Blog: The London Finale

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Last night we were at the Hackney Attic for the final London performance of Total Hero Team, where we had Mr Matt Tiller and Ms Jenny Lockyer as support. Rather wonderfully we ALL arrived there early - possibly because Hackney is known to one and all as Slightly Tricky To Get To. (For people who don't live in London - this just means it isn't on the tube, it's actually PEASY.

We spoke with the organiser about expected audience size - "about 20?" we said, honestly, and much to my relief she seemed FINE with that, so we arranged tables accordingly, did our soundchecks, and waited to see if we'd guessed about right.

We totally did, and rather wonderfully the vast majority of the 20 were people I didn't recognise, some of whom had seen the posters and decided to give it a go. Hoorah! We kicked off with Matt who I've not seen play for AGES, and who was ACE. I always like his song The Plymouth Hotel, so was very pleased to hear it, but the high point of his bit was when he invited Matthieu The (French) Sound Guy onstage to live translate Henri Le Chauffeur De Camion Amoureux. Usually he gets an English person (e.g. ME one time) to translate his French into English, but getting a French person to do it has Unforseen Consequences e.g. he couldn't understand much of Matt's version of French, and when he could he didn't know the English!

When Matt came off people looked a bit confused, expecting a compere, so I stood up and said "Next act in 10 minutes!" but there seemed to be a feeling that this was insufficient,so I went and did a proper intro for Jenny, who was GRATE as ever. There were new songs, REMARKS, and an especially lovely version of Granny Pearl, another favourite of mine which I was very happy to hear again.

After that general excellence all that remained was for me and Steve to stomp on and do the show, which seemed to go over fairly well. It felt a bit WEIRD because we had to use microphones and have the guitar and uke plugged in, but CERTAIN members of the group seemed to LOVE it. Clearly Steve has been missing his days as a Lead Singer, and took the opportunity to remove the microphone from its stand and SWAN ABOUT a bit. He loves it!

Afterwards Matthieu came over and said I had to go downstairs to see about payment. I was AFEARED that this meant they wanted me to cough up some deposit, but actually it turned out they wanted to pay US. This on top of the BEER TOKENS we'd had earlier meant we'd actually made a profit of POUNDS, even including travel! A first!!

Some of us moved over the road to The Cock Tavern for a celebratory pint. It's a very nice place, and had many very nice people in it. After a while I had to drag myself away in order to catch my train, and was a bit peeved to find that the trains seemed to be a bit knackered, as I ended up spending 20 minutes sat on a cold platform, when I could have spent most of that time in a nice warm pub!

It was the only (very mild) low note in a lovely evening. Being on tour is FUN - next stop Glasgow!

posted 31/1/2014 by MJ Hibbett

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