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Posterous theme by Cory Watilo edited by Steve Pretty

 

Filed under: segue

Latitude Festival

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.

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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.

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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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Segue at the V&A

I co-devised Segue with Laura Kriefman of the Guerilla Dance Project, which we performed at the V&A. Segue is, for want of a better description, an interactive music-dance-theatre game. I co-devised it with Laura Kriefman with assistance from Mel Cook, and it was originally designed for Hide & Seek’s ‘V&A Late’ session in March 2010. For more information about Segue itself, see my composition and sound design page.

 

The V&A debut was brilliantly manic fun. There’s nothing quite like getting some serious musicians, dressing them up in silly hats and getting them to play fragments of music whilst surrounded by an exhibition of clothing from 1890s India. The game was a great success and went down even better than we’d hoped. Hide & Seek are also lovely to work with – I’d recommend going to anything that they run as it will, at the very least, be massive fun, and probably interesting and informative too.

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