Another little musical milestone

A lovely evening at Kings Heath’s Bohemian Jukebox last night represented another small, but satisfying milestone in my evolving solo music efforts. I debuted several songs which I had either written lyrics for (Jobbery, Listen In and Who Knew) or written from scratch (Trip Diary) on my recent trip to Australia, alongside a few older songs and I didnt include a single cover.

This was the first vocal set Ive done of entirely original material and it went very well. Who Knew went down particularly well, prompting calls from the audience wanting to know where they could get a copy from (Im yet to record any of these songs except there is a live version of Sucking Up on my myspace and facebook pages).

The room – the smaller of the two upstairs rooms at the Hare & Hounds is lovely – well suited to this type of gig and the band on before me – the Lazy Lizards were great fun. A nice intriguing blend of instruments, some fine playing and gently wordly/folky sort of spirit matched with some energetic and danceable percussion. I was a little nervous to be following such a lively act, but a song or two into the set and the mood calmed and rerefocussed and the reception from the crowd was really great. An the end, I encored with an unplanned shot at my piano piece Completion which did really well, making me wonder if I should mix up instrumental and vocal tunes more often.

Im rapidly growing in confidence as a performer and enjoying the fact that with the piano parts of the songs being that much less challenging than many of my instrumentals, I can look around more and engage with the audience more directly (rather than having to look down at the keyboard so much of the time).

Ant Ramm cleverly managed to get a recording and the above picture online within minutes of the end of the gig via his phone. The quality of the recording is very low as you’d expect from a phone, but its here to listen to should you be curious.
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