Last Saturday I opened up for the Shoreditch festival. The festival features a series of public artworks by Bob and Roberta Smith under the title of SHOP LOCAL.

Bob’s public works were a series of signs advertising local businesses in Bob unique hand sign painting style, including the ‘Ron’s Eel and Shelfish’ posters that are all over the underground (see previous post). There is a nice write up about the show in yesterday’s Times Newspaper by Grayson Perry.

Last Saturday was the launch party with live performance from The Ken Ardley Playboys, Leigh Clarke, Jemma Freeman and myself. The Ken Ardley Playboy are the archetypal art band featuring Bob Smith and Victor Mount; Jemma Freeman is previously of art-punk-band The Fucks and Leigh Clarke is an artist who also does stand-up comedy and body beatboxing.

Opening up a show is always hard work and I had also been asked to do a 30 minute set which is more that I usually do in on one go. 30 minutes of poetry is quite heavy going but I accepted as it was Bob and my last show with him was great. I had decided to base the show around Bob’s SHOP LOCAL project and I had proposed a set of grocery and food themed songs. When I started rehearsing last Friday I realised all my food themed songs did not quite add up to 30 minutes of material so I decided to add in a few readings of Delia Smith recipes to fill it out.

Making Delia Smith recipes sound exciting was a little harder than I anticipated and I had to cram in some extra last minute rehearsals. The extra practicing and the extended set was not good for my voice and the show got a little ropey in places, but you learn by your mistakes. I managed to end on a version of Art School Band which unsettled a few of the other acts so it all ended well.

Next weekend is Ditchlicker which is going to be a scaled down version of Frogstock with only one stage rather than 6. The smaller event should be a little less work and more fun. The line up features a few great acts that have a unconventional style and are associated with art school bands and wrong music so it should be an interesting experiment to see who bemuses the audience the most. Victor Mount is coming which is an honour. You can learn more about the entertainment and get directions to the festival site on the Frogstock website

The BBC promises the weather will clear up in time for the weekend