Hello! I’ve been Not Updating my blog lately, as I’ve reached the limit of my plan data wise, and have been weighing up whether to move to a new blogging platform or not. It’s a tricky decision, as on the one hand I’m very annoyed with WordPress for their brazen and very stupid embrace of AI, but on the other hand I am very lazy, a lot of my stuff is here, and most everyone else seems to be embracing AI too.
It’s a shit reason, but I don’t want to spend absolutely ages archiving, moving, and rearranging my blog [1] on a new platform, only to learn they also love stealing people’s writing to profit some of the worst people in the world.
The last week has involved me being in bed, ill, a great deal, as I seem to be battling a series of colds and flus. This means I haven’t been out as much as I’d like, and the walls have been closing in somewhat, which is particularly a problem when you live in a small flat. As soon as I’m better, I am going to unleash myself on the polite and friendly people who work on my nearby coffee shops.
Interspersed with being ill, I have been doing gigs – two with The Highchurches, and one with my beautiful sketch lads, Next Level Sketch.
Let me write about The Highchurches first.
While deleting a few old files to have space to write this new blog post, I found a few recordings I shared, including a demo of Doris Wu from back in June of our lord Jesus the two thousand and twenty three.
When I wrote it, I’d have no idea that two years on the song would a) have fans and b) be played by a four piece band called The Highchurches, featuring me and three lovely friends who have joined the band gradually, and almost cinematically, via a series of This Machine Kills Wasps gigs at The Folklore Rooms.
We played it on Thursday at Totally Acoustic, and then again on Saturday, back at Wasps, and the sound sounded tight. We sounded tight. We sounded tight. I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some stage we’ve turned into an interesting, confident, and very wonderful live band.
Next year, we’ll record some tunes, properly, and release them into the world.
Let’s start with Totally Acoustic. It was our debut London gig, after Mr MJ Hibbett very kindly asked us on to support him and Chris Thorpe-Tracey, who are still working on their album of piano-led tunes together, as debuted at my own Wasps show in August.
I’ve been going to Totally Acoustic for many years, and Chris and Mark are two of my favourite singer-songwriters ever, so it was a proper honour to be asked to perform. Also, by doing a gig in London, it meant some of my London friends who had never seen the band before had the chance to come along and see us without worrying about a train back from the South Coast. And verily did loads of friends both old and new come along, and verily was I happy to see their little [2] faces in the audience.
As the name suggests, Totally Acoustic is a totally acoustic gig, so we didn’t have to worry about sound checking exactly, beyond figuring out where to put Ros, our fiddler and thus Player Of The Loudest Instrument. An added issue was upstairs at The King and Queen – location of the first Dylan gig in the UK, no less – is an L-shaped venue, so one has to “perform” in two distinct directions.
It wasn’t quite the issue faced by Rod Stewart performing in the round at Wembley stadium in 1995 (a reference I made several times to my bandmates, who quite rightly ignored me), but we did need to think about where we should all stand.
In the end, Elle, with her acoustic bass, was closest to the biggest mass of audience, and that felt like it made sense, as hers is the quietest instrument. Then came Martha, with her emotional support music stand with chords and lyrics, which Elle was also able to glimpse at. Then it was me, with Ros to my right.
Elle had printed SETLISTS for the show, as Mark had offered us a half hour set and thus we were going to play more songs in a row than we’d ever done before – pretty much all the ones we know as a band so far, in terms of our own recordings. Having a setlist with the date and venue printed on it felt VERY PROPER and also SOPHISTICATED.
Of course, I didn’t look at the setlist before we started playing, and so I launched into Hymn for the Ruins, which we’d just rehearsed, instead of Avalon, the actual first song in the set.
Oooops.
This mistake rectified, we got through the set with lots of GRACE and also CHARM and only MILD fucking up (I forgot one of the choruses to Harvest Moon, again).
People seemed to enjoy our songs. There were only a few people in the room who had heard us before – my MUM, Lou, Dan, Denny, and Highchurches ultra Cara MacB, who as always was topless and had various unrepeatable pro-Highchurch slogans painted across their chest.
For the rest, the applause and cheering, as opposed to the booing and the throwing of rotten vegetables, was a reassuring indication that we were doing ok.
Because of the lack of room, Ros was facing back towards me for much of the set, and I felt very in touch with her during the songs, even risking some eye contact from time to time (sometimes this leads to one of us giggling).
We’re trying to listen to each other a lot more, as we become more comfortable with the songs, and it’s a lovely feeling, being up there, focusing in on Martha’s harmonies, say, or figuring out how to end a song without it falling apart like a clown car.
The whole evening was a lot of fun, taking in chats with Mr Steve Hewitt about trousers, the aforementioned Mr Dan Smith about work/life balance, and chats with pretty much everyone about DOGS. The band were sat next to a perfect Sussex Springer called Topaz, so that was nice too. For a more in-depth write up of the show, I wholeheartedly direct you to MJ Hibbett’s OWN BLOG.
Two days later, we were back on stage again at The Folklore Rooms, for the final This Machine Kills Wasps of the year.
For this show I’d managed the slightly surreal coup of booking Robin Ince, who seems like a thoroughly lovely man, and a man I mildly worried wouldn’t make the show, given he has spent the past few months fighting some of the very worst trolls both online and in the BBC over his solidarity with trans people.
It looks like he’s gonna take a bit of a break from stand-up, to take stock and write some books, which makes me even more grateful to have booked him. He read some very charming poems, he did the world’s most terrifyingly accurate Stewart Lee impression, he was, in short, a good egg.
It was another sold-out show, with a big bunch of young students who had booked for a birthday without, I suspect, quite realising what it was they had booked for.
One of the whole THINGS of TMKW is to try and get people watching stuff out of their usual comfort zone. It’s one of the reasons I usually start with my weirdest act, and why there’s a jarring shift in tone half way through.
It’s my hope that, say, bluegrass fans go away having found that they also love electro-pop songstresses, or clowns called Mikey Bligh-Snmith, or that comedy fans go away with a new and unexpected appreciation of classic folk.
The drawback to this, sometimes, is that there are a lot of people in the audience who aren’t quite sure what’s going on.
Certainly the energy was low for the first half, partly explained by Leslie Bloom, our host, struggling with a cold and not quite being her usual incredible self.
Baba was supposed to open, but couldn’t make it due to family illness, and suggested Maya Ricote as her replacement. This act, I greatly enjoyed, or what I saw of her, because I was busy at the door dealing with late-comers and attempting to find them seats or perches in the sold-out room.
Next up was Next Level Sketch, whose on-stage seats, I assured these late-comers, would be available for them as soon as our set was done.
We did well, with some of our very best sketches being unleashed, but it was a strange reception. For some of the sketches, I don’t think they quite realised that we weren’t being serious, which seems absurd, especially when we recreated It’s A Wonderful Life with Sir Kier Starmer finding out that had he died, everything would be exactly the same. But we got lots of lovely feedback from the crowd during the break and after the show – I just wish they’d fed back in the more traditional medium of laughing!
I missed about half of Robin’s set, as I was dealing with people trying to get into the venue. Some of these people were drunks, some of these people were trying their luck, and some of these people were just simple geezers. All of them were men. This was frustrasting, as I had been looking forward to seeing him!
He left shortly after the interval, saying we should stay in touch, and also saying he’d enjoyed my band’s tunes during our soundcheck.
By the time the second half started, we were running late, as is traditional, but really very late, which was a worry. All the acts had overran, except (hilariously) my own sketch group, who had stuck almost exactly to the timeslot offered.
I checked with Guy the Sound Guy, who reassured me we had the room til eleven, and so relaxed, but only a bit.
The second half was kicked off with Saoirse Juno, an incredible singer-songwriter I know from folk choir, whose gentle, meandering songs are often suffused in gentle birdsong and ambient noise. She was brilliant as always, but perhaps (my fault!) a bit of a sleepy way to get the second half under way.
When Juno was done, I had, however, an ace up my sleeve – Maf’J, with her brilliant, silly, and weirdly profound Brighton Seagull Song, which everyone joined in with, especially the increasingly unhinged seagull noises between each chorus. Guy got in on the act too, adding ACTUAL seagull noises in the background. They were there before us and they’ll be there when we leave, as the chorus goes…
Our penultimate act was Jo Burke, with her friend Al accompanying on an assortment of instruments. They’d had a proper think about how to do songs off Burke’s impending album with keyboards and cornet, amongst other instruments, thrown into the mix.
Jo Burke is one of the best folk musicians out there, and I was sorry to have to ask her to cut out her between-song chat due to our running late! She performed magnificently nontheless, Colour of Amber my own personal, heartbreaking favourite, and I thoroughly enjoyed being asked to join on shruti box for one tune, eyes closed, trying to take all of the beauty in and remember the moment forever.
Finally, then, came The Highchurches, who were punchy, alert, and sharp after their gig at Totally Acoustic. We had cut new tune Future Dreams from the set to allow Martha time to perform a special birthday song for her dad, and further cut Doggerland and, it turned out, Joy In The Morning, so that we would be able to stick to time.
We sounded absolutely gorgeous, especially on Even Keel and Doris Wu. After Even Keel, I apologised that we didn’t have anything to sell yet, and that 2026 would be the year that we would finally do some recordings.
“Hurry Up!”, shouted someone in the audience. That someone turned out to be Cara, who explained “I meant with the recordings, not with the set”.
Beer and chat and hugs downstairs ended the night, and I went home clutching the world’s largest cone of chips (I’d forgotten to have dinner) and holding a happy song in my heart.
[1] I’m aware a lot of readers of my blog don’t really notice the difference, as they just read stuff via email delivered to their inbox, but I’ve got two platforms for my writing at the moment. There’s this blog, where I write whatever I want in rambling stylee, and have done for many years; and then there’s a slightly more professional newsletter, which I post via substack.
[2] Also medium sized and large faces.
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