This event was organised as a Your Stories In Song event (our first one) with Compass Community Arts. They had wanted to hold the event as part of Eastbourne Alive, arts celebrations alongside the Turner Prize at the Towner. We had originally talked about holding it in a unit in the Enterprise Centre (now the Beacon) where Compass are displaying their Big Conversation exhibition, but the space was not what they expected so they had booked a room upstairs at the Towner in December. When we started chasing for a date and time so we could start promoting the event, we found that they were now not able to use the Towner room (because of the Turner Prize) so had arranged to hold it at Frontier Cafe in town in just a week’s time. This wouldn’t have given us much time at all to promote it as a Your Stories In Song event so we decided to postpone until the new year.
Come the new year and a confirmed February date, we still had to chase to get details of ticketing, numbers and set up times. It was a bit frustrating but we know this is a charity and run by volunteers and this event was not in their usual remit and just a tiny part of what they do.
Ben Somers and Nick Ryan were going to be sharing the evening with us and we really didn’t know want to expect, other than they had asked to borrow our pa and mic stands if possible. Ben couldn’t have been nicer but setting up was stressful as we had expected to be going on first and last with Ben and Nick doing a set in the middle, but as it turned out the Compass Improvised Sound group wanted to do something to start and it worked best for Ben and Nick to go on first as Ben would be doing something together with them. Nick took a while to set up and connect the PA, he was using a laptop, but just as they were about to start the PA decided to play up so only one speaker was working. After a lot of fiddling around I suggested they should start and go with one speaker, but shortly after they started it seemed to clear and was fine.
The place was full, mainly with people from Compass in the performance end of the room, but lots more in the bar area and front of the venue. We had a great response from all of the audience once we started, many of them joining in from the start. The time we had spent researching the responses from Compass in their Big Conversation exhibition and how they tied in with our songs, was well worth spending as it all held together really well, some of our songs developing new meanings in that context. We performed our new song, Button Tin, inspired by one of these responses, which went down really well and quoted some poetry from the exhibition catalogue which went really well with some of the others int he set list. We had a group effort at writing a quick song based on suggestions people were handing in on the night – we had lots! Using a white board we wrote a line from each of the suggestions and worked out together which elements to use. Jackson the Cat was born, Jim quickly noodling a simple tune to which we added words plucked from audience shout-outs, and we had everyone singing along really quickly. Had to steer away a bit from body shaming in the words as ‘fat’ seemed the most popular rhyme for ‘cat’, obviously.
The whole evening was filmed but at the time of writing we haven’t received the files yet.
The venue is in Grove Road in Eastbourne which is free parking after 6pm if you can find a space – fortunately we did find one really close. The performance area is at the back of the venue so you have to walk through to set up, but it was relatively empty when we arrived. With all of our instruments and PA plus the white board and banner for Your Stories In Song we had to make a few trips through. It is dark at that end, just a few candles for atmosphere so we could have done with taking some lights, not just to make us more visible, but so we could see what we were doing to set up.
I don’t know what the deal was with the venue as it had been booked by Compass, but the staff were really friendly. They have regular music events there, it seems like a lot of jazz, and it’s a very ‘arty’ venue. As the event was part of the project, we are paid from the project funds including a fee for PA hire and travel so I don’t know how the venue usually pay performers.
This wasn’t a regular gig as such so we didn’t promote our own CDs, just the Your Stories in Song Project. We got 12 completed forms but most did not complete the section to sign up for the mailing list.
But it was an absolutely great start to the Your Stories In Song project and we were delighted with how the evening went in the end!