After a good run of my past several gigs, I knew there would be a point when I had a not-so-good gig and Monday night provided it.
In order to get new material road-worthy, you have to be prepared to go through the ordeal of testing it in front of blank stares; and that is largely how my set was received. But going through this does at least give you an idea of how it feels to say perform it, even if it gets little response. And although it’s not the nicest experience, it certainly gives you a jolt to improve the material so you don’t have to go through it again as badly with the same set.
Fortunately, I was given quite a jolt indeed and the next night it was Ruby Tuesdays, the monthly gig I sort of co-run with Langton. He doesn’t all the work and I just turn up and perform, pretending I’m actually doing important things. This is an exact reversal of how we do our shows at festivals.
It was another good one good night; we had decent numbers of audience and all the acts did well.
I had quite a radical rethink about the material that had bombed on Monday, but didn’t actually have any time to write anything down, so I ended up turning in quite a rough-edged set with half-formed ideas that need developing. But it actually all worked pretty well and the pressure of having no option but to improve the material seemed to do the trick, and I think the additional ideas I came up with do have legs. That said, I expect I will have to endure several more nights of blank stares with this material before it is properly Edinburgh-ready.