Blog: Legends Of Spring Time

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An amazing site greeted me as I stepped out of Goodge Street last night - sunshine! Actual proper Spring weather for the first time this whole flipping year, it felt like winter had FINALLY buggered off and GOOD TIMES were heading our way!

This feeeling of delight was probably partly to do with the fact that I was on my way to The King & Queen for Totally Acoustic. When I arrived I found TWO more aspects of summer waiting for me. Firstly, there was plenty of space inside the pub - usually it is RAMMED on a Thursday, but this time everyone was outside whooping it up, which made for a much more pleasant environment within. Secondly, terrifyingly, they were serving COCKTAILS! Happily they were doing it in a very King & Queen way i.e. instead of doing them one by one so it would take HOURS for anybody to get served they had made one massive BARREL of Mojito to dip into as required. Very sensible!

I got the tables set up and then very soon my regulars and the ACTS arrived, also quite a lot of audience. In fact so MANY people came (some from AFAR) that at one point there was a QUEUE forming outside to get in!

Everyone got sat down and we kicked off with ME, doing 20 Things To Do Before You're 30, The Girl Who... and, as my tribute to Victoria Wood, The Ballad Of Freda And Barry. It all seemed to go all right - I'd mentioned before starting that there are a LOT of words in 'Freda And Barry', so everyone seemed prepared for me getting some of them wrong!

After that I introduced Patron Saint Of Totally Acoustic Mr Pete Green, although he had to wait to start for a couple of minutes while everyone passed chairs over their heads to get more people sat down, orchestrated by Mr S Hewitt and Mr K Top Of The Pops. Once he was able to get going he was a one-man VARIETY SHOW, doing acapella songs, ukelele numbers, POEMS, and even a couple of wistful indie HITS! He was great, also RELAXING - he knows what he's doing, does Pete, and he played the room EXPERTLY!

Next up were The Popguns, who I must confess I had little prior knowledge of but who impressed THE SOCKS off of me. They were ace - lovely songs BRILLIANTLY done. Actually Being Able To Sing is a bit of a rarity at gigs I go to, so to hear such ACE songs sung so well was a bit of a treat. I enjoyed it so much I bought a CD - no higher recommendation!

And then we finished with The Catenary Wires who I HAVE seen before and, as ever, thought were GRATE. Perhaps it was an ERROR to introduce them with the story of how we used to sing "Shallow" at my friend Mr S Wilkinson approx 300 years ago because it was on a mixtape his GURLFRIEND had given him (it was next to "Enter Sandman", I seem to recall) but they didn't seem to mind and went on to be FAB throughout.

It was, it must be said, one HECK of a night which resulted in a MIGHTY whip round for the acts. We've had a right good run of shows just lately, with all the INDIE LEGENDS we've had on. It looks like the NEXT show might feature ME doing a full set though, so maybe that run is about to end!

posted 6/5/2016 by MJ Hibbett

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