Blog: Wonderful Christmas Time

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I rolled up to The King & Queen last night to find it NOT full of drunk people wearing Fezes, unlike the last two times I've been there. The STRANGENESS continued when I went upstairs to discover that the room had been set out in the OPPOSITE way from how we have it i.e. with the chairs facing AWAY from the corner. To be honest it's probably a more sensible way to have it, but I am LOATH to veer away from tradition so spent a sweaty ten minutes turning everything round, during the course of which I found a bag and ukelele. "Clearly someone left this behind last night, after the reverso Totally Acoustic ended" I thought. Being a good citizen I took them downstairs to hand in as Lost Property, only to be told that it had been dropped off by "a bloke who said he was playing."

I'd noticed that the uke had TINY lyrics taped to the side. "That's like how Gav does it," I'd thought. I should have followed that thought through really shouldn't I? Anyway, I was soon joined by Mr S Hewitt, then by our acts Mr G Osborn and Mr H Carr and a whole HEAP of other people. Upstairs was soon very pleasantly full, "just the right number of people" I thought, CORRECTLY as it turned out. The Pies In My Tray had brought along MINCE PIES for everybody and, amazingly, we had EXACTLY the right number to go around for everyone who wanted done. It was a Christmas Miracle! As I handed them out several people said "My first mince pie of the season!" and, when I asked later, it turned out that it was EVERYBODY'S first for this year. It was an honour to provide them!

Once everybody had been fed it was time to get going, and I did THIS:

Easy Christmas

Roy Wood In The Blue Note

Wondeful Christmas Time

Thank Goodness For Christmas

Walking In A Winter Wonderland

We Three Kings

I Got You What You Want For Christmas

The Advent Calendar Of FACT

It was ALL CHRISTMAS, ALL OF THE TIME! As ever I did the "for some reason I don't do these songs very often" joke, this time using it as an excuse to have the LYRICS to hand, which nobody seemed to mind. I DEBUTED this year's Christmas song, Roy Wood In The Blue Note, which went jolly well (much to my relief) as well as doing The St Mark's Junior School Peterborough version of We Three Kings for the first time live since, well, when I was at junior school. There was also a LOT of joining in and singing along, it was dead Christmassy!

Next up was Harry, doing his QUIZ in character as Harry Cafe. I must admit that, just before he went on, I had a sudden WORRY - would this go down all right? I've seen and enjoyed a couple of Harry's shows, but it IS character comedy and a bit WEIRD with lots of games and joining in, so I wasn't sure how well it would work in a room like this. I was, of course, a FOOL to have such fears, as it worked out BRILLIANTLY. The Totally Acoustic audience is always LOVELY and MORE than ready to join in when asked. Within moments everybody had joined Harry in the stage area to pretend to be Rhinoceroses and later gave hearty voice to various jingles. It was HILARIOUS!

Finally we had Gav doing a set which I had booked basically as a CHRISTMAS PRESENT to MYSELF for LO! he is always ace and was very much so this time. He did a TONNE of stuff that I'd not heard him do before (and I've heard him play a LOT!) including THREE (3) marvelous Christmas songs. He also did a brilliant version of "Sweet Bedford" made even MORE emotional than usual by the fact that Stevo from the song was sitting in the room.

It was, all told, a lovely way to kick off Christmas and also, in my case, complete the gigging year. On the way out I booked in for a SLEW of new Totally Acoustic shows next year - I've got the line-ups for the next two months on the website but I hope to get a good few more finalised soon. It's a beautiful gig to do in general, and this was a VERY beautiful one in particular!

posted 4/12/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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