He's behind you!

I went to the panto at the Playhouse with Anders & Nick last week. Now, I've got to be honest, at about 2 o clock that afternoon I was feeling really tired and really just wanted to ditch the panto and have a night snuggled up on the sofa watching some dreadful TV and taking it easy. Partly this was down to the tiredness and partly down to my aversion to pantos. I've just always thought they would be bawdy, childish and get infuriated by all the "he's behind you" shouting. I think I went to see a particularly bad one as a child. I have a memory of tiny me all red faced and angry being made to shout "He's behind you" for about the fifteenth time. I used to hate it when people deliberately used to pretend not to know/see things. Sounds like I was an angry child. Weird.

Anyway, off we went to see Mother Goose, rather reluctantly, had a quick bite to eat at Cast (burger, very nice) and loaded up on sweeties for the performance. About 10 minutes in I think the first "Boo!" squeaked past my lips. About 20 minutes in I was laughing along at the one liners and ad-libs. Before the first act ended I was joining in with the singing, cheers and jeers with all my heart. I loved it! It was genuinely funny, the costumes and set were bright and spangly, the songs were fun and I didn't have to repeat chants 10 times to get anything to happen. They had a really nice balance between stuff for kids and adults, between playing it knowingly and getting involved in the performance and between the different characters. I've always been pretty certain that the panto wouldn't be for me, but I loved it and would recommend it to anyone.

On Friday we were hosting two gigs - one a proper Hello Thor gig at Spanky Van Dykes, with Injured Birds & We Show Up On Radar playing live - one a Broadway gig with Anders doing the organising, a celebration of Scandinavian sounds called Nordic Noise, with a Cardigans For Goalposts element thrown in.

Thankfully both  were a great success, with lots of nice comments and some awesome performances. I won't talk about them all, but just want to record that We Show Up On Radar played with their full band for only the 3rd time. They were great. Having a fuller sound just totally makes sense and gives the songs a proper setting in which they can sparkle. The full band brings a bit more power and confidence to the performance as well as the tunes and everything just seems really right. I can't wait to see them again.

Here are a few of my favourite pics from the evening:







See more pictures here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellothor/sets/72157625467734169/

This week I will be:

- Sewing tonight! Yeah! last one before Christmas

- Jumpers for Goalposts tomorrow - not at the Alley Cafe for one month only. Read more here: http://thesecretdiaryofjumpersforgoalposts.wordpress.com/

- Dinner at Angi & James' on Friday

- Daddy Bones' Birthday at Broadway on Saturday - This is going to be great. The Yeah I'll Play It Later DJs will be on the decks, lots of lovely people will be hanging out and dancing. FUN.

- Snoozing all day Sunday please.

See you soon!

Bex
x

Rene Gruau

Last weekend we went to visit Chloe & Jamie and see our other friends in London. On the Friday we went to see a 12 piece band who play DJ Shadow's Endtroducing through from start to finish and do all the samples live. I was really excited about that and thought it was going to be super cool, it turned out to be super lame. Lewis likened it to when his teachers formed a "rock band" at school. At times it was toe-curlingly uncool. Shame. However, we did get to go to Koko, which looks like this:

Lovely!

Over the weekend we also ate lovely food, caught up with Lewis and Emma, did a bit of shopping at a vintage market and went to see a great exhibition at Somerset House.

The exhibition was of work created for Dior by the illustrator Rene Gruau. His work is so beautiful and luxurious I just wanted to live in that world. You can imagine it feels like silk and smells amazing! He created pieces such as these:

His illustrations are incredibly stylish, yet minimal, confident and sophisticated. I could've looked at them all day. There were some 80's influenced ones which didn't really work for me so much (airbrushed style faces and angular cheekbones etc), but the 50s-70s ones were so good that didn't matter. Even his signature is beautiful. Look:

Anyway, enough wallowing in the glory of bygone days.

Stuff coming up:

2nd Dec - Studio sale at I Dress Myself to say goodbye to Han & Pete. I still can't believe they're leaving Nottingham, and so soon! They'll be missed.

10th Dec - We Show Up On RadaR @ Spanky Van Dykes. This looks set to be a great show and only the 3rd time they've played with their full live band in Nottingham. Look for the event on facebook for full details.

16th Dec - Jumpers For Goalposts @ Tether - For the first time we're leaving our Alley Cafe home and venturing out into the big wide world for a special Christmas edition of Jumpers to help Tether celebrate their final night of the studios. This is going to be FUN.

I reckon there's probably loads of other good stuff coming up too, but I can't remember everything!

Bex
x

busy-ness

Things have been busy lately, right? The sun makes me busier too, because I don't want to do boring things while the sun shines. One brilliant thing about the sun shining though is "Summer Tea", which just involves sitting eating our food on kitchen chairs in our little garden. It's brilliant.

Fun things over the past couple of weeks have been:

- Seeing Fists play in Sheffield. It's really great to see your friends doing something they are really good at. It just makes you see them as something else besides your friend who you've known for ages and have lots of fun memories with. I think seeing them play in Sheffield did this x2, because in a little room above a nice pub there was a bunch of strangers really loving them and their music. It makes you sure that you don't just like them as a band because you know them and reminds you how good they are.

- Playing SingStar R&B with my friend Abi. We already owned SingStar Classics and were pretty high up the score table for Depeche Mode, but SingStar R&B is a different ball park altogether. I have a new respect for R&B singers... their songs are HARD! It has also introduced me to Teardrops by Womack & Womack, and I'm very pleased about that.

- Making a draught excluder snake. He's lovely. He's called snakey and so far hasn't been used to exclude any draughts.

- Seeing our veggies growing really big in the garden. We are going to be overrun with beetroot soon.

- The guilty pleasure of the BGT final last Saturday. Oh dear, what have we come to? Loved Britain's Got Talent all week through the semi-finals, felt slightly tarnished and ashamed as soon as the final had finished.

- The Tether Art Crawl. Truthfully I didn't actually crawl. But me and Abs met up at the Ropewalk with Anders who had been leading a group round the various venues, teaching them about the history of Nottingham and sharing some of his favourite stories. Go Anders! Everyone involved was really nice and I wished I had booke in time to do the full crawl. We went on from the Ropewalk back to Tether where the Tom Tomas Club performed a "greatest hits" set after a painfully protracted set-up which involved boo-ing random people (including Dan Toporowski) as they came into the room. The TTC were as terrible/amazing as always. The room at Tether was mental, it was like a cardboard igloo. I don't know why, but it was warm and oddly comforting.

- Planning our website at work. I work for my family firm, which is mostly a little bit dull. At the moment though I'm beginning work on setting up an ecommerce website for us. This is a lot more fun. The internet is fascinating. Last month something like 70% of everyone who went online visited Facebook. It's huge.

- Looking up stuff about CUBA! Me and Anders are going in July. Can't WAIT. If you know of any "must do" things please let me know!

Hope you've been having fun in the sun too.

Bex xx
x

Well, that was brilliant!

(I had such a good time at the Fists gig I wanted EVERYONE to read about it!)

A great turn-out...

Nottingham luminaries were there - Swimming, Joey Chickenskin, Rob Yunioshi, Bones, the lovely ladies of Tether, Tom & Nick from Hello Thor, Dan Toporowski... so many brilliant minds we could've started a revolution!

A great set from Fists...

James parping his giant horn, Joe dressed as a greaser-cowpoke, Angi delighting us all with an immense analogue beast of a keyboard, Pete's brilliant new tune You Dudes Rock (thanks!) and Tez rocking out the world's smallest drum solo.

I loved it - Thanks everyone!

x anders

Thanks for making Supernight great!

Hello there,

This is a big fat THANKS to everyone who came to Supernight on Saturday!

And also to the lovely Oxjam people, the wonderful bands who performed, the delightful Kate Musgrove who did projections, my sister Katie who made a really nice cake, the fantastic Tether group with their art tombola prizes and The Maze for having us!

So... hope you had a good time? We did! We'll be putting some photos online soon and I'll post the link up here for you.

Some of my favourite moments included:

- Most of Fists set but especially the little ghost tune (little gho-o-o-o-o-o-st!)
- Lovely Joe working the tombola like a demon
- Seeing the proud winner of a beautiful yellow woolly hat and orange necklace modelling his prize... yellow is really Ned's colour...
- Enjoying the slightly surreal experience of walking out the back door of the Maze and realising there was a team of Maze staff completely rebuilding the back half of the club!
- Watching Napoleon IIIrd - that was the first time I've seen him and I thought he was amazing - Raising money for Oxfam (I don't know how much, you can't get the lids off those rattly tins, but thanks to everyone who donated anything!)

Last but not least, my absolute favourite thing:

- Taking home my most random souvenir ever from a night out... a golf club.

Anyway, it's Monday now, work time, so I'd better get on with some!

Love Becky
x

p.s. if the nice man who really would've liked a Jarvis Cocker badge (rather than a rubbish Kaiser Chiefs one) is reading this, drop me an email, I saved one for you.