Keen

I’ve got a gig! Not a particularly earth-shattering piece of information, particularly as those of you reading this blog (hopefully all six of you) have: a) played with me at one of my recent gigs; b) seen me at one of my recent gigs; c) known about one of my recent gigs but had something much better to do on each occasion.

Most of my playing these days takes place either in private (not listening to my own advice), with my wife at our local pub (strangely lacking in invites to return after four or five appearances… Could it be we simply don’t attract the right quantity of audience – regardless of the undoubted quality) or at my local open mic night (here, most definitely taking my own advice).

The only time, however, I have played my own version of soundscapes/Frippertronics was at a sort of ‘freestyle’ open mic night at the Firestation in Windsor – the so-called Professor Hitchen’s Art Lab (or some such).

I’ve been down there a couple of times, actually, just to make some sort of observation of the reaction to a bloke standing there making bleeping and droning noises with a guitar, a giga-delay unit and various knobs, switches and pedals to make the whole experience as unearthly as is humanly possible.

Which was great – and the response was great, too. The thing is, it was, like any open mic night, a ‘blind’ performance. I emailed the organiser, explaining what I wanted to do, they responded saying ‘great, come on down’ and I played – although it was clear on each occasion that the MC had no idea who I was or what I was doing and on each occasion implied that I would be getting on stage with my guitar ‘to sing us a few songs’.

In a way, that was kind of cool, because if anyone was expecting a song, they would have been extremely surprised to hear the amorphous swoops and whooshes emitting from my guitar…

But I digress, yet again.

Yes, I have a gig – a gig playing my auraloramas – a gig in an arts centre – a gig with loads of other artists, musicians and dramatists… A gig where I had to send in some examples of my music to see if it was suitable.

An da man, he say ‘yes’.

It is the tenth anniversary of the Norden Farm Centre for the Arts in Maidenhead and the establishment is holding a special, all-comers celebration of the arts in Maidenhead. There will be drama groups, musical theatre groups, dance groups, artists and who knows what else, all performing in every possible square inch of the centre.

I’m telling people that I will be in the disabled toilet… I don’t know if that’s true, but it is possible – and who cares. The fact is that an arts centre thought my strange noises suitable for a multi-arts celebration.

I’m jumping the gun a bit here. I’ve just been on the Norden Farm website and the September 26th event isn’t even on the calendar yet, but hey, take this as a suitably previous teaser for the eventual blog I will write again once the chance to book tickets has arrived…

Bloody hell – that’s the problem with the mediocre: too damn keen…