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.
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).
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'!
Due to overwhelming popular demand, I transferred my hit show Perfect Mixtape to London's West End for a Triumphant Run, which took place on 1st November.
Was very fun to do it again and the London crowd seemed to enjoy it as much as most of my Edinburgh audiences (make of that what you will), so when I have time I will be looking at taking this show on, perhaps in modified form, elsewhere.
As well as that I took up my position as resident Music Monkey at two of my favourite comedy nights, the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society and the Forgery Club. They're both very different from your regular comedy night, with ACMS specialising in experimental (though invariably very fun) stuff, bookended by me doing some hopefully entertaining musical experiments involving technology, teapots and titting about and with Forgery Club being a themed character and musical comedy night where I also teat about, do musical stuff and some character shenanigans from time to time.
Oh, and I did yet more musical teating around with Colin Hoult, including introducing my alter ego Steven Briggs one-man-colliery-band-slash-grime-mc to his unsuspecting audience.
Here's me playing a teapot with my mouth and a spring onion at an ACMS (photo courtesy of the ever-ace Isabelle Adam)
I had a ball (quite literally) doing this show at the Barbican in October 2011. It's a kind of update of the old dance marathons of the 1920s, only with some really fantastic contemporary dance choreography, fantastic video projections and some nice moments of theatricality thrown in. I was playing in the band but also found myself dancing more than I ever have before - normally for about 2.5 hrs per show. Think I was fitter than I've ever been after the run finished.
Bluemouth Inc were an absolute pleasure to work with, and was great to do a theatre show with so much improvisation; nice to be able to stretch musically as well as dancing like an idiot for a week.
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?
As well as performing my one-man comedy/music show Steve Pretty on The Origin of the Pieces, I also played with Frances Ruffelle for her show Beneath the Dress at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The show was great fun to work on, and is the first time I've appeared on stage in black silk pyjamas which showed my naked nipples. In a professional, capacity, at least.
It was a great month and very much enjoyed working with Frances and (I quote) 'the tightest band at the festival' (sorry, but them's the facts).
