I Hate Mornings

I played on “Radio 4″:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/looseends.shtml on Saturday. It was the first time I had played on radio, the first time I had played Candlelit (Jont’s new single) live, the first time I had played the banjo in public and the first time I had met my childhood hero “Clive Anderson”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Anderson.

I learned a few things that day:

# Clive Anderson is (as I had hoped) a thoroughly good egg;
# Loose Ends is recorded around a table as if it’s live, so you sit and listen to all the clever folk yapping about their latest achievements before (and after) performing your own slice of marketing gold to a very diverse group of non-music types;
# Radio 4 (at least this bit of it) is crammed with fascinating, eloquent and passionate people;
# The intonation of a new banjo isn’t necessarily perfect, so playing the twelfth fret can be *really* under the octave.

The most interesting guest was “Emmanuel Jal”:http://www.rhymehouse.com/featureemmanueljal.html, a Sudanese child soldier who was rescued by a British aid worker and has become a rapper here in London. He’s a great guy, and his rapping is much more poetic than your average talk-singer. ;o) He’s going to come to the UNLIT on Friday and play with Jont and me, making it the best line-up to date (”Sam Sparro”:http://www.myspace.com/samsparro is coming to do his Live Lounge acoustic set too).

We’re playing “Johnnie Walker’s show”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/walker/ on Radio 2 in a couple of weeks, and I get to play piano (as well as banjo again) on that one. I doubt there will be quite as many “Egyptian novelists”:http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/event/the-writer-next-door hanging around though, which is a shame.