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.

6music_recommendation.mp3

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6music_recommendation.mp3 (369 KB)

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.

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."

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origin-of-the-pieces-JBrGkEFtrdoHEoABmbtC.zip (12.98 MB)

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?

Being MD for Robin Ince's Book Club at Latitude Festival was pretty much a highlight of the early part of the summer. As well as doing a few short comedy sets where I tried out some bits of my Origin of the Pieces show, I also ran a couple of epic cockney knees-ups, one in partnership with Kevin Eldon and featuring performances from Gavin Osborne, James Dowdeswell and Josie Long on the swannee whistle. It was, in the words of Chas and Dave, a Lovely Ol' Job, if I do say so myself. Getting 500 people doing the Hokey Cokey on the last night was, to put it mildly, fun.

Other Book Club stuff included various incarnations of an improvised musical about crabs taking over the world with Robi/yns Ince and Hitchcock, accompanying Robin reading a bedtime book for kids alongside Josie Long (swannee whistle) and Helen Zaltzman (toy glockenspiel) and an impromptu duet with Ben Goldacre playing my MIDI trumpet.

Speaking of which, was also good to perform with a laptop and live electronics hooked up to my trumpet/voice/melodica for the first time properly, even if it was in order to make lots of extremely silly and/or spooky sounds.

Latitude was especially busy for me in 2010 because I was also performing on trumpet and electronics with Ron Jetson, and doing the music/dance game Segue that I co-devised earlier in the year. Both went extremely well, thankyou very much, and here are some photos and a video to prove it.

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latitude-festival-dbxCmJfEjbJnHdstvkcf.zip (37.65 MB)

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…