Blog: Booking The Turns

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As part of my project to make the first week back to work slightly less GHASTLY than it otherwise might be I've embarked upon the next wave of bookings for Totally Acoustic. This is always a LENGTHY process, but one which I have honed during the (amazingly) EIGHT years that it has been going.

The first and LONGEST part is, every so often over the course of about six months, to think "OOH! Them!" and write a NAME down on a special page in my notebook headed "Ask For Totally Acoustic". This page gets particularly busy during the Edinburgh Fringe or at Indietracks, when I see someone i like who is a) NEW or b) not so new but who I have never got around to asking before.

The next job is to have a look at the list of all the past gigs and work out who's played before but I haven't asked in a while. This invariably leads to me gazing wistfully into the middle distance thinking about how much fun it was the last time they came because, also invariably, it WAS.

Once THAT'S all completed i get down to ASKING, and this is ALSO done in stages. From prior experience I know that some people have DATE RESTRICTIONS i.e. jobs or CHILDREN that mean they can only do gigs at certain times. I ask this lot FIRST (especially if they've never played before), before going through my wishlist of new people a few at a time. The NIGHTMARE SCENARIO is that more people say "YES" to a date than I have space for, which HAS happened in the past although is less likely now as my NOT doing a full set myself every time allows room for THREE guests. It does still FRIT ME UP tho, so I try my best to wait until most people in a WAVE have answered either way before moving on to the next.

And that's where I'm AT at the moment, about halfway through asking NEW types if they fancy doing it. I'm hoping to get that all done in the next week or so before working out how many previous TURNS I can ask to come back and then we'll all be set for approx seven months of ROCK. As you can see from the recently updated list of line-ups we've got some CRACKING people coming already. I'm MOST excited about the fact that Ruth from Po! is going to be coming down, as I've not seen her do a gig in DECADES, but they all look like being GRATE and there's LOADS more still to ask!

By heck, it's making back to work week feel hardly ghastly at ALL!

posted 5/1/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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