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Martin White's Stupid Accordion-Playing Face
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| BOOK CLUB |
[12 Jun 2009|11:30am] |
A nostalgic evening yesterday at the lovely Cross Kings pub on York Way, reviving the old Book Club show which, as ever, overran in a shambolic manner. All the old gang except Johnny Candon was there: Natalie Haynes, Peter Buckley Hill, Josie Long, Chris Neill, Howard Read, and Danielle Ward was there too though she texted me to say she didn't get to do her Chat play because it ran so late, which is a shame. I wheeled out some accordion cover-versions and tried my hand at a bit of stand-up about Prince, which I think went OK, and reminded me of my long-deferred plan to do an hour-long show about the life and work of Prince, who is a veritable goldmine of comedy material. I'm going to try turning rambling half-improvised material from last night into a properly "honed" routine as I reckon there's some mileage in it. Am playing at the Five Pound Fringe launch gig at the Boogaloo on Monday and may try it then, though I should really be doing something from Accordions Of The Gods. Argh, that's creeping up on me too quickly, and there's still the nightmarish logistics of orchestral Karaoke Circus and Latitude to surmount first.
My research into conspiracy theories and the paranormal continues to be very entertaining. I stumbled upon a hilarious recording of abduction nut Whitley Strieber interviewing Rick Strassman on his internet radio show. Strassman is one of very few scientists to have been granted permission to do proper scientific research into the effects of the psychoactive DMT drug and inevitably the paranormal nutjob community has decided that his findings somehow legitimize their zany theories, and to hear him stuck on the end of the phone as a awkwardly polite captive audience while Strieber says things like "I once saw an alien in my bedroom! How do you explain that!" is entertaining indeed. Hopefully all of this stuff will find its way into my show too - I'm keen to cover as many cornerstones of nuttiness as I can.
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| MFMO GIG THIS FRIDAY |
[02 Jun 2009|11:38am] |
In an attempt to get our collective swag on with Latitude not far off, my band The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra will be doing a show at the Smithfield Tavern on Charterhouse Street in Farringdon this coming Friday, June the 5th, on stage at 8.30pm. It is FREE. Please come along, otherwise we'll be playing to the backs of people's heads and that won't be fun. There will be some new MFMO songs and some MFMO songs being dusted down which are so old that they may aswell be new.
See you there!
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| TERIYAKI |
[27 May 2009|04:28pm] |
Earlier today.
FOOL: Know what I had for dinner last night?
ME: No.
FOOL: Teriyaki chicken salad.
ME: (grudgingly impressed) That sounds nice.
Later this afternoon.
ME: I fancy a baked potato.
FOOL: I had a baked potato for dinner last night.
ME: I thought you said you had teriyaki chicken salad!
FOOL: I did. I had it on a baked potato.
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| WEEKEND |
[26 May 2009|10:55am] |
Lovely weekend at home for my sister's birthday. Went to see Oliver! at Drury Lane, lucky to catch Rowan Atkinson's Fagin on a rare night when he wasn't in hospital for one reason or another. We had the comedy Welsh Oliver and best of all the brilliant Julian Bleach as Mr Sowerberry. And the Julian Glover who played the baddie in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade played Mr [rich man who turns out to be Oliver's grandfather or something], so it was a fun cast. Then a tasty dinner of sea bass on Saturday night. I do like fish. On Sunday I headed from home to the Brixton Windmill - I have joined Les Carter's whimsical band Uncle Fruity in my usual capacity as obligitary comedy accordionist, and we did a jolly set of songs about tigers, bus drivers and the sea. Imagine an beery indie version of Rod Jane & Freddy and you get the idea.
Got another tax bill last week. I only just paid the last one! I really should start being more sensible about this. I probably pay way more than I should do - I keep good records of what I earn from performing, but I'm hopeless at keeping track of everything I spend. [insert some kind of satires here about MPs' expenses]. So I've a massive slab of dosh to pay to HMRC by the end of July. With this in mind I declare June FRUGAL MONTH. My laziness is expensive: sandwich-buying and gratuitous public transport journeys add up to over a hundred pounds a month, so I am going to live entirely off packed lunches from today until the end of June.
I've got back into bread-baking. It is top fun, and nowhere near as difficult as I remembered from my last dabblings. For about 20p's worth of ingredients I've baked myself a batch of lovely soft bread rolls to have for my packed lunches. So that's 4p a roll. Made a massive batch of lemon shortbread (normal shortbread but with lemon zest mixed in - yum!), and that along with a cheese roll and an apple comes to a 50p packed lunch, so in a week I'll be spending half as much as I usually spend in a day on rubbish from the supermarket. Got to discipline myself and make this work! Am also going to limit myself to taking the bus once a day at most (getting out of bed in time to walk every day is, frankly, not a realistic target), unless it's bucketing down both ways.
This is starting to sound like the kind of thing Richard Herring would do to generate material for an Edinburgh Fringe show.
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| UNCLE FRUITY AT THE WINDMILL |
[21 May 2009|01:19pm] |
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I play the accordion for Les "Carter USM" Carter's novelty side-project Uncle Fruity. We're appearing at the Brixton Windmill on Sunday night, around 10pm, on a bill with Jim Bob and Tim Ten Yen. Looks like it will be rather good fun! And no school in the morning.
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| W&W's KC |
[18 May 2009|10:10am] |
Karaoke Circus is now on the Latitude poster!
http://media.livenation.co.uk/fido//publishing/content/g/s/t/LATO9_web_15-5_bruce.jpg
MFMO isn't, because of some deal with the Britten Sinfonia whereby they are the only orchestra playing at the festival. It's flattering that they consider us a proper orchestra and not just a band with the word "orchestra" in the name. There's a lot of that about - bands who think they're an orchestra just because they have a cellist. MFMO are definitely on though, midnight on Friday in the Literary Salon (not the Book Club tent, another one nearby) and noon on Sunday at the In The Woods stage.
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| WEEK |
[15 May 2009|11:21am] |
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A productive week of sorts, infuriatingly broken up by having to go to work. I have, as usual, massively overcommitted over the coming months. It's the only way to guarantee being able to look back on a given period of time with any sense of achievement, and if there's one thing I hate, it's looking back and thinking "I did nothing then". One ambition I'm ticking off the list at the moment is composing a feature film score, for a film about, oddly enough, a man who quits his city job to become a comedian. Luckily that has to be finished by the end of this month so at least that will force me to get it out of the way to concentrate on other bits and pieces: I've loads of songs to orchestrate for the epic Karaoke Circus gig in July, I have to rewrite my Edinburgh show (now retitled "Accordions Of The Gods?") and make some movie inserts for that, and I'm getting started on recording a new bunch of MFMO songs - tomorrow will be spent in the studio laying the foundations, click tracks, percussion, all that sort of stuff, and Jeremy Limb is going to pop in to do some smooth piano stylings for a White/Chamberlain-King blues number about working as a stage corpse. Looking forward to finally doing a giganto-scale recording of 'Squeeze Me'! There's also a song Mr O'Hagan and I have written for the film soundtrack, called 'Bad Joke', which is an overblown tragi-comic epic ballad. And a lullabye about fish in space which I'll be doing with some brass players at Robin Ince's astronomy gig thing at the Bloomsbury in June. Busy busy busy.
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| WARD & WHITE'S KARAOKE CIRCUS JULY 8th |
[07 May 2009|12:38pm] |
Tickets have just gone on sale for the next phase of our evil Karaoke Circus agenda.
http://www.wegottickets.com/event/49865
Ward & White's Karaoke Circus joins forces with the Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra to bring you live orchestral karaoke! Ben Miller, Kevin Eldon, Isy Suttie and Andrew Collings are just some of the slebs we have persuaded to sing their favourite songs, with more yet to confirm.
It's going to be prettay, prettay good. Get a ticket now, as it will sell out!
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| KARAOKE CIRCUS TONIGHT! |
[29 Apr 2009|09:58am] |
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Ward & White's Karaoke Circus IV is tonight at Lowdown @ The Albany, 240 Great Portland Street, The Londons. Live band karaoke with guest turns from Ben Miller, Chris Addison, Sarah Kendall and open mic spots for show-offs. There will be a grand prize for the best performance as decided by resident judges Dan and The Baron. It will be ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. Doors 7.30pm, show 8pm-10pm, admission £8.
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| QUIET WEEK |
[06 Apr 2009|01:09pm] |
A week of normal life ahead. No gigs, no zany extracurricular deadlines, just 9 to 5 job and evening pottering-about. Much as I abhor boredom and routine it may do me good. I'm sure I'll find something mad to keep me up past my bedtime though. There's the film score to noodle with, and I'm keeping my CGI oar in by putting together 3D-animated versions of some scenes from my favourite Tintin book, King Ottokar's Sceptre. Should be able to put some online in the next day or two. I want to get in with my idea of what a Tintin movie should look like before Spielberg freaks us all out with uncanny-valley motion-capture. My version basically looks like what Trumpton would have looked like if they'd had a multi-million pound budget.
Ben Miller is now added to the bill for Karaoke Circus on the 29th - he's becoming a regular feature. I hope I can continue to resist saying "Not drinking, Chuffy?" to him.
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| KARAOKE CIRCUS IV |
[01 Apr 2009|11:18am] |
If you're doing anything on April the 29th, cancel it and instead come to WARD & WHITE'S KARAOKE CIRCUS at The Albany on Great Portland Street. It's a gig I run with Danielle Ward, Dave Reed from the Penny Dreadfuls and Foz from David Devant, where we accompany our celeb chums singing their favourite songs. There are also lots of open-mic spots for audience members and a prize for the best performance!
Our guests this month will be Chris Addison, Josie Long, Sarah Kendall, Peter Buckley Hill, Sara Pascoe, Miles Jupp and the novelist Toby Litt, with a couple of others still to be confirmed. The judges will be Dan Maier and the inimitable Baron Gilvan.
April 29th, doors 7.30pm, show 8pm-10pm, admission £8.
Call the Albany now on 020 7387 5706 to let them know you're coming. As anyone who's been before will tell you it gets very busy and you don't want to be turned away!
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| HILARITY |
[01 Apr 2009|10:59am] |
I hilariously out-April-fooled someone at work who was boasting about his amazing April Fool abilities.
COLLEAGUE: I reckon I'm the best person in the office at lying. For example, you know that game Call My Bluff?
ME: (deadpan) I've never heard of Call My Bluff.
COLLEAGUE: Really? Well, it's this game where...
ME: HA HA HA I WIN. I am the best liar.
COLLEAGUE: But you've never even heard of Call My Bluff!
That conversation really happened!
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| OMEGLE 2 |
[31 Mar 2009|04:53pm] |
*sigh*
You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!
You: hello?
Stranger: hi
You: what is this?
Stranger: what ?
You: is this a game?
Stranger: Yes
You: Pleased to meet you
You: I am at work and bored
Stranger: ok
Stranger: where do you live ?
You: This is the second time I have tried this. The first time someone greeted me with the question "87?"
You: I replied "88" and they terminated the conversation
Your conversational partner has disconnected.
*sigh*
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| OMEGLE |
[31 Mar 2009|04:49pm] |
*sigh*
Omegle must have seemed like a great idea up until about a seventeenth of a second after it went live, at which point the massively-diluted mass intellect of online humans entered the equation.
I've just had a go at it:
Stranger: 87?
You: 88
Stranger: CHALLENGE-RESPONSE FAIL
And the chat was terminated. What on earth happened there? What am I missing? Who starts a conversation by asking 87? Have I naively failed to recognise some kind of code?
*sigh*
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| STREETLIFE |
[24 Mar 2009|03:33pm] |
I went to the Latitude Festival launch party last night, which entailed going to a place in London I had not been to before. By way of preparation I thought it might be a good excuse to try out the new Streetview thing on Google Maps, and so I had the odd sensation of teleporting myself there in advance. Then, an hour later, I experienced the even odder sensation of deja vu, the feeling that I had actually been to that place before. Stuff like this makes me increasingly paranoid that our powers of perception are being slowly retrained by the shadowy elite to understand the way reality works - it's like remote-viewing or something like that. I'm reading way too much conspiracy theory nonsense these days.
Finally finished Graham Hancock's book 'Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind' which was splendidly mental, and stopped just short of being completely harebrained. In it, Hancock "argues" that caveman visions of spirits drawn on rocks, medieval goblins, Victorian fairies and modern-day alien encounters are all the same thing: hallucinations borne either of the accidental or intentional consumption of psychoactive plants, or of the spontaneous over-production of DMT, a hallucinogen produced by our brains for reasons that remain unexplained. Hancock, having braved many such trips himself, is convinced that these spirit/elf/alien beings exist in a parallel dimension and have been trying to make contact for tens of thousands of years. He sees it as a catch-all explanation for all supernatural events ever, from God to ghosts. And they are trying, bit by bit, to learn about us and teach us stuff that most people's brains are too puny to comprehend. Francis Crick himself believed that his discovery of DNA was in fact vouchsafed to him by the machine elves while on a hallucinogen trip. I personally would be much too scared to enter an altered state of mind like that, but there's no denying that science is faced with a massive blind spot when it comes to fundamental matters of consciousness and perception.
What else. I am currently being kept busy by a long-held ambition: I am composing a film score. It's a movie called Peacock Season, about a man who leaves his life in advertising to become a comedian. It's got lots of comedians in it. Film music was my pop music when everyone else at school was listening to indie bands, and I have long taken an active interest in the power the film composer has in determining the tone of a film. It's bally difficult though, much more difficult than you'd think. Having watched the 80-minute film through a few times I sat down with my keyboard in front of me and had a go at improvising along. Disaster! There's no two ways about it, the only way to do it is to make laborious charts of timings and tempos and time signatures and laboriously fit the music into the oddly-shaped gaps. There's two or three opportunities for songs in the soundtrack, so the way I'm coming up with the thematic material is to write the songs and then extrapolate melodies from there. The music is already changing some of the scenes almost beyond recognition, and the power and responsibility I have is rather frightening. I'll upload some soundtrack snippets soon in case anyone's interested in hearing them.
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| MFMO THIS THURSDAY |
[17 Mar 2009|01:14pm] |
This Thursday the 19th of March, The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra will be appearing at the Boogaloo pub in Highgate. We're on stage at 9.30pm and it's only three quid to get in. We'll be doing the usual over-the-top orchestral bluster and premiering a new song called 'Bad Joke' which I've written with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) reggie_c_king. Please come!
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| ANNA AND KATY SALUTE YOU |
[04 Mar 2009|11:51am] |
I went to the Drill Hall last night to see a kind of live TV pilot showcase thing which my friends Anna and Katy were doing for the BBC commissioning big cheeses. Danielle Ward and I had written a big opening number but for various reasons this didn't make it to the final show - they used the backing track as a theme tune though, which was still quite exciting. Anna and Katy are very funny ladies - I hope they get their show commissioned. It would be nice to see some harmless fun with proper jokes in it on BBC3 rather than yet another "edgy" and inconsistent sketch show.
The bun counter in Munch features baffling and unintentionally hilarious bun-labelling. The marshmallow cones have a label on them that says "If only this were real ice-cream". Some of the others look like they have been translated from Japanese. I'm going to have to take pictures of them and then figure out how to get pictures from my phone onto here. Is there any way of uploading them directly?
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| TEA |
[04 Mar 2009|10:27am] |
I just went to get a tea from the Purley branch of Munch, which boasts the surliest, rudest staff in the South East.
MUNCH LADY: mumble mumble
martylog: I'm sorry?
MUNCH LADY: DO. YOU. WANT. THE. BAG. LEFT. IN.
martylog: No.
MUNCH LADY: No what?
martylog: Erm... no thanks?
MUNCH LADY: (rolls eyes) "No" you want the bag left in or "no" you want the bag taken out?
martylog: You asked me do I want the bag left in. I said no. That means I don't want the bag left in.
MUNCH LADY: (wild furious eyes) Fine!
Gordon Bennett.
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