Day 548
Sunday January 5
Right, let’s get this catchup started. It really has been a case of not too much Diaryable happening for one reason or another, so behind but not behind. Then there was the time taken out to write the epic two year report. Then a bit more of behind, not behind so yeah, will get to writing, but let’s be on other things. Then, oh my, we’re almost six months behind. That will just not do.
So here we are at the beginning of June. Yep, it really is June, and just really getting started with January after spending the first part of all this looking at the previous two years. January begins with yet another gig outing, this time inspired by Frank Turner who we saw in Madrid in November, and who we now have tickets to go see again in February in Wolverhampton. As you may imagine from that, we’ve also listened to him a lot. One of his songs has really resonated with us personally, and within that song, one particular line. It’s the song Showpeople, which celebrates everyone trying to do their thing on stage, no matter how hard or outwardly unrewarding it might seem. Can you do it to an empty room with as much heart and enthusiasm as you would do it to a full one? If you can, that might just make you one of the ‘showpeople.’ It all ends with the line: ‘You’re more likely to be John Otway than the Beatles/ But Otway’s still on tour, hats off to the show people.’
When we saw that John Otway was coming to town, we just had to go and see who he was and deliberately looked nothing up. This was all going to be revealed live from the stage of The Lexington, a venue nestled two thirds up the main road from Kings Cross to Angel. It’s one of those large bar downstairs, venue upstairs places.
Well, yep, he is still very much on tour and you can see that he really has a strong and dedicated fanbase, even if it’s not the biggest in the world. But he’s been around long enough to be able to fill places like this wherever he goes year after year. We only discover tonight that he’s been around since the 70s and has had a few moderate chart successes of the top 30 variety with songs sitting somewhere within a quirky punky poppy vibe with a touch of out and out rock’n’roll outrageousness. Commercial or not, it’s been enough to deliver a hardcore fanbase that has kept on turning out through the years, and here he is tonight, full band behind him, and we’re part of the turnout. And no support act either. Just two full sets of Otway.
While we stand at the front of the stage amusingly bemused and most definitely entertained, everyone around us seems to be treating this as their favourite movie they’re watching for the 20th time, or maybe more. Case in point, his quite brilliant cover version of House Of The Rising Sun with just about everyone in here playing their part, which suddenly makes us an audience of two.
John: There is.
Audience: What
John: A house
Audience: Where
John: Down in New Orleans
Audience: What’s it called?
John: They call it the Rising Sun
Audience: What’s it been
John: Well it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And on it goes. All the way through, with some of the questions being quite sophisticated and all called out in unison. It really is quite the central showpiece and a true case of performer and audience becoming one.
Everything here tonight is brand new to us and I don’t want to give away too many more of the lyrical, musical and visual experiences. This is an unusual case of a gig review not wanting to enter the realm of spoiler. But the real point here is that everything is performed and presented as though for the very first time. And I guess that is the essence of being one of the show people. That huge band, or small band, may be playing that song, or songs, for the hundredth or thousandth time. But for so many people in the audience, this may be their first and only live experience of that song or songs. I think for this show, that describes just us two, but I’m sure there are more. And we come away feeling like John played that show like it was one of the most important shows he’s done. Not one part of it felt phoned in or done a thousand times before. Just a wonderful exuberant night of rock’n’roll.
Then, when it’s all over he stops by to say hello and have a really nice humble chat before posing for a selfie with us. All that’s left now is to check out the merch stand where we joyfully pick out two of his biographies and his own brand of hot sauce. Which, I will confirm, now is quite simply the hottest sauce I have ever encountered. It really should come with a warning label. He calls it bunsen burner sauce. After this, I half think bunsen burners should be renamed Otway burners.
As for those two autobiographies, they show that John wears his sporadic and lower chart level success firmly on his sleeve with both being taglines with, Rock And Roll’s Greatest Failure!’
The next day we send an email to Frank Turner, attaching our selfie with John, to tell him that his song inspired us to check John out. The email reads, ‘Thankyou very much for the heads up and musical introduction. And I’m sure we’re not the only ones your brilliant reference has steered in the direction of John. You’ve also made us curious about those Beatles guys. Maybe we should check them out too!!’
Frank replies with, ‘Thanks for the mail. I have to say it made my day; John is such a wonderful writer and performer, I’m glad you got to enjoy his show.’
Frank, that reply made our day.
Day 552
Thursday January 9
We’ve decided it’s time to do our very first for real London Now Hustle. And we’re doing it total random. Without any research of what kind of bars a place has, we’re just selecting a tube stop we’ve never been to before heading out there to see what we can make happen. Yes, we live in Camden but we decided from the very beginning that we weren’t going to Now Hustle here. Just like we never Now Hustled in Clara. The place we’ve chosen for tonight’s adventure is Hendon. We drove through it once on our way to having a go at hustling the Edinburgh Festival. Oh dear. Maybe we should have researched what kind of bars the place had. Hendon central and it’s dead. No-one around, hardly any bars to look at, and the one we do wander tentatively to is practically empty. No, we are not going to try to hustle that place. It’s only now that we have a look at maps and see what bars are around the place. We discover they are very lightly scattered and we would have quite a bit of a walk to find the first one that might, might be a prospect. We can often walk past two or three as it is, so the thoughts of wandering out there to discover another dead spot just isn’t part of any plan. So in that case, what is the plan? We could head back to the tube and travel somewhere else. We’re not giving up so that’s about it really. Unless…we get on that bus that’s coming right towards us now. And luckily, we’re only a few yards from the bus stop. OK. That’s happening now.
As we ascend the stairs of this random double decker that’s just crossed our path, we don’t even know which direction we’re heading. North, south, east or west. We soon figure we’re heading north, but where to, we have no idea. We’ve never heard of the advertised destination and even as I write this I can’t remember what it was. Yep. Here we are on our bus to nowhere off to play a gig in London. Well, maybe.
As we’re taken deeper and deeper into north west London, we see very little sign of life. It’s just street after street of houses. There is the occasional bar, but they look quiet and not worth the risk of getting off. If a hustle is refused, or if we decide the place is too quiet to even try, we’ll be stranded on an essentially purely residential street with another bus not coming from who knows when, and to who knows where? Once that happens, we either grimly carry on, or admit defeat for the night and get the next bus heading somewhere towards home, again. And no telling when that bus would be coming either. No. We are not getting off to try any of these bars.
It’s dark, it’s ever so slightly raining and we keep trying to convince ourselves we’re still off out on an adventure. Where, oh where are we heading, and what do we possibly think we’re going to find when we get there? Mainlining on optimism, we conclude that that is actually the adventure. That thought that out of nowhere there could yet be something really cool to be pulled out of this dreary bus ride to dark, mildly rain spattered nowhere. But we’ve got a guitar, we’ve got our spirits, and we’re in some kind of motion. Sometimes that can be all that you need.
Oh, what’s this? All of a sudden we see we’ve pulled into a small high street. Or at least we’re seeing a few lights and what might just be a bar or two. This is the first sign of any kind of life we’ve seen since we left Hendon. We’re pushing the button. We’re getting off. Whatever is here, that’s where we are.
It really is quite a small high street. We get off the bus and are now able to read the street name. Oh. We’re on Wembley Park Drive, at the end of which is Wembley Way, at the end of which is the actual Wembley Stadium. Ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived. This is where we tell you that we have now played Wembley Stadium…Sports Bar.
So yeah, we enter Wembley Stadium Sports Bar where we meet landlady Natasha and a bemused group of Polish builders playing pool. We tell Natasha that we just want to play a few songs and introduce ourselves and she’s like, ‘Why not?’ Brilliant. Just like that. And the pool players are intrigued as we set up.
We play two songs to what I’d call a curious and warm but mildly uncertain response, although we’ve been noticing Natasha seeming to be really quite into it. At the end of the second song we think we’ve been regarded as a fun interlude, but to play any more might be pushing it. As we’re considering this, one of the pool players suggests we take a break. We take that as a polite suggestion to call it for the night and so we do. We pack up and wander over to the bar to say thankyou to Natasha. She says she’s disappointed we stopped and that she thought we were going to play for ages. Oh. OK. She was really into it. That’s a something. Then the guy who suggested we take a break comes over and says, ‘I thought you were going to play more. We really loved it.’ There’s around ten guys sat around the pool table and he looks towards them for confirmation and they all nod approvingly. Oh, it’s been one of those. Where people are really into it, but continue with what they’re doing and we just aren’t quite able to read it properly. OK. We’ll take that. But really, we are packed up and ready to try the next place. But we’re good to hand around here for a while and a few of the guys are really keen to talk to us. Two of them even ask about the possibility of booking us for private parties. Oh wow. This is getting more and more. This has been far more successful than we thought it was being. We thought at best we were being politely received with a very gentle unwritten sign in the air not to outstay our welcome.
Natasha now asks if we want a drink. Thankyou very much, but we really s
hould be seeing what else we can do round here. With that, she suggests we go across the bar and speak to her friend Sinead. Tell her I sent you, she says. Fantastic. So out we go armed with a recommendation. Next destination, The Parish. We actually passed that on our way to Natasha’s place, but there were only three people in it so we gave it a miss. This time we walk in and find it a bit busier. Still quiet, but a few more people. We greet the lady behind the bar with a confident, ‘You must be Sinead.’ She confirms she is and looks a little intrigued. ‘Natasha sent us,’ I say. ‘We’ve just played in her bar and she thought you’d like us in here.’ ‘Well, if she’s said so, that’s great. Let’s give it a go. And so we do.’ We play three songs and indeed do get a great reaction including from Sinead. Then there are two guys who came in as we were on our first song. Almost as soon as we finish they invite us to join them. They buy us drinks – for the rest of the night actually – and tell us they come here all the time but always sat outside and this was the first time they had come inside and it was because they heard us.
As we have a great hang out going quite deep into the night, which includes a little mingling with a few other people in here, Sinead says there are a few more bars we should try should we venture out here again. Natasha had mentioned the same bars, so that really could be something to aim at on another day. And who knows? We might pop in and say hello to these two bars again.
The way we’re seeing tonight, and this kind of gigging in London in general, we’ve just played to around 20 people who would never have come to a gig and would never have seen us in any other circumstances. Generally for a gig in London you wait weeks or months, do massive promotion on it, then still play to essentially just friends. If you’re lucky, you may play to four or five people who have never heard or heard of you. It may look like all we’ve just done is to play to sparsely populated bar rooms, but in one night in Wembley we’ve possibly achieved what a conventionally gigging band could achieve in a few months of sporadic gigging. Which is generally how grassroots gigging tends to go. And sometimes with the stipulation that you have to agree to not play another gig within two weeks or so, or at least not have one organised. Well, we can do this whenever we want and as often as we want.
Day 563
Monday January 20
We get the first proof of our debut book today. This feels huge.
You may well know that back at the beginning of November we finished our debut book from these Diaries, titled Music, Love and Impossibilities. The idea is that the series is called The Diaries, it’s listed as being written by The Diaries, with our actual names in the legal bit in the first pages of the book, and subsequent books will also be called The Diaries, written by The Diaries, with other names given to those individual parts of the collection. This first book covers our first three months together going up to the day we made the ferry for the move to Clara, Ireland. The next book will see us finding our feet there, then setting off on our first European tour, then probably continuing with us beginning our travels around Ireland to try to play as much as we could there. Actually no real idea of how much will be covered in book number two but that seems a fair estimate. It took us a while to decide where this first book would end, and indeed, even with which Diary entries it would begin;
Back to this first book and we did everything ourselves, apart from the actual physical printing. Which meant typesetting, cover design, all the formal and legal things you write in the official pages, barcode, and so many other little details including type of paper for inside, type of paper for the cover, the thicknesses of both. So many other little things that at times it felt like an endless project. Then deciding on what printers to use and why, which included a few printers sending us samples of other books they’d done, or mock-ups of what they could do. Oh, it took a long time.
The next stage is this. The printers make one physical copy – called a proof – send it to us, we check and hopefully approve it, then the go ahead is given and they push the button on the first print run. In this instance, we’ve gone for an initial print of a hundred.
It’s with some excitement and ceremony that we open the letter containing this precious first proof. We even film it so we can put this unboxing up on Youtube. Then we open the first page to show it to the camera. Oh dear. The chapter headings are all wrong. Whole swathes of letters are missing in all of them. This is unpublishable and our disappointment, so quickly emanating from excitement, has made our triumphant unboxing video unpostable. And you only get to do this genuinely once. And we could do it with our next book but you only get to have your first book the once too. We have a tiny nervy period as we open up our document to make sure this is not our mistake. Because if it is, what else have we sent that’s wrong. But no. It takes a day or two to fully communicate with the company and to sort this out, but we discover that one of their printers, or computers, or whatever, had trouble with the font we used for the chapter headings and a few letters were missing. Kinda like the typewriter in Misery I guess. Sorry if that reference has gone over your head. I get that they’re not our proofreaders, it’s not up to them to go through the book and that all mistakes are ours. But come on. This was checkable. Wasn’t it? Fine. Fast forward a little. It all gets sorted out in a, I guess these things happen, kind of way, they send us a screen proof to ensure this error has now been fixed, and we give the go ahead. Next stop, a hundred copies of the debut book by The Diaries. Now we really are on our way and, following the initial disappointment of unboxing day, this feels huge. With this, we also order a card reader machine. With that and the books on their way, we are now finally about to be in the merchandise business.
Day 674
January 31
I really don’t want to get sidetracked in this catchup with another massive review, but definitely worth mentioning that today is the day we go and see The Meffs, who we saw support Frank Turner in Madrid in November. This is at The Garage in Highbury. It’s a decent sized hall with a 600 capacity and looks pretty sold out. Lily announces from the stage that this is the biggest crowd they’ve headlined too. Feels quite special to be a part of and the show is every bit as frantic and amazing as we thought it would be. Yep. That will do.
Day 685
Tuesday February 11
Well, this is it today as we get our first load of actual books. One hundred copies of Music, Love and Impossibilities to sell or distribute as we please. Let’s see how this goes. With that, we decide to head on down to Ant’s bar Ten To One and introduce all this to the Ramshackle Collective crowd. It’s a launch of sorts, I guess. Ant of course gets a copy. Den gets one, as does Antonio. And we even sell a whole two. Ladies and gentlemen, we are off the mark. Not only that, but Ant takes a few to put behind the bar to advertise and possibly even sell. With that lovely gesture the book goes public.
Day 686
Wednesday February 12
I have absolutely no idea how to do this, but I guess you just do it. How do we now get ourselves into actual bookshops? Is that’s even possible from our starting position? I go down to Kentish Town’s independent bookshop Owl Books and find the manager. He has a look, says he’s impressed with the appearance of it and asks where we’re from. Camden, I say. And the book is set in Kentish Town. Well, we really should have a few, he says. With that, we’re in our first bookshop. This is on a sale or return basis, which is that we take no money now, leave a few for free, and if they sell, we can invoice. If they don’t sell at all, the bookshop says, oh well, we tried. Please come and take them back. All fair enough. To give us a helping hand and some kind of fighting chance, the manager says he will put them on one of the main display tables in the centre of the shop. Wow. This really is going public now.
I follow this up with a trip to Kentish Town Library. Another little London geography reminder. Ktown sits right next to Camden Town, so we kinda sit right in between both high streets. I also happen to know Ktown library a little more than the one in Camden Town. This is very much borne out when I go in and meet Richard who I’ve dealt with over the years purely because I used to use this library so much. Now I instigate a little of a more formal introduction, tell him I have no idea how to go about these things and show him the book . He’s very impressed by the look of it and by the synopsis on the back. He has a flick through and says that yes, this is something he would like to help and get behind. This really is a wow. He tells me who we need to get in touch with to try to get it into the libraries of Camden Borough, which is where Kentish Town lies, and I tell him that I’m on it. For his part, he says he’ll also email the relevant office and see if he can help anything along, and suggests we keep in touch as this hopefully develops. We are now in the actual process of getting this thing in libraries. In the meantime, he says he’ll take a copy and as soon as he can get the go ahead, he’ll at the very least see to it that this library holds one. Really can’t ask for more than that. I leave the library in some state of jubilation. I should say now that Richard really does become a great champion of the book and very much an ally of ours. This is quite brilliant.
We are now in a bar, an independent bookshop, and have a toehold into our first library with a view to getting it into a few others.
A note on that library thing. London is made of up of 32 boroughs, each with around ten libraries give or take. Camden Borough has nine with the head office being Swiss Cottage library, while Camden Borough itself stretches from the northern edge of Hampstead Heath down to central London itself, stopping just about the distance of a running track from the Thames and also just shy of Chinatown and St Paul’s Cathedral. Which means to be available in Camden Town libraries is to be available in central London.
Day 688
Friday February 14
This is the day I’ve set aside to go visit the independent bookstores in our surrounding area, as well as the independent libraries. Richard told me they can be a bit more nimble footed than the bigger library organisations, so we might have more luck getting in them immediately. We don’t. But the big hit from today’s walkaround is from a guy called Christian in Daunts bookshop in Marylebone who receives me with great enthusiasm. He tells me that while walking in off the street can be effective with some bookshops, the thing we really need to do is to get ourselves on Gardners. This, he says, is the distribution company most bookshops use. An absolute must. It goes right to the top of the to-do list. Apart from that I don’t rustle out much from more than five miles of walking and hitting the street, but it feels that Christian has given us something to aim at.
Day 690
Sunday February 16
Time for another Now Hustle adventure and we decide a trip to Angel for this is long long overdue. I’m going to blast right through most of the experience now and say that we get totally taken by surprise by how quiet the whole place is. Almost every bar is empty, or has just one or two people in it. I know Angel really quite well. Apart from it being one of my favourite areas of London, I hustled the hell out of this place when I was with The Insiders and came back to many bars time and time again as they kept making promising noises, only to say each time, come back in a month or two, it’s not quite right yet. We did manage to play a bunch of places around here though and I continue to have very fond memories of the area. Oh, it was also one of the first places in London I came to and vaguely got to know in my first job here when I very first arrived in November 2014. Oh, and the London Bass Show was here at least once in the Business Design Centre, a venue I also worked on in that first job; it was at a company providing hire furniture for corporate events. During the week I worked in the office coordinating the furniture, processing orders to the warehouse and the like. And, because I’d just arrived in London and so was trying to get something of a decent financial base, in the evenings I did overtime in the warehouse, physically processing (carrying) some of those orders myself. And then some weekends I would contine the overtime by going out to the events and helping out with all the lifting there. Some of which was in Angel. So yeah. Between that, The Insiders, just loving the place myself, and also the fact that it was where me and Maja stayed when we came for a visit from Ireland – in Alex’s place above The Camden Head – Angel carries a fair amount of nostalgia for me.
All of which means that, unlike many places we’ve Now Hustled, there are actual targets we have singled out to aim at, and we have it pretty well routed too. But each time we arrive, there’s nothing there to play to. One place I’ve always wanted to play is the Alma, and I finally manage it tonight when the boss, Nathan, gives us the go ahead. But even in there, there’s just two or three mildly interested tables and we give it our best shot and Nathan’s positive enough afterwards. But that’s about it.
Oh, and a very bar-looking place that we arrive at only to discover it’s now a restaurant. And that, people, is what I’m talking about. So many bars and potential places to play in London are disappearing so there’s less and less opportunity for everyone and so more and more people are hustling for the fewer and fewer places there are. And as we don’t want to join in those almighty scrums for smaller crumbs, we’re just continuing along with our own thing.
There’s a bar on a road just heading out of Camden and towards Kings Cross that we’ve long been curious about but never been in. Back from our somewhat muted efforts in Angel and we decide it’s time for a visit. This is The Prince Albert on Royal College Street. We walk in and it’s empty. But we are very enthusiastically greeted by the two girls on duty who are winding things down for the night. We’re also still an hour or so from closing so all totally good. The girls are Bee and Saph and they’re intrigued by us as we walk in, tired but elated, and with a guitar. They ask what we’ve been up to and they are blown away by the concept of us just walking into bars and just asking to play. Not only that, but we’ve managed to actually do it. With this, they become massively interested in hearing more so we settle ourselves in at the bar and this all becomes a bit of a private hang out. Then we show them the book and they really get into the drama of it all. They want to hear some music, so our Spotify list comes up and gets played over the bar speakers. Then they say they want to buy a copy each of the book for themselves. Done. Well this was an unexpected outcome. A bar we’ve not even tried to play at on a Now Hustle night and we feel we’ve made an actual connection and found a friendly place to return to.
Day 692
Tuesday February 18
Another gig trip. This time we’re off to Wolverhampton. And this is the Frank Turner show we booked after seeing him in Madrid and with the knowledge that the London shows were already sold out before we even started looking for anything. So Wolverhampton it was. During the show we discover we are at the 2997th Frank Turner show with the 3000th slated to take place at his huge homecoming at the 10,000 capacity Alexander Palace a few days later. And yes. We confirm what we believed to be true in Madrid. Frank plays every show like it’s his first, last and only as we have another great experience with him and another massively exuberant crowd.
This really is a flying visit. Arrive in Wolverhampton, check into hotel, out to the show that night, leave in the morning. Maja isn’t even taking the day off and sets herself up in the hotel cafe to work for the day. So I head into the nearby city centre to see if I can hustle any interest in our book from any of the local bookshops. Only problem. There aren’t any. I chase a few red herrings of shops I manage to find, only to discover they don’t exist when I reach the address. My search around the city eventually leads me to a Waterstones where I think, why not. As I thought, the guy I meet tells me all their decision making and buying is done centrally so there’s not even a conversation to be had here. But he’s happy to chat a little and poignantly tells me, there used to be independent bookshops and other bookshops around here. But now we’re the only one. Oh Ok. It’s like that. Oh well. Back to the hotel, then off to tonight’s show.
Day 694
Thursday February 20
We now have international distribution. Yep. You can go into almost any bookstore anywhere in the world and we will pop up on their system as available to order. This is through the company Gardners. It’s a bit of a generic thing and the way books work in the UK. You don’t pay for this service, but most bookstores will only stock you if you are on the list of Gardners. It’s been a bit of a process, but we’ve made it there. But Gardners doesn’t stock us. We do that. And Gardners doesn’t pitch us to anyone. Again, we do that. And it’s not just a general send out either. It doesn’t work like that. No. We have to do what we can to generate interest and hope bookshops will make orders. When they do, Gardners send that order to us, we send the stock to Gardners and they send it out to the customer. We do not find out where any orders have come from. At the end of the month we invoice Gardners for any copies sold. They offer generous discount terms to independent authors but we’ve decided not to take them up on that, instead choosing to offer them the more Gardners favourable terms the major publishers offer. We’ve done this to help maximise interest even if it minimises profit. The reason for this is that we’re seeing the book as a marketing tool. A great advert for The Diaries. Just the fact that it exists demonstrates a depth and seriousness. And hopefully people will read it and get to know us. As we said in the two year report, a big part of making your act a success is having a story people can learn about and get behind. Well, this book is it and the more people who see it and read it, the better. If that means we make a little less money on it than we could, well that’s absolutely fine by us. Let’s just get it out there and hope interest in The Diaries and our music follows.
