Blog: York New Musicals Festival

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Saturday morning found me a little "tired" after the late night of extreme ROCK spent at the Prolapse gig the night before, so when I met Mr S Hewitt at Kings Cross Station at 1.45pm I was ready for a nice sit down. Happily we'd got pre-booked on the first class carriage, so had a very pleasant nearly 2 hour trip to YORK, where we were due to perform Hey Hey 16K at the York New Musicals Festival.

When we got to York we strolled through town, confidently following the route to the venue that we'd used two years ago. It started well but I felt less and less confident the further we went, as my BRANE struggled to remember a route which we had only taken ONCE, 24 months ago. It was actually an interesting MENTAL SENSATION, as to start with I knew exactly where I needed to go at least five minutes ahead, but this gradually reduced until near the end I only knew where my next few steps needed to go, with my BRANE struggling to keep up, like Wile E Coyote laying down tracks in front of a speeding train.

Anyway, we DID find the venue OK, but everybody was upstairs watching the show before ours, so we BRAVELY went to the pub down the road for a much needed (ESPECIALLY in my case) bit of Hair Of The Dog. By heck it was needed a LOT!

Back at the venue we were met by Mr Jim Welsman, organiser and LOVELY man, then headed up to the performance space. It's a dead nice venue with all kinds of proper facilities which we weren't really going to use - our tech requirements are basically just to have a table and the lights turned on before we start, although, once the audience came in, we did make use of the wings. Well, what actually happened was we hid on either side of the stage, alternately giggling and then thinking "Hang on, how do we know when it's time to start?"

After a bit of this Steve did a countdown with his fingers and we LEAPT out to discover we had a thoroughly respectable audience of about 35-40 people. Many of these were from other shows, but there were definitely some paying punters including a few that I *didn't* recognise from other gigs!

Before we started we did the usual introduction about it being a "preview" show, and so any mistakes being part of the fun. This was a very sensible thing to do as Steve and I committed quite a LOT of fun! Something about playing in a Proper Theatre where you can't SEE the audience (as opposed to our more usual top rooms of pubs where you CAN) always makes me a bit nervous, and the fact that we still haven't properly worked out the new arrangement to History's Re-written meant we got off to a bit of a shaky start, but hey, we are MORE than used to this and had a right jolly old time, especially when we had to deal with the fact that we weren't in a pub by MIMING beer. It was lovely, and even more so when we reached the last third of the show, the "downhill" section where it is ALL HITS!

It IS strange doing a gig like this though, where the darkness of the audience means you don't really know how it's going, so it was a HUGE relief when the lights went up and we saw everybody GRINNING. Lots of nice people came over to say how much they'd enjoyed it, one chap even said that We Did It Anyway was the best song he'd ever heard!

We gave Jim one last HUG and then set off in triumph to the pub with Mr A Ewing for a couple of beers before getting back on the train home. I hope future shows are a bit less shaky with regards to Knowing What We're Doing, but if they go down half as well as this one did I'll be very happy!

posted 2/6/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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