ComEnts

So, tomorrow morning White Sunday are heading to the Big Smoky Apple where the streets are paved with gold and dreams can be won and made on every street corner, in order to start recording some new tracks with a "name" producer in a big swanky studio where lots of big swanky people have recorded lots of big swanky things.

Eeeeeeeexcellent. *steeples fingers together, Mr Burns stylee*

My new Gibson Les Paul (yet to be named..) Studio model has fresh strings, a shiny demeanour and sounds fucking amazing through a Rocktron blackcat wah and a Fender combo. Two amazing gigs in the last week mean that we have our tails up and teeth bared, having supped Stella with Mr. Producer Dude for a few months now means that we have fine-tuned the songs and are happy working with him and all that remains for me is to descend into a drink-and-drugs fuelled haze of creative and metaphysical empowerment.

Eeeeeeeexcellent.

This is about the only image that came out of my Screwball pics. Apparently the camera was drunk.

Sadly the weather on Sunday wasn't that great, people still did come down though. The band played Cruella DeVille which made me laugh. The person who's basically driven the whole Fringe thing this year is called Luella, I might have asked at one point if her surname was DeVille, and it may or may not have led to her nearly not being let into the Six Nation State launch party because she was down on the guest list as Luella DeVille. I guess it was a coincidence, but a funny one.

It wasn't just the kids who got to have fun at the Jelly Leg'd Chicken workshop, this monster was made by Steven Green with help from AK.

In many ways Screwball Cabaret last night was a huge success. Unfortunately, there was hardly anyone there to see it so it was a bit of a financial disaster and the atmosphere wasn't as good as it could have been. I am not sure whether losing the money is worse than being a bit embarassed at not having a big crowd there for the bands or not.

It was great to see The Palestinians (dressed in Monks habits, I'll get the pics off my phone to post when I have access to the necessary cable...) back on stage. It was like they'd never been away! I thought they were really really good.

Three Litre made use of some childrens toy instruments and an ironing board in their set which sounded really great other than the extremely irritating fact that the venue had booked a band to rehearse into the room behind the quiet stage! Absolutely unbelievable. Graham was as amusing as ever, my personal highlight was the updated lyrics for Girl From the Industry "with a thin lizzy button on her record bag, and Russel Brand's jism dripping from her vag...". Is that how you spell jism? Not a word I write down very often. I suspect Graham will know.

The Hundred Handed I liked, but what crowd was there didn't really seem to take to them, which was a shame. They had some technical difficulties, the bass DI xlr lead was a bit dodgy... and I don't think that helped matters. On the plus side, it did give us a chance to use Rob's excellent Dalek compere malfunction track. Speaking of which, the Dalek compere idea worked really well, by the end people were really joining in with the (pre recorded) compere banter and cheering when requested etc. Rob did a great job making the clips sound great, and really funny and Rich did a nice job animating it too.

Through Snowy Static were as good as they sound on their myspace. Those kids should really go far. Fantastic voices, great songs. Really excellent stuff.

And to cap the evening off, we had Shorty who were incredible. Everyone was dancing and cheering, the band are ultra tight, funky, funny, they rock and their vocal work is really excellent. Really nice bunch, easy to work with and professional too. I can't recommend them highly enough.

http://www.myspace.com/throughsnowystatic
http://www.myspace.com/threelitre
http://www.myspace.com/thepalestinians
http://myspace.com/hundredhanded
http://www.myspace.com/shortyonline

Word is spreading about the Fringe Festival. In the pub for the fringe meeting last night I bumped into a guy I know, was telling him about the Fringe etc, gave him some leaflets, and he said he was already DEFINITELY going to the short film festival, which is great to hear.

And at the end of the evening, as him and his friends were leaving, they said they'd found loads of stuff they wanted to go to in the programme! Once people find out about all the events they seem to be really excited. Hopefully we've reached more people this year, and will continue to do so.

People talking about the Fringe is going to be the best way of letting people who don't read/watch/listen to their local media informed.

So keep telling people, and especially tell them how great screwball will be. And come to screwball too!

So, it started last night.

Sunday - Rehearsal with new band
Monday - Rehearsal with old band for gig on 22nd
Tuesday - Fringe meeting
Wednesday - night out with co-worker and his girlfriend
Thursday - Screwball Cabaret
Friday - Pete and the Pirates @ PnP
Saturday - TBC choice of Fringe events
Sunday - Fringe events in Forbury gardens, Song for Reading or Damien A Passmore in the evening
Monday - Rebus and SNS at the Fez or The Limes and The Hot Silk Pockets at the BBBs
Tuesday - Müf gig with The Mean Season at the BBBs
Wednesday - Reading Homecoming Festival at the Fez
Thursday - Death Disco? Club V at plug'n'play? Maybe I'll take the day off
Friday - Friend's Pirate birthday party in Bristol...

In the meantime I still have hundreds of flyers to put out, and loads of bits to sort out for Screwball.

The Fringe Festival press launch seems to have gone quite well, we're getting some really good press.

BBC Berkshire have a fantastic preview in their Festivals section, including a picture of me! Well some of the fringe team including me and my blog co-writer AK.

Local listings magazine Blah Blah also gave us some fantastic coverage. They even put a little 4 page pullout in their August issue which is fantastic. Their editorial has some interesting points. They mention that the Fringe is at the same time as Edinburgh Fringe - have to say, before this year I didn't realise that - and they think that because of that, and the fact that a lot of people are away in August is the reason the Fringe programme is mainly live music orientated. They suggest doing it a different month next year. It is true that the programme is mainly live music, but I think the reasons for having it in the week running up to the Carling Weekend are pretty convincing. It is a time when the national media focuses it's attention on Reading anyway and it's a good way to present the story. Our outlook has always been that tens of thousands of people descend on Reading for The Carling weekend and then leave again without really knowing what great arts are in Reading all year round the other people I really want to reach are local people who go to the festival and don't realise there's all this local talent.

I'm not sure if it's the month and the Edinburgh Fringe which mean it's mainly live music. I think it's down to us not having enough of the right contacts. The main base of the organising group came from a 'live music' background. We'd love to have more arts events on, we've tried our best this year, and it's certainly a much more diverse line-up than last year, but we'll need to keep improving. One of the things we need to keep doing is diversifying who's involved with the organisational side of the Fringe so we can get in touch with more people. This year three of the new people we have involved Joe, Elaine and Steve Green brought in a load of new events through their contacts. Every creative person we can meet brings a new set of contacts, and that means we can spread our net of events wider and wider.

As Ben Marwood mentioned in his Drowned In Sound preview, we do have a problem with venues. I think next year we're really going to have to get creative with venues. We're also going to have to try harder to inspire people to put events on, at the moment we possibly give the impression (wrongly) that we'll arrange events for people. We've spent so much time trying to organise peoples events for them that we haven't always been able to do all the admin and keeping people in touch with what's going on.

I heard some students on the train the other evening saying that Reading is rubbish for going out and there's nothing to do, that used to be true (or maybe I was like them and just didn't know about the stuff there was) but there's an incredible amount going on at the moment and through the Fringe I've learnt that the stuff I knew about was only the tip of the iceberg! I'm sure there's plenty more out there we haven't found or got in the programme yet.

We are learning all the time though, and we'll get better. Constructive criticism is always useful, although if you give it to us I can't promise that we won't try and recruit you to help us improve things next year!



Screwball tickets available now!