Hello again! It’s been a little while. I figured a blog post to bring the internet up to date with my life was needed so here’s whats been occurring in the last few weeks / months.
I’ve been writing. Loads. I have a new tune in the final stage of a mix that will hopefully be out in March. I have played some bloody awesome shows. Our live show has come on a lot and I’m so excited to show it off. January is traditionally quite tough for DIYers, crowds have even more of an excuse not to come play out, everyones getting sick all the time and not much really happens until February is looming. Thankfully though, a glorious beacon of hope lies far north in the form of Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow.
I played the Danny Kyle Open Stage there last year to (at the time) the biggest crowd I’d ever played to (around 400). I remember on the morning of the gig I’d gone for a swim at our hotel and my ear had got blocked by water and wouldn’t yield, meaning I played the entirety of last years gig not being able to hear ANYTHING apart from the vibrations of my voice inside my own skull and a faint bleed of the guitar in the monitor. I had no idea if people were quiet and listening or loudly booing (still; after 3 and a bit years – never happened) but thankfully it went well and I shifted a record number of CDs and was invited back to play the main festival this year.
So yeah. This year came around and Glasgow was calling me again. I was supporting a band signed to Xtra Mile Recordings (Frank Turner, Skinny Lister etc) called Mull Historical Society who’d had some hits in the 90s and had pretty much sold the show out months in advance. Me and Colin (Mull Historical) had shared some contact on Twitter before the show and a good gig was on the cards. We drove up the day before and spent the first evening acclimatising and hanging out in the city centre, I popped my head in to say Hi to our artist rep Maureen and Liz who had run the Danny Kyle stage last year. The Danny Kyle venue was smaller than I’d remembered, maybe it’s just cos I’ve played bigger since. I remember that being the first time I’d stepped on stage and faced the ‘sea of faces’ – I always look around and do a rough headcount while I’m playing. Last year’s gig was the first time I remember being like… well there’s.. 50 there.. maybe.. idk maybe more.. theres loads more back there, I have no idea, I’ve lost count, there’s tonnes of people on the walls too. God knows. ANYWAY. Show day came around and me and James (backing guitarist, harmony extraordinaire and band-mate since Dec 2017) decided to go busking to get some extra cash in. We were being taken care of by the festival. They’d paid us a very reasonable flat fee for the show along with a decent petrol contribution and put us up for the night in a hotel round the corner with breakfast provided and meal and drinks vouchers to cover us. We were in Glasgow for one day/ night only though so needed to make the most of it.
We busked our set reasonably well opposite a Sainsburys by the Royal Concert Hall. It was a pretty rusty performance but it was early in the day yet. We didn’t do great on the money front but got enough together in 45 mins to pay for our lunch at a traditional, Glaswegian Wagamama’s. We had a booking to do some press on Celtic Music Radio at 3:00pm so we went to the venue for the night’s gig (The CCA) and loaded our gigging gear before heading back down the main street to the Royal Concert Hall where our radio interview / performance was taking place.
Now, this performance didn’t go particularly well. We had some technical issues, the sound was being run by students and my guitar wasn’t coming through when we were on air.. which is pretty embarrassing looking back but hey ho. If you were in the studio, you’d have known that me and James played a pretty much flawless set. We packed up and said our goodbyes then returned to the CCA venue for soundcheck.
Mull had Bernard Butler (Suede, Producer on Duffy’s first album) playing with them and we had a quick chat about guitar pedals before we sound checked. We played fine and the sound was great and then we had a nervy hour and a half wait before our set. I remember pacing around back stage for the final 30 mins beforehand. I don’t usually get hit with nerves too badly unless it’s a big show, or if I’ve been excited about a show and I’m suddenly hit with the.. is this going to be as good as i’ve been imagining for the last few weeks? This occasion was much the latter and I was hit with an overwhelming sense of dismay when, 15 minutes before my set I look out of the dressing room to the stage to see a whole TWO fucking people in the audience. I was gutted. We’d driven for six hours and there’s two people here… I went back to my dressing room and paced some more. THANKFULLY as stage time hit we walked on to around 150 people (which grew to full capacity during our set. (We later found out doors opened late and people had been queueing outside but yeah, that wasn’t fed back to us.)
The show went great. It couldn’t have gone MUCH better. We won the crowd early on, they loved it and they loved us. We came off stage to thunderous applause (one of the biggest cheers I can remember) and shifted lots of CDs and a T SHIRT (never happens). Watching back the footage from the night I think we played ‘When I’ve Got You’ almost perfectly. I remember being hit by a wave of emotion after this performance as I could just FEEL that the crowd had ‘got it’. I can’t really describe the feeling though. It’s kind of like.. when you’re watching a sports match and everyone in the room is on the edge of their seat but is silent.. or when you’re in a cinema and you just know everyone is on the verge of tears or scared or idk, when you get that really kinda fairytale ‘about to lean in for the first kiss’ moment with someone. You can just feel that everyone in the room is on the same wavelength, and it’s balanced on a knife-edge and you can just feel the emotion in the room growing. Idk. That sounds so cliche but anyway; I ended that performance by emotionally going ‘oh man I felt that, I felt that thank you so much.’ And that’s what I’m on about above.
In terms of the rest of the set, I think we played a touch fast, but aside from that. We smashed it. I shook hands with people and caught up with friends and watched Mull Historical play a musical blinder. We then packed up our stuff and dashed around the corner to Glasgow Arts Club to play at Celtic Connections Festival Club. It wasn’t a busy show, it also wasn’t particularly great BUT, the sound was to die for, and we were going into our 4th performance of the day and absolutely smashed it. We didn’t miss a beat all set. We said farewell to our artist rep Maureen, Colin (Mull Historical) and band who’d come in after us to play later on and hit the road back to Manchester (via a kebab shop) to arrive home at 5am.
And I had a wedding shoot in Sheffield the next morning starting at 11:00!
Joel's Side Of The Story 
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