Since I last wrote anything on here, I have done two gigs and maintained the unintentional trend of only gigging in Gloucestershire. Both gigs also happened to be on Fridays. I think this is by coincidence and not another unintentional trend.
The first gig of the year was in Cheltenham, which has quite a few gigs running these days. It was in a coffee shop and was a great room.
When I arrived, the kitchen was doubling up as a green room for acts. And the toilet was right next to the stage area.
Given that I cannot perform a comedy set without first having a poo, I put my years of experience of going to Cheltenham to good use and knew there was a shopping centre nearby that was still open and had toilets. Thus, getting around any awkwardness.
The gig itself was great fun. There were about 30 people in and really up for it. Given that the coffee shop is very small, it was a packed room. I’ve written on here before about when you haven’t gigged for a while, you really feel the adrenaline afterwards. And if it’s a good gig, you feel it even more. This was very much the case here.
The second gig was where I tried out the longest stretch amount of new material in one go, possibly since 2018. That year in particular is relevant here because I returned to the same venue on Friday night that I last performed at in 2018 when I was on a mission to do as many gigs as possible to test out new stuff.
The venue is in a workshop where they make guitars. And I was workshopping new material in there again.
They were a really nice audience, very forgiving if a punchline didn’t quite land as well as I’d hope, or my speech or voice failed me – which happened a couple of times. But after listening back to the record, there’s a lot in those eight new minutes that works nicely already.
I actually started writing a lot of the stuff I tried out in September 2019, but haven’t really had much of an opportunity nor incentive to try it out. But it is one of those subjects where once I start writing it, stuff just seems to flow out of it. This is an encouraging sign, and I am considering taking it up to Edinburgh for a week or two to not only refine, but also give me that incentive to actually write more. I am currently finding this more appealing than dusting off HTWAPQ again. There’s more excitement in something new that may not work. At least before arriving in Edinburgh anyway.