brown, Dai Pritchard, Romano Viazzani and myself as musician/actors, led by MD/arranger Jim Holmes.
The show was conceived and directed by Kate Flatt with writing and dramaturg assistance from Pete Rowe, and was based around some lesser-known songs by Kurt Weill.
I had an absolute ball doing it, working with a great and extremely talented bunch of people and learning a lot about combining dance, theatre and music. There wasn’t a lot of acting to do in it, but having been concentrating a bit on other things recently, I really enjoyed the bit there was. It was also a bit of a kick to be performing at the Royal Opera House, which felt like far too swanky a place for the likes of me to be performing.
Still, I kept it real by doing a new comedy show in a pub in Camden in the same week. Phew.
Photographs here are copyright Alex Rumfeld
I took my one man show Steve Pretty on The Origin of the Pieces to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2010, where I performed it at the GRV as part of the (now sadly defunct) Five Pound Fringe.
Here's the blurb:
"Until recently, Steve knew almost nothing about pop music, despite being a professional musician and having been born 5 minutes after John Lennon was shot. In an ambitious attempt to change this, he resolved to listen to every piece of popular music ever known before his 30th birthday. From prehistoric boneflute music to Jedward, no stone would be left unrolled.
Unlikely connections emerged and he found himself on a Darwinian voyage of discovery. Would a merciful God have created N-Dubz? Are Led Zeppelin the transition fossils between medieval minstrels and Muse? And how do creationists explain Lady Gaga?
Part edutaining interacto-lecture, part stadium-rock-gig-in-a-small-room-without-a-rock-band, this is one man’s attempt to recreate the entire history of pop music with only a trumpet, a laptop and a fondue set."
The show went down really well, with a nice clutch of four star reviews (like this, this and this) and even a mention as part of Fest magazine's 'Perfect Fringe Day', intimidatingly suggesting that people go straight from my show to Paul Merton's.
Fest magazine called it 'an eclectic mix of fun facts, sharply observed one-liners and audience participation' and 'original, intelligent comedy delivered with commendable panache', which was nice of them.
The show website is still live and has lots more information about the show.
I really loved writing and performing a show that combined a lot of my interests, hopefully made people learn something, and (mostly, and most importantly) made people laugh.
As I write (February 2011) I'm currently planning my next solo show which I'll be taking up to Edinburgh this summer. Why don't you sign up to my mailing list so that I can let you know when I've got previews happening?
Appeared in an ad for John Lewis, where they dressed me up to look like Chris Addisson.
If you can spot me, you get a prize. The prize is the knowledge that my part of the shoot took 2 days.
Don't judge me; something's got to help fund my career and anyway, John Lewis are generally good folk I think.
Shot The Lady and the Cripple, in which I was playing the eponymous (if somewhat insensitively-named) Cripple, Franklin. It's a zombie film (well, short film), which pays homage to that genre by having lots of references to classic horror movies. I didn't know much about these, so was interesting watching films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the name of 'research' (my character is partly based on the whiney, curly-haired guy in a wheelchair in that film).
The production values of this were pretty damn high, with some frankly amazing prosthetic severed heads, blood and general gore. We shot it over 2 days, one of which was slashing down with rain and the other of which was prosthetic-meltingly hot. I'm presuming that this might be a reason that the film is still at the post-production stage...
