Roviyas

Edinburgh 2013 Week One

It’s nine o’clock on Saturday night and three of my housemates have just decided to have a nap. (In other, totally unrelated, news: the Edinburgh Tattoo with its fireworks that resound across Edinburgh every Saturday night, hearty as haggis, has just begun in earnest.)

This evening I have dragged myself away from the promise of pleasures abound to have a rest. I am weary. My skin has begun to protest against the diet of wine, cobbles and wretched anxiety in the form of a painful chin-based spot.

It was raining hard last Monday afternoon as we pulled up to C Nova, our venue in Edinburgh. Director Montse was already there, cowering under an umbrella. Ben, Dan and I clambered from the van and onto the Scottish sheened cobbles and, after checking in and not quite drinking a cup of coffee, we hefted my set into the studio theatre space to begin the technical rehearsal.

I had been brittle with nerves about the tech. Bright Lights is set around a reception desk with a telephone that acts as a loop pedal to record and play back my voice. All swishily simple, really, and something I can set up easily in my house with my stuff, but I had no idea how to plug it all into an unknown venue. I had never met Ash, the freelance technician I had employed for the run. I had no idea what anything would be like.

As soon as Ash bounded in he began sorting things out. Talking to the venue technicians, joking with Montse, plugging things, testing things and gaffa taping other things. Montse guided us all through the tech, sorting out all the lights and sound, I just stood in the whirlwind and mentally crossed something out on my Things To Be Terrified About In Edinburgh checklist.

We finished at about ten, and Montse and I headed back to our flat. Ben and Dan had already arrived, and had carted all of our stuff – cases, instruments, boxes of cables, set – up the seven flights of stairs. Lifts, apparently, are not the done thing in fancy Edinburgh townhouses.

Simply put: this flat is a palace. Last year we all nearly had to stay in a place that was reminiscent of the place where dogs go to defecate and die. This year we played the Fringe housing game and won gold. (Maybe silver, actually. For it to be gold standard it might have to have a lift.)

The large wooden coffee table in the living room was covered with an array of cheese, wine and small artisan biscuits, around which was an even better array of housemates. There was Ben and Dan, (whom I love and adore and respect and admire as humans and men). Then Tomás, who is performing a show called Tomás Ford’s Electric Midnight Cabaret, and Aaron, his manager. They are from Perth and are both the sort of people who make you laugh so loudly that you worry they think you’re a bit needy. Then there’s Fi, from Wanaka in New Zealand. Fi is funny, gutsy and cool, plays a mean guitar and is a whiz on the whisky. Alex, our final housemate, hadn’t arrived yet, so we all proceeded to bag the best rooms and spent a large amount of time laughing wildly and pointing out the castle to one another. “Look” someone would exclaim at least once every five minutes “at the castle! It’s right there!”. A collective, smug sigh would ensue, before someone else would point joyously in the other direction. “And there’s the SEA!”.

Between then and now all has been brilliantly, weirdly heady. I had the worst dress rehearsal ever, followed by two preview shows (one of which was awful and the other alright). Yesterday I felt like I finally, tentatively began to relax. “Oh, yeah!” my brain mumbled. “I think I might like this.” I have spent such a long time planning and worrying about it, and had somehow forgotten all about the good bit.

I have been wondering recently whether I might be better off just performing my songs. I feel comfortable on stage when I am just being myself, singing songs I’ve written and chatting away to the audience in between. I have played those songs so many times, even the new ones. I know the format of gigs so well that I am rarely fazed by them any more. But this is my first solo show. It is barely out of the packaging: shiny and not worn in. But quietly yesterday I began to feel like I knew it, and today I suddenly breathed and felt comfortable, to my enormous, unending relief.

Today and yesterday I have had good, biggish audiences. Yesterday I performed some songs and cello at C Nova, and tomorrow I am doing a spot on Pick of the Fringe at the Pleasance. I am going to begin doing my proper music slots next week. And I have had a review! Which is very nice and lovely, and was from the preview that nearly sent me under, so I feel heartened. Montse went home today, but she set me up and held my hand, giving me notes and support and being generally on my team in a massive way.

Now I can hear my housemates stirring and I want to go and hang out with them and laugh too loudly at their jokes. We haven’t quite been doing the all-out Fringe party, although there has been some carousing, drinking and seeing shows at midnight (we all went to Tomás’s show, which is insane and hilarious). Now we have been here for nearly a week and it’s starting to not feel weird and scary, it’s starting to feel like that thing that I do everyday. What luck! I can do this every day. I would prefer to do it without a spot on my face, but you can’t win them all.

I think maybe it’s all going to be fine.

Available link for download

Edinburgh Eve 2013

Tomorrow morning we go to the Edinburgh Fringe. Two days of technical and dress rehearsals before starting the run of Bright Lights on Wednesday. This time next week I will be five shows in. It feels unreal, and I am pinging nauseatingly between heady excitement and abject fear. The weather is obliging me with a bit of heartfelt pathetic fallacy, hurtling between searing sunshine and intense downpours.

I have been meticulously labelling all my stuff, scrawling my telephone number over everything. Its weird, doing a show alone. The buck stops with me. Somethings lost? My fault. Words forgotten? My fault. Accidentally chewed off own arm out of sheer terror? Definitely my fault.

Now I sit, surrounded by small bits of tape, doing the annual writing and losing of lists. I keep suddenly worrying that I have forgotten all my lines and having to announce them to the empty flat. Ben and Dan are downstairs in the theatre space rehearsing for their two shows, every so often one of them appears to make some tea or a terrible pun.

Bright Lights is a show based on this blog, in an indirect kind of way. All those years of being a terrible temp, squirreled away behind a reception desk writing earnest blog posts about my CAREER and how I just wanted to SING, they have all gone into this show. Its a show about risk and taking chances. Its a show about failure.

Have you seen my trailer yet? I have been smearing it obsessively across social media sites so youre probably bored of it. However, we all have to be relentless self-marketers, as smug arts websites do not tire of reminding us, so here it is again:



This last month has been Egg-shaped. We trotted off to Latitude, DUCKIE and the Southbank, writing and rehearsing furiously in between. It was all fueled by a heady mix of in-jokes and too many bottles of white wine. Lowri was back from Brazil, Lydia hadnt yet moved to London, Roxy hadnt started her new job, Sara was being her usual excellent self and I was in a highly-strung pre-Edinburgh state. It was brilliant. Now we have a small hiatus before a massively exciting Top Secret Event on December 20th (you are invited, so pencil it in). It was delicious to have a run of excitement with those crazy Eggs Collective lads before we all change gears for a while.

DUCKIE

We performed at DUCKIE on the Friday and Saturday nights, stalking about from 9pm until 3am sporting glittery green dresses, beehive wigs and haughty expressions. We had flirted, snubbed and generally click-clacked our way into a really good time. We were the Ginas with that Queen of Cabaret, Amy Lamé. (Look here to get a feel for the night, including the glitter canons at the end of our performance.)

On the Sunday afternoon at about 3pm we were skulking about on the baked backstreets of Camden.

“What was your favourite bit, then?”

I turned to Lydia, who was walking behind me and gazing dreamily into the sunshine like someone who has just realized her major crush on the world is reciprocated. She had clearly been considering the question for a while.

“All of it” I said. “What was yours?”

She sighed.

“Well. There was this moment, after we had taken off our heels and put on our trainers. We flung ourselves onto the dance floor to scrape up the remains of the night. I joined in with some people who were singing along to ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’ in a circle with their arms around each other. Then more people joined in. Then more. People were breaking the circle to get in and be part of it. It was top.”

We continued walking.

“Yeah” I said. “They were that kind of nights. I’ve got two best bits. The first is when we stormed the Drakes photo shoot and had a stand-off. It was like West Side Story but with more sexual tension. The second is being on stage staring fiercely at eight hundred cheering people, and feeling like joy might just whisk me away.”

We loved Sally, the woman who made and fitted our wigs. She had sharp, fizzy blue eyes and a sharp, fizzy wit, dispensing wry advice and jokes through a mouth full of kirby grips as she squinted at and straightened our beehives.

The Figs in Wigs leapt on the bar every hour for a stony-faced dance routine, and they served the drinks the rest of the time. After we had performed, at about two thirty in the morning, we all put on our trainers and went back down to the club. I was leaning on the bar chatting to a Fig, when Get Lucky came on. It felt like the joy coursed up through my Converse and made me leap and laugh and dance until I thought my legs would fall off.

Two nights of magic. Well over a thousand people. Roxy said her favourite part of the night was watching the four of us warm up. After the madness of getting down to London and getting into costume, swearing at fake eyelashes as they stick to everything but our eyelids, make up, line-runs and prop panics, the warm up is just the four of us, focused on each other. Roxy loves that bit, probably because it means nobodys escaped for a cigarette/glass of wine/wee.

DUCKIE is always a glorious night. This time, though, in Camden Town Hall, both nights were epic and joyous. Two nights to end all nights, or begin all nights. Two nights of feeling like you’re on the brink of the universe.

FILTH at Southbank

I want to get a T-shirt made that reads I Sang The Thong Song At The Southbank". Or maybe "I Threw Up In The Purcell Rooms".

I asked Sara what her favourite bit was.

"Sometimes youre in a little still moment, and you catch yourself. I was sitting on a piano stool backstage, dressed from head to toe in Primark, waiting to take a mouthful of fake sick and go on. I could see the back of Dickie Beaus head as he watched another act on the little fuzzy TV screen. You and Scottee were joking about something on another sofa. And I just thought: this is amazing."

(I included that one because it involves me having a joke with someone really cool. But you knew that.)

Roxys favourite bit was rushing into the kitchen of a Fashionable Restaurant and demanding some free chips. "Its for a show!" she sang, and stared at them for a long time. Eventually a nice chef was disconcerted enough to give her some chips ("I hope the head chef doesnt find out about this") in a small china ramekin. Thanking them, Roxy darted off back down the Southbank, where she begged a "really nice and clean-looking" woman for her recently-emptied aluminium takeaway tray. Abandoning the ramekin, she came back with our essential prop.

Sara re-arranged the chips in the tray and then tentatively sniffed at her hands.

"Oh" she said, disconsolately. "Now my fingers smell like someone elses tuna."

After our performance we all changed into our gold sequin dresses and danced happily into the crowd, who were all lurching excellently like teenagers. Bags had been stacked in piles on the floor as people freed their hands to point at each other and do actions to lyrics.

My sister, Sophie, surveyed us all, thoughtfully. "Ah HA! Ive rumbled you!" she said, triumphantly. "This Eggs Collective Ladies Night thing isnt an act at all. Its just your actual personalities!"

The next morning we woke up deep in the wilds of Bermondsey, in our friend Amys flat. Lowri and I were top-and-tailing on a mattress, and Lydia and Roxy had shared the bed.

Sara pointed at the blue sky from her tangled sleeping bag on the sofa.

"Look! This is LIFE!"

We then all went to the Mango Landin in Brixton, where we sat in the sun, and dreamily drank Sangria until our faces melted.

LATITUDE

I asked Ben (not my Ben) what his Latitude highlight was and he considered carefully.

"The thing about Latitude is" he said, after a moments silence. "They really know how to light a tree."

By the time I got there at about 11pm on Friday night everyone was in full festival mode. The two Bens came to meet me from my shuttle bus, where I said goodbye to my new best friends in the whole world (whose names I cannot now remember) and was ushered to our camping arena.

"What" said not-my-Ben, sweeping his arm lavishly around the array of vodka, red wine, white wine, cider, beer, rum, rosé wine and gin, "would you like to drink?"

"Um, can I have all of it?" I said, in the enfeebled voice of a woman who has been on public transport for eight hours in the baking heat (after a full day at work).

"Yes!" he declared, and began concocting me a veritable Georges Marvellous Medicine in a small, plastic bottle.

We went off and found everyone else, and the fun began (for me. It had begun for them at about 3pm the previous day.)

At 10 oclock the following morning we were in the rehearsal tent, eating bacon sandwiches like they might save our lives.

Lydia, whose To Pack list for the festival had been:

1. Wolf leotard
2. Party shorts
3. Rock On! jacket
4. Tent (optional)

was smoking endless rollies. "This is my favourite bit" she said, thoughtfully. "Wait, why does it say soya on my coffee cup? I cant drink out of this, what if someone sees?"

My favourite bits were crawling in the dusty mud at the end of our first performance, rolling onto peoples laps. Its always the best bit because, even if the rest of the set hasnt gone brilliantly, when you tell someone sincerely that you love them they will say it back to you, and it really feels like they mean it. Dusty-kneed and sticky-faced, we clambered over Latitude. I hugged one woman and she said "I read your blog!", which was amazing.

Hi, woman!

Our sets at Latitude were peculiar, because we had written material for people in full party mode, and it was four in the afternoon. We did our very best, lunging and leaping in our gold sparkles, but in retrospect I think we all agreed that we are late night ladies, really.

(A man stole my phone charger from our dressing room, as well. I am still glowering darkly about that.)

The amazing thing about Latitude was spending time with brilliant people. We lazed and dazed, swilling glorious things in the sunshine and regressing to childhood by doing running races around tents and buying small Spiderman badges for everyone. Ben (my-Ben) and I slept in a tent with two others, sizzling like sausages in the early morning heat. I loved seeing everyone crawling malodorously from their tents, blinking like newborn (and slightly hungover) kittens. The sad part was that Lowri had already gone back to Brazil, so we were one level of brilliance down.

On Saturday night we all danced until we fell over and got dust in our eyes.

"I love you!" I said to everyone. I stand by it. I bloody love that lot.

On Sunday night my brain switched to anxiety mode. A neon sign in my mind hummed and buzzed, blinking on and off in an ominously demanding manner. Edinburgh. EDINBURGH.

I went to bed before everyone else, feeling sucked down into nerves and apprehension.

I waved everyone off on Monday as they got in the minibus back to Manchester and I set off for London to work with my director Montse. She is coming up to Edinburgh with me for the first few days, so I am not totally alone. (Ben and Dan are up there, too, but they have two of their own shows to grapple with.)

Now I sit, surrounded by boxes, bits of tape and pieces of paper saying:

Vitamins
Microphone
Shoes

and I am feeling the nerves seep in. Tomorrow morning we leave to join a million other performers who are baring their souls for a month.

It is terrifying and brilliant.

I am dreading it and I cannot wait.

Available link for download

Edinburgh Part One

The day before we went to Edinburgh I nearly suffocated in lists. Our flat was littered with small, desperate scraps of paper with scrawled To Do haikus on them.

Loop pedal (and lead)
Black dresses (one, two and three)
Ibuprofen (lots)

On the morning we left Ben made egg mayonnaise sandwiches for five people, while I checked corners for lurking fruit that might be ready to go dramatically mouldy as soon as the front door slammed shut. As usual I did not check my lists, considering a thoughtful frown in the vague direction of my luggage sufficient insurance against forgotten things.

Once at the train station we met Dan and stood amongst our metropolis of luggage. A cello, a speaker, a guitar, a loop pedal, a midi keyboard, computers, a snake nest of leads, a keyboard stand, a wooden board and two weeks worth of clothes and shoes. I may have been responsible for slightly more of the last two things than Dan and Ben, but luckily for me Sophie and Lowri soon arrived to even up the scores.

Having wrestled our suitcase city onto the train, we excitedly all ate our sandwiches way before lunchtime, gazed out of windows for goat-spotting and made jokes about what we were going to do next year instead of saving for six months to go and rinse our money trying to get people to validate us. "2013: Costa del Sol!" I remarked, hilariously, privately deciding to make it an in-joke for the rest of the trip.

Finally, after quite a number of "are we in Scotland yet?"s and "have you brought your passport?"s, some whole carriage conversations and sudden realizations that one of us had forgotten something vital, we pulled into Edinburgh Waverley.

Two taxis later and we arrived at the accommodation wed booked months previously. Loud music screeched from the battered, pebble-dashed flats. "Dont you just love the summer holidays?" one of us muttered in response to some howls that echoed from an upstairs open window. We sat on a wall and waited for the estate agent to come and let us in, everyone trying their best not to look like a snob and consider the over-a-thousand-pounds we had paid for a two week stay in this place where brown water was seeping down the walls and the hallway seemed dark and foreboding through smudged glass.

Eventually the agent loped into sight. He was tall, with a bald head and an expression of amused distaste. He gamely picked up a suitcase and lead us through the damp concrete hallway to our flat on the fourth floor.

I was heaving my cello onto the second set of stairs when I heard Lowri and Sophie being shown into the flat.

"Oh!"

It was an "Oh!" that could have been "Oh! An en suite!" or "Oh! A balcony!" or "Oh! A hot tub with a built in Champagne dispenser!".

I made my way up the next two flights to discover that, in fact, it was an "Oh! What is that smell that has just hit me round the face like a three-week old haddock?"(which you will certainly agree is a significantly inferior "oh!").

The flat smelled impressively bad. Like, horrifying, kneecap-tinglingly, retina-searingly awful. Later we decided that it smelled as though a dog, or possibly some dogs, had urinated copiously, then died and not been discovered for a few weeks. I do like to employ poetic licence sometimes (read: flagrantly exaggerate) but I promise I am not in this case.

The estate agent tried to tell us he would have it cleaned but we all went into simultaneous lawyer-mode (as learned from Ally McBeal circa 1998) and determinedly lugged all our stuff back down the stairs and demanded alternative accommodation.

After a short phone call ("yeah, no, it is really bad actually") he announced that he had an alternative for us. Taxis were called, luggage heaved once more and he said hed meet us there.

Again, Sophie and Lowri went in first. "Oh!" I heard one of them say. "A balcony!" I waited hopefully for the hot tub/Champagne dispenser to be discovered, but when it didnt happen I didnt really mind. It didnt smell like a canine mortuary, and for that I was immensely grateful.

It was a much nicer, infinitely nicer, stupidly nicer flat. It was further from town, overlooking the shore, but it meant our balcony had a sea-view, so we could watch ships do disappearing tricks and try and pretend we were on a proper holiday. ("Costa del Sol!" I said, to gales of disapproving silence.) We chose not to focus on the fact that the estate agent was clearly going to charge us loads of money for a dump when they had perfectly lovely flats available, and settled in.

That night we unpacked, drank wine and got excited, nervous about the following day, when Sophie, Lowri and I would start our show on the top of our bus.

Available link for download

Edinburgh Eve

Ive never been the sort of person to lie awake in the early morning, hours of delicious sleep ahead of me, and think, no, its no use, Ill get up and be useful to the world and myself. I always manage to frogmarch myself back to unconsciousness, fall back to sleep by sheer force of will.

This morning, though, nothing was happening. I tried sternly lecturing myself about the inevitability of tired crossness, showing myself mental images of uncalled-for shouting and bursting gracelessly into tears over dropped things, but to no avail.

Its no use, I thought. Ill get up.

Partly the problem was that Ben hadnt come home all night. He had been out on a pre-Edinburgh poetry rampage, fueled by coffee, deadlines and being "on a writing roll". He was burning the word-candle at both ends and I couldnt sleep.

So I got up at about six, and stared forlornly down the barrel of a day that would require actual mental facility. Oh dear, I thought. I hope nobody asks me to do any sums.

Tomorrow we go to Edinburgh.

Yesterday evening Sophie, Lowri and I sat outside my front door in the last shards of sunlight and began to embark on the serious business of Getting Really Excited About It All and working out which shoes to take. Ive been rehearsing for the last week, practicing getting the loop pedal-wielding accurate and trying to work out what it would be like to perform to a small audience on the top of a bus every day for ten days. My extract of the show is set in an office, and is loosely-based on a blog post I wrote back in 2008. In fact, its loosely-based on this blog from about 2005-2009. Not all of it, thank God. I dont think even Edinburgh audiences could cope with that much daydreaming about ponies and Charmed.

In an office, as most of you will know unless you happen to live on a beach, carousing in the sand every day and surviving on seafood and smugness, there are desks. The central feature of my office in my piece is a desk. This morning I discovered that the stairs are too, well, too bus-like to fit a table up, so I must trudge to Argos and find a smallish, foldable one. This, along with my cello, loop pedal, a speaker, props and costume, a stupid amount of clothes and an irrepressible number of pairs of boots, I must take to Edinburgh with me on the train tomorrow morning.

We are all getting the same train: Sophie, Lowri, Dan, Ben and I. Clutching only our dreams, way too many clothes, musical instruments, a small table (me) and a tea trolley (Lowri), we will whoosh up, noses pressed to the windows. I am sort of terrified. What if it all goes wrong? What if my bit of the show is awful and everybody laughs at me in a bad way then makes me go and sit in Glasgow for the rest of the festival? What if I run out of money because I have spent it all on stupid small tables?

But I am more excited than terrified, really.

The only problem now is that I have to pack sensibly on hardly any sleep. My brain is currently dancing around some trees somewhere singing out of season Christmas carols, and so cannot be trusted. I would not be at all surprised if I arrived in Edinburgh to find that all I had packed was a small, foldable table and a single boot.


If you are at Edinburgh this year, come along:

Wrong Place, Right Time (me, Lowri and Sophie)
Upstairs on the Comedy Bus
Three Sisters
1.45pm, 2-12th August

Geddes Loom (band busking set)
4,5,6 August, Mercat Stage on Royal Mile at 12pm
13,15,16 August, Mercat Stage on Royal Mile at 6pm

Anthropoetry (Ben and Dan)
Fingers Piano Bar
7.50pm, 4-16th August

Available link for download

Edinburgh Part Two

(Do you want to read Part One first?) (You dont have to.)

The first day of our show was hectic. Sophie had left all her knickers in Manchester, and our flyers hadnt been delivered to the venue. We rushed up and down the bending streets of Edinburgh, our thighs getting a taster of what they would be put through over the weeks to follow. It was the Thursday before the official starting weekend of the festival, so flyerers were comparatively thin on the ground: only a smattering of teenagers in their pants promoting their re-working of Henry V in a 1920s New York cabaret club featuring the songs of Buddy Holly (or whatever).

We arrived at our venue, the 3 Sisters, and went at once to inspect our performance space. The bus squatted in the corner of the courtyard, half-painted and looking unmistakably bus-like. We had been wondering how they would have transformed it to make it into a performance space, and when we got to the top deck we realized that it really was just a bus. A bus with lights and a small P.A. system, yes, but pretty much just a bus. It only occurred to me a while later, when chatting with a comic who was also performing on the bus (a nice guy, about 6ft tall) that it was lucky none of the three if us were particularly tall.

That first day Sophie had an incident involving lack of knickers, a wrap dress and an enthusiastic dog. And we couldnt flyer, due to lack of flyers.

Right, we thought, thats kind of OK (the flyer thing, rather than the dog thing). We could probably do with a day without an audience anyway, seeing as how we had been too rushed to really put it together before we left Manchester. In fact, we told each other, its a good thing! We can have a dress rehearsal in the venue well actually be performing in! What luxury!

Lowri and I were in the bus about ten minutes before we were due to start, when Sophie came upstairs, pale-faced. We had audience members, she told us. Not only that, but three of our audience were reviewers.

Oh God.

Ten minutes later we began, and about an hour later we finished, relieved that we had not died or had aneurysms or anything. The reviewers went off to judge us, and we decided to inspect the offerings of the bar.

Soon we sat clutching pints. I was calling the print company to chase up our flyers and posters. The man I spoke to did not help my mood, calling me love and darling more times than was necessary (which is exactly no times, in my book). In the many, many conversations that followed he even had the temerity to tell me not to "get in a flap about it".

(I would like it noted that I did not immediately commandeer the nearest vehicle, go to Glasgow and kill him totally dead. The self-control that required should impress you greatly.)

It took another three days for our flyers to arrive (the posters are still a total mystery). We still needed to promote the show, though, so Lowri whipped up some excellent stand-ins:



For our first few days in Edinburgh we rushed over cobbles, performing over and over, meeting people, celebrating birthdays, seeing shows, doing band busking slots on the Royal Mile in the baking sun then in the whipping rain (top tip: an umbrella is not big enough to cover a cello), went to see a terrible, awful musical ("did someone write this as a dare?"), went to the opening night of Ben and Dans show, Anthropoetry. We encountered some extremely posh and even more extremely drunk people ("what does your father think of what you do? Is he disappointed in you?"), waited for night buses before giving up and hailing taxis, trudging up and down hills and handing out our ersatz flyers to whomever would take them.

Time scuttled sneakily by.

We were reviewed, which was really weird. Seeing yourself in print being critiqued by a stranger to whom you cant respond, it is peculiar. Anyway, I wont put the reviews on here, but if you want to see some of the nicer things that were said about me, I have put a page on my real site for them. This is a cunning way of being a narcissist whilst pretending not to be. How sly I am, you hadnt even noticed, had you? (No.)

The weather suddenly went hot. The sun tripped off the cobbles and hangovers, and the top deck of the bus became a dramatically sweaty place to be in the middle of the afternoon. People still came, though, and bravely watched the show, gently steaming and fanning themselves listlessly with our newly-turned-up flyers. We had some good shows, some great moments. One day the queue was snaking out of the bus, and we jammed as many people on as we could before sadly having to turn the rest away. It was bizarre, telling a story in the middle of the top deck of a bus. If you did that on a bus in South Manchester you would get pelleted with rolled up bus tickets (or worse), and quite rightly.

Some shows werent so great, of course. In one I forgot the end to my story. I just, kind of, didnt say it. I only realized halfway through Lowris piece, and by then it would have been churlish to leap in with a punch line. We had some walk outs. Some bored stares. One man answered his phone during the show, which you just cannot hide on the top deck of a bus.

But we had as many laughs, as many thanks and warm reactions and one guy even came back a second time. We got better as we went along, it got easier to ask people to donate, and my looping got smoother.

About halfway through Lowri, Sophie and my ten day run Ben managed to score the band (Geddes Loom, with me, Ben and Dan) a gig (can I get away with using the phrase "score us a gig"?). Wed decided that busking was a bit crap, as we risked totally ruining all our equipment every time we played at the mercy of the weather. The venue was called the Tron Church, at the bottom of the Royal Mile.

We did the gig, and they liked it so much that we performed there everyday until we left Edinburgh eleven days later.

Ive got more to tell you about all those gigs, but not in this post. It is long enough already and I suspect that Ben might be about to give me some food, so I am going to go and look hungry at him for a bit.

Available link for download

Edinburgh Part Three Sort Of

I definitely had more to tell you about Edinburgh. I wanted to talk about how gloriously hot it was, how many incredible things I saw, and how one day we were delayed starting our show because someone had thrown up all over the bus during the previous nights sticky, wailing karaoke.

I wanted to tell you about the daily gigs we ended up doing, and how weird it was to be filmed by so many camera phones, and how the guy who booked us, Jim, cried on our last day. I wanted to mention the group of wealthy, middle-aged Scots who grasped my hand after a gig and said "you should go on television! Television! Have you thought about television?" before very kindly informing me that all I needed was "one big break" and to be "seen by the right people". They were desperately well-intentioned. My Dad said after that I should have gone back with a notebook and pen and said "right, say that again. X-what?".

Mostly I wanted to write about the single worst and most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me on stage.

We were doing our very last Geddes Loom gig in the Tron Church, which was the venue we had performed in daily. It had been going stormingly. There was a lovely, hearty Saturday crowd and I was wearing the blue top that makes me feel OK, a short black skirt and flip flops. It was our second to last number, a song called February Town, which is upbeat to the point of being bouncy (it definitely doesnt, despite what Ben claims, sound anything like Hansons smash hit MMMBop).

"Rain splashes down
On this February Town..."

I sung, feeling all chipper, looking out over the audience of three hundred-ish people and thinking oh, this is good! Everything is A-OK! Well done, life!

Suddenly, with absolutely no prior warning, I felt an ominous something seeping down the back of my leg.

(NOTE: if you are squeamish, and dont like blood or the idea of it or the concept of periods and them dramatically arriving in the middle of gigs when people are wearing short skirts and bare legs, please grow up and stop being such a baby. PERIODS HAPPEN. Deal with it, idiot.)

I clamped my hand to the back of my skirt and crossed my legs, trying desperately to mop up the ghastly river that was snaking its way to my ankles. I had been moving about before (not dancing, not really. I am not, contrary to popular belief, Beyoncé) but now I stood stock-still, rooted to the spot by the entrance of Womanhood, who had flung herself through the door like an ageing cabaret star, all theatricality and scarlet fury.

Frozen, one hand clutching the microphone and the other pressing my small skirt to the back of my squeezed-together legs, I carried on singing.

Just keep going! I thought. SMILE. DANCE WITH YOUR EYES!

The song went on for hours. I smiled and sung, willing them to look at my face, please, look at my face! Look at my smiling, terrified face! The song trickled on. I also trickled. Oh, God. Please let this end. I will believe in you if you just make this stop.

"...and Im only one girl
Feeling down down down down down!"

Eventually, after approximately eight weeks of anguished jollity the song finished.

I didnt move a muscle. My smile clung, limpet-like, to my face.

The audience applauded, and I scanned their faces for looks of menstruation-proximity-related horror. Nothing.

"Thank you! Thanks!" I said through my teeth."Um, Ben! Can you come here for a second? Please?"

He walked over and leaned in. I pushed his microphone away and hissed in his ear.

"MyperiodsjuststartedandImbleedingalldownmylegshelphelphelp!"

He looked at me for half a second then sauntered to the front of the stage.

"Right, ladies and gentlemen, before our last song Im going to do a poem!"

I put my mic on the stand and sidled off stage, trying not to turn my back on any of the audience. The venue had no toilet, so I had to run, pulling my skirt down furiously, into the nearest public toilets. Shaking and tearful I grabbed an acre of tissues "sorted myself out" and legged it back to the stage in time to hear Ben do the last twenty seconds of his poem.

"Now, for our last song! Weve been Geddes Loom..."

I had a pint after the gig.

When I got home I invested in a hundred floor-length dresses to wear in all future performances, and nappies to go underneath, you know, just in case.

I have got loads more to tell. I am doing a show soon, all on my own. Whenever I tell people they seem to say "on your own?" and then suck air in through their teeth. Who knows why. Anyway, Im going to write a post for Contact Theatres blog about it soon, so I will link to it here.

Basically I am of the opinion that if I dont actually have any bodily functions on stage (apart from breathing, obviously, and perhaps a light glow of elegant sweat) I will probably be OK.

Although if it happens next time I have decided to own up to it and call it performance art.

Available link for download

EDINBURGH R GO

Yesterday we were on the motorway, heading North in a hire van made of sellotape and hope. The skies widened and the horizons suddenly got all massive. As the road stretched out ahead all the signs started to say things like “Carlisle, Penrith, SCOTLAND.”

It’s that time of year: all roads lead to Edinburgh.

On Sunday night I lay in the bath, gin and tonic in hand, studying my feet.

Sorry, feet, I thought. Look at you, all innocent, blissfully unaware that over the next month I will force you to do the famous all-weather fringe trudge as I flyer for, and then perform, two shows a day. Enjoy the warm water and elevation while you can, feet. You’re going to be working like two small nail varnished dogs. Mostly in the flip-flops of optimism.

**********************

On Saturday morning I was in Hackney, drinking a coffee and being desperately trendy. My sister Sophie lives in a converted boxing gym in Homerton, and underneath is a warehouse space that someone has just made into a café: all mismatched furniture, perfect flat whites and lightbulbs where you can see the filaments. Sophie, Ben and I were sitting reading our books and eating croissants with things in. Oh, this is lovely, I thought. Like a little holiday.

I was sort of desperately relieved. The night before Id performed my new solo show, Dirty Old River, at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green and it had gone kind of pretty well. Not perfect. I definitely couldve done it better if I had thought to not sweat so much my fingers slid all over the cello.

Just before the show I was sitting in my dressing room (a boardroom with a mirror and a used flip chart in the corner).

I felt the familiar stabbing, low nerves.

Oh God. I don’t think I can do this. I can’t remember loads of it and the bits I do remember are shit.

I started pawing at my chair.

Is there an eject button on this thing?

In the name of distraction, I began leafing through the flip chart. TEAMWORK, someone had written on one of the pages of the flip chart. There were some dots around it, where someone had emphatically stabbed at the paper, no doubt making some excellently-crafted point whilst ruining a perfectly good board marker.

I miss my teams, I thought.

Of course, I got over the nerves, and loved doing Dirty Old River. People seemed to enjoy it right back. I got this excellent feedback:


as well as becoming InStyle Magazine’s latest girl crush. (Hurray! I am definitely going to make myself a badge.) (Im not even joking. This may be the best thing thats ever happened to me.)


In Edinburgh, though, I’m with my teams.

Eggs Collective: Eggs Collective Get A Round

For five weeks we snuck into our lives and our friendships and picked at the difficult, brilliant bits. We chucked it all in, threw all of our petty triumphs and grand disappointments into the mix, messed about with it all, drank some wine and came out with a show. We worked with a man called Mark, who Really Got It, and who we quickly realized we could be totally ourselves with. (Often in a borderline inappropriate, but totally excellent way.)

One week we stayed in London in a tiny flat, every night watching Made In Chelsea and eating enormous jacket potatoes, or sitting in bars drinking red wine, resolutely ignoring the football. Or watching plays. We were working during the day at Camden People’s Theatre, a mere stone’s throw from the very last place I temped in London before I moved to Manchester five years ago.

(My twenty seven year old self would be pretty pleased with my thirty-two year old self, I thought. (She might tell her to stop whingeing about how tired she is, but apart from that she’d probably approve.) (Actually I think she mightve thought shed be wearing better clothes by now, and maybe have some kind of fashionable haircut.))

We did the final show at Royal Exchange in Manchester, which was the best thing ever because they have fridges in the dressing rooms, which we obviously immediately filled to the brim with post-show Prosecco (it was on offer). Just before the show started, Lowri and I waited behind the pillars, ready to go on. We both pressed our cheeks against the stone and stared at each other, wide-eyed in the half dark, listening to the audience take their seats. The first notes of the opening song oozed in, and the dry ice began to froth, ready for Sara’s entrance.

By contrast, at Latitude, we three stood outside the back of the Live Art Tent, sheened with sweat and Elnett. When those first bars played, we crawled through a little opening in the canvas, through the mud and onto the stage.

In Edinburgh we are performing at midnight every day, in a tiny free fringe venue called The Counting House Attic. If you come along we will feed you wine and love (be warned: you might ingest some Impulse bodyspray, but all in the name of art).

Geddes Loom: Prelude To A Number

When our friend Liz came to see a run though of Prelude To A Number, having seen Eggs Collective Get A Round the previous week, the first thing she said to me was “wow, you’re going to have a split personality in Edinburgh”. She’s not wrong, and I don’t just mean my terrifying mood swings.

After doing a run of the show back in early March we all stepped back from it and went, mmmm, like mechanics, but with fewer practical life skills. Something wasn’t right. Something was rattling weirdly. There wasn’t enough oil in the… Hang on, no, wait. I don’t know enough about cars to take this analogy any further.

Anyway. We didn’t have enough music in it. It felt all a bit too serious, somehow. Not enough ‘us’. Not enough of us as a band who play music together because we all like playing music and not enough of us as people who make jokes together because we like making jokes.

So, having been asked to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe by Northern Stage, we took it all apart and looked at the bits, deciding what should stay and what should go. I got a bit carried away with that bit, merrily lobbing the as many babies out as I could find in the bathwater. Let’s just do it all again! Let’s change all of it! Hurray for ruthlessness! See ya later, Ruth!

Luckily I was reined in, and now, even though we have lots of new bits (including loads more songs) we have a show that we really like, and that is a lot more ‘us’. It’s lovely to perform, I love telling the stories and playing the music, and being on stage with Ben and Dan.

We’re on at 14.50 everyday (not Sundays) at Kingshall (Northern Stage). If you come we will feed you music and love (be warned: you might ingest some maths, but all in the name of art).

**********************

Weve arrived now. Were sitting in the Kings Hall as a team of Northern Stage champions whizz our set into the venue, and Dan does a series of complicated things with wires. My cello is set up, people are making endless notes to make sure that we can hop in and out of the space every day like pros. Eggs Collective arrive at the end of the week with suitcases packed to bursting with Blossom Hill and dreams.

I am excited! But a bit tired! I have already seen two people that I recognise but dont know well enough to talk to! I have been rained on!

EDINBURGH R GO!

Available link for download