This was a fabulous stage, great hall, bar, easy access and lovely organisers. All it was missing was the audience numbers that this little festival deserves. Little Arts Festival 24 is the second of such festivals at Rushlake Green, having been revived from one started in 2016. There’s a history of arts events at the hall and the current organisers took on a real task with 2 weeks of events, all run on a voluntary basis, with ticket proceeds going to the running costs of the festival. Our event was during the second week and, as we were doing this as a ‘Your Stories In Song’ event we were paid out of the project lottery funds.
A contact we know, Mark, through both the day job and through Summer Trifle (our own festival we ran for 6 years) had contacted us to ask if we would be interested in playing. We went along to a ‘meet and greet’ event at the Dunn Hall in Rushlake Green to meet the committee, hear about their aims and everyone stood up to say what they were doing as part of the festival. It looked like an ambitious project and they did manage to get together a really good variety of events. Our event was one in the series of Your Stories In Song events, every other one being free entry, this one having a £10 ticket tag so we marketed the gig as an evening concert with a Your Stories In Song element and we really went for it when setting up. We filled the stage, using our own Milton Hide banner and the Your Stories In Song banner and some lottery bunting and Jim took 3 guitars and a banjo. The lighting was great, it all looked fantastic and we did really enjoy playing and went down very well. There was an audience of 17 including the organisers. A decent turn out for such a remote location and we went down into the audience for the group song writing element of the evening, using one of Marks’ suggestions – the boy from the estate. Jim worked this into a blues number and we had everyone singing along, giving it some real bluesy angst.
We had three suggestions for the Your Stories In Song website and a couple of sign ups to the mailing list and we sold one CD.
We’d realised the day before that our PA may not be PAT tested as we think we bought it after the last round of tests (no labels available at the time) so managed to find Bernie who would come round that day and do it all in our house for a reasonable fee. So we arrived with fully legal and safe equipment. It was raining but we had a parking spot right by the front door and Mark’s dad was there to help us load in. It was still raining at the end of the night but we then had several helpers with the get out. Unfortunately our ‘idiot check’ (last minute check to make sure we’ve not left anything behind) didn’t spot Jim’s trousers hanging on the side of the stage (he’d changed into his on-stage trousers) so we had to go back and collect them a couple of days later. Everyone was really friendly and we had a lovely time, enjoying being part of something so special. The response from the chief organiser: that was a cracking show, and we all loved every minute of it.