Count Up To Edinburgh: #2 First run through

Hello. Last blog I was a bit pissed off, it happens, it's life, we move on. Even if the moving bit is like Trains Planes and Automobiles, when the car being driven by Steve Martin and John Candy has blown up, but they are still able to drive the thing, all burnt out and just about running but moving none the less. Just did the first run through of all the material so far, with some of the music interludes I've made. It went ok. I'm excited, but also realise there's a lot of work to do. Am playing with a loop station for two of the stories, not 100% confident on it yet but we'll see if that's something I go on to eventually use.

As it stands, there are 8 stories with more to come. In each show there will probably be time for 5 or 6. What I'm aiming for, is to have a whole bunch of material that I'm able to chop and change for each show, depending on the vibe I get with the audience. Each story is written to stand alone but together they all form this wider narrative. When I was a nipper, my big sister had all these Duran Duran 7 inch singles, if you layed them all out together they made this bigger picture, which was also the artwork on the album sleeve, I always liked that idea. So that's what I'm playing with. I'm using the stories form The 90 Sick E.P which are well tested and a few of the others I've preformed at various open mikes and scratch events, so material wise I think I'm in a good place. Just got to learn it all now and work out what I'm doing with each one physically, I have a few ideas..

Putting it altogether was fun though. Whilst doing it, I suddenly felt that pressure to select the right story when the music interludes were playing, it was an odd pressure, the type of which I hadn't felt for a while. Reminded me of MCing in clubs all thoses years ago, anticipating a drop on a tune about to kick in, and I had to quickly work out what lyrics I would use. This is uncharted territory for me, with other shows and spoken word gigs everything is usually pre-planned so I'm a little nervous in that respect, being that it's larlgy unplanned, well sort of anyway.

Gonna have another pop at it today so we'll see how it goes. Enjoy the sunshine