London Launch Party – a retrospective

So all of three days ago now, I played at my London album launch, which was held at the George on the Strand. It was really rather ace. (for those of you who are in the US, the NY launch is on December 12. Click here for the facebook event page.)

The original plan was to hold it at the Duke of Uke, but when they said they didn’t have the space, and we realised there’d be twice as many people attending as could fit in the Duke, we had to reconsider. I used to do stand-up at the George most weeks back in the mists of time, and so I knew they had a reasonable sized room. It turned out to be perfect.

There were about 100 people in attendance, I think. The audience were receptive and excited, and wonderfully loud and cheery in response to everything played.

The evening started with a full but quick and breezy run-through of most of Awkward Ballads, my first album. I thought it would be interesting to chart the changes I’d undergone between first and second albums, and I think the most interesting highlight was how much easier Awkward Ballads was to sing. A lot of the songs don’t have melodies so much as words strung together in rhythms, so it’s pretty easy to be quite off on a lot of notes and for it to still sound okay. Not so with Painfully Mainstream. A couple of the blogs I’ve read about the evening have said that my voice wasn’t great. One even went so far as to say that they’d have been happier were it just an Alex Day and Eddplant gig. I think this is the fundamental difference between people who hear music casually and are kinda into it and people who genuinely listen to and understand and appreciate it – people who prefer perfectly polished pop to rougher, more interesting things that are open to wider interpretation as art. But that’s another blog entry entirely*.

The next section of the show was dedicated to my good friends Alex and Ed, who both played a number of their songs, and were both excellent. Ed was on top form as a musician and a performer, and Alex did a wonderful rendition of all his greatest songs. I was as proud of them as I could possibly be.

The third part of the evening involved all three of us up on the stage playing through my new album, Painfully Mainstream. The biggest issues here were two-fold – there was a microphone that didn’t work, which I think got a lot of the audience quite impatient after a few minutes, and there were the complex manoeuvres of the piano, which we had to continually shift back and forth on the tiny stage in order for things to work properly. This led to a lot of dead air, often for a good 10 seconds, where we really should’ve been talking to the audience and connecting with them so as not to lose their attention. When it’s just me + uke, the show always bounces along nicely and I can get the atmosphere ever higher – with the constant shifting of equipment, it was hard to get people excited for more than the length of a song. Sad.

Despite this, we sold awesome amounts of merch (I sold more than half of all the copies of my CD I have) and spent an hour after the show signing things that people wanted us to sign. It was a great evening, and one that I’d love to recreate elsewhere in the country – perhaps next time with a backstage area. It was awkward to start the show, because I had to walk through the crowd to do so. What we really needed was somebody to go on and introduce us with, like, a really brief opening act. (Thax – I’m looking at you. Do you have international delegates?)

Alex’s blog on the gig: http://alexdaymusic.com/25/

Ed’s blog on the gig: http://eddplant.com/2009/12/performance-postmortem/

*and oh boy, it’ll be a good one.

Some videos of the evening: