The Last Working Day Of The Month: Issue 18

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(MJ Hibbett & The Validators FACT, July 31st 2006 )

Hello all, and welcome to the EXHAUSTED EIGHTEENTH issue of our POST-TOUR newsletter. Let's make it HAPPEN shall we?

GIGS TO COME

This month we shall be playing the following places:

Sunday August 20 - The Secret Garden Party, Huntingdon (On the Living Room stage at 9.45pm)

Sunday August 27 - Buffalo Bar, London (Bowlie all-dayer with The Gresham Flyers, Wintergreen, Silver Springs, Pete Green and loads more - this is apparently likely to sell out, but if you want to be sure of getting in you can get tickets from http://www.wegottickets.com/event/11496)

I'm playing Secret Garden Party on my own, but hopefully I'll have some of The Validators with me again for Bowlie. The gig calendar's looking a bit empty now that the tour's over, so if anybody'd like us (or just me!) to come and play a gig sometime, do let me know!


GIGS WE'VE DONE

The month began with a last-minute solo spot in Lewisham before The Validators LAUNCHED the album in Sheffield, where Emma unveiled THE BACKDROP for the first time. A couple of nights later we ROCKED a PACKED Portland Arms in Cambridge then shortly after that I played on my own in London to an audience of TWO people!

The next week the tour proper began - we played Birmingham, Hull, Leeds, Brighton, Leicester, London and Nottingham on seven consecutive nights, all to lovely people, and all in EXTREME HEAT. By the end we'd lost an awful lot of sweat, met an awful lot of friends old and new, and smelt... well, pretty awful. If you managed to get along to any of the gigs thanks VERY much for doing so, we REALLY enjoyed ourselves - there's LOADS more details of what we got up to on the webpage, and if you missed us this time don't worry, we'll DEFINITELY be doing it again!

RECORDS

"WE VALIDATE!" is now very much OUT, and you can buy it from directly from us (http://www.mjhibbett.net/buy/) or via Amazon (details at http://www.mjhibbett.net/buy/amazon.htm) or indeed from record shops. If you go for the latter option you'll probably need to ask them to order it in for you - it's distributed by Proper Distribution, catalogue number AAS052.

We've had some more really nice webzine and fanzine reviews since the last newsletter, from Indigo Flow, new noise/mmf, To Hell With, Subba-Cultcha, Tangents and Unpeeled. We've also finally broken into The Print Media, with really rather groovy reviews in The Morning Star, Artrocker and, apparently, the next issue of (the) Word Magazine!

Meanwhile plans are already in hand for the NEXT single, which will most likely be "The Lesson Of The Smiths". We're going to try to get it out sometime in October, with new b-sides, a radio edit (to take out the swearing!), and whatever multimedia bits we can fit onto it - more news of this next time!

RADIO

This month we've had plays on 6Music, Radio Ceredigion, both flavours of Raw Talent, and Radio One! This last one was our session on Lamacq Live, when we went to Maida Vale Studios to play "The Gay Train", "Leave My Brother Alone" and "The Lesson Of The Smiths" LIVE to the nation. It was brilliant - the engineers were really helpful and patient, the studio itself was dead posh, Mr Steve Lamacq was as fun to chat to as ever, and we even got to bring some friends along with us. Personally I was TERRIFIED from start to finish, but didn't realise quite how much until it was all over, at which point my knees buckled with FEAR! The nicest thing about it all is that it seems to have got quite a few new people to gigs, which is rather wonderful. If you didn't hear the session I've put the tracks up on our myspace page (http://www.myspace.com/mjhibbett) temporarily, download them while you can!

OTHER THINGS

We've got a couple of new songs to record - "Other Bands Setlists", which we wrote ON THE ROAD for the b-side to the next single, and "The Story Of My Life", a possible solo track for the next Sorted Compilation. In other news, there's a few tour t-shirts left, which'll be going in the shop in a few days time, my first column should be in the next issue of Sandman Magazine, and I'll be compering the Thursday night (31st) of the Fortuna Pop! festival at The Luminaire alongside Doktor Coka Cola MacDonalads... not quite sure what that'll be like, but at least I'll be getting in free!

And I think that's probably enough to be going on with - thanks again to everybody who came along to the tour gigs, it was very much appreciated, and hopefully see you again soon!

Cheers,

Mark

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