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.

 

We took a bit of time off gigging in winter 2012 to get lots of new material written and rehearsed, but we couldn't stay away for long, so ended up doing a few choice gigs playing a mixture of old and new stuff.

My favourite was at the Hootenanny, Brixton, where we played a raucous late set to a capacity crowd. It was my first time playing this venue, and it's got a really great vibe, so if for some reason you live in south London, get down there immediately.

We also did some ace wee gigs elsewhere in town, including another sell-out gig at the superb new venue the Hackney Attic, a bar and performance space at the top of the new Hackney Picturehouse. Top that off with a fun set at the revamped Floripa (formerly Favela Chic) and a double set of entirely new stuff at our regular(ish) haunt the Trinity in Borough and it actually wasn't that quiet a winter of gigs.

There's lots of great stuff planned for 2012, including what I think is some of our most exciting material yet, so keep an eye on our website for details.

 

Now if that isn't a news post that excites your interest, I don't know what is.

Yep, in January I was featured as part of the Bollywood Brass Band in a BBC Radio 2 documentary about the international brass band scene. They came with us on one of our many India jaunts and you can hear some (what I think is) interesting stuff about the development of different international brass traditions, as well as interviews and music from the BBB. Well, you could if the programme were still up. Which, you know, it isn't.

But if enough of you demand that this landmark piece of brass-themed radio documentary making is repeated, it will happen. Believe, people!

In the meantime, here's a video I took when we were interviewing the excellent Jaipur Kawa brass band in Rajasthan.

 

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'!

As has now become something of an autumn tradition, I went back to India with the Bollywood Brass Band in autumn 2011 to play a couple of fun Bollywood gigs. The trip was much shorter than our trip earlier in the year but was still lots of fun, and I managed to tack on a few days at the end to have a little explore along the west coast, where I've not really spent much time.  

Look, here I am not blending in. 

Everyone loves trad jazz, right? Oh no, wait, sorry, make that ale-loving tweedy men with a penchant for straw boaters love trad jazz.  
 
 
 

I had a busy autumn of music gigs alongside the comedy bits and bobs that I was up to.

HCB were especially busy, with headline gigs at Scala (twice!), Queen of Hoxton and Dogstar alongside quite a few private and corporate gigs including a 2 different beer companies. They know us too well...

I was also quite busy with the Bollywood Brass Band, including a brief India tour, and a few extra bits and bobs like working with Darren Hayman and playing with the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra at the Union Chapel in Islington. The autumn also saw the River City Stompers launched on an unsuspecting world, and I tootled for Dance Marathon at the Barbican.

Look, here I am dressed as a skellington playing with HCB at Scala for Halloween, amongst other things.

 

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)

 

This autumn I've been doing a lovely series of gigs with ace singer-songwriter and ex-Hefner frontman Darren Hayman to launch his album The Ship's Piano and the single I Taught You How to Dance both of which feature me on trumpet pretty extensively.

Look, here's a bittersweet video that goes with it.

We did a couple of great intimate piano-and-trumpet shows at The Albany in Great Portland Street in October; as it happened I also had another gig there that week, doing silly comedy and musical things for The Forgery Club, which was a nice way to say goodbye to a superb little venue that has now sadly been turned into a posh restaurant.

I also guested with Darren's full band the Secondary Modern at Fortuna Pop's knees-up at Scala, which was a considerably more raucous gig, and no less fun for it.

We then did a Brighton show in the Unitarian Church on 13th November which had a perfect acoustic to play that material in. I've said it before, but I really like working with Darren; I think we really hit it off both on and off stage, and he really trusts his collaborators. Plus he has a lego model of his dog in his house, which is possibly the greatest thing ever. Look, he's even got him and his wife in the head driving it. Wow.