I’m still recovering from my time in Tomás Ford’s Disco Bunker eight weeks eight days later.

It was a pretty awesome experience, I’m kind of weighing up how I thought it went; on one hand theatres are agonisingly middle class, a conventionally seated crowd is really hard to work with and I think the ticketed nature of the event priced out a few people I would have liked to be able to see the show. I’ve forgotten how to read theatre audiences a bit as well, which is an unfortunate side effect of my not working in theatre anymore; I’m totally ninja with festival/pub/club environments but it’s a very different feeling in a theatre.

Apart from those qualifications though, it was pretty much an unqualified success. The reviews have been uniformly excellent (you can read Ben Watson’s great one on my Press Kit page), so I’m likely going to be touring it to a few festivals this year. A lot of things from the show will feed back into my general live act, but there’s quite a few things that are specific to playing in a theatre and the journey I wanted to happen for the audience that I don’t think will work outside of that.

It really knocked me about though - aside from all the time I spent getting the show together, the nature of the gig was that it took a lot of my mental energy, which I didn’t really give the audience a chance to give back in a conventional way. So I was wiped after the shows and although I enjoyed playing them, it actually took a couple of days for me to really appreciate what I’d achieved with them.

Now I have even more ideas for how to progress the show, which is great, because I hate it when I start to feel satisfied and smug about what I do. I mean, feeling smug is a very enjoyable emotion, it’s actually my favourite feeling but it’s not very useful.

Anyway, there are some great shots from the show shot by William Buck for Faster Louder that you really have to go see for yourself. He shot both the early and late shows so you get a really good feel for the way the show went if you look at the whole set.

In other news, I’m back to recording this week and loving it, even if it’s still moving at a glacial pace. It’ll get there. Promise.