We’re looking to do more house gigs, so send me a message if you want The Diarys to play a set round at your house.

We love playing house gigs, so if you want The Diarys to come and play at your house, just send me a message!

Please get in touch if you would like to book The Diarys for a gig.

Please get in touch if you would like to book The Diarys for a gig.

If you would like The Diarys to play in your living room (or anywhere else for that matter),  just send us a message.

Cheers!

If you’d like The Diarys to play in your home, just send me a message!

Enjoy!

Anyone who knows me well, knows how much I love playing music. So after listening to this episode of the CD Baby DIY Musician podcast featuring Fran Snyder, a musician who runs a website called Concerts in Your Home, I thought “I can do that”!

I asked the other guys in The Diarys whether they would be up for it and they all agreed. So we went ahead and put on the gig at the weekend, inviting a few friends along to turn it into a bit of a party.

And what a great evening it was! Not only did everyone enjoy themselves, but we passed a hat to collect some cash on behalf of Shelter, the housing and homelessness charity and raised nearly eigthy quid!!

Anyway, I recorded and videoed the entire set, so I’ll be putting a video on this site every week for the next few weeks. I’ll also be posting them on Facebook and YouTube (but you can download them from here and the quality might be a bit better too).

So watch this space!

One of the bands I play with on a semi-regular basis is Acoustic Soup, which consists of me on guitar and vocals, my brother Arthur on mandolin, dobro and vocals, my son Nils on bass guitar (and a few vocals here & there!) and my good friend Carl Warner on percussion.

We don’t play gigs very often, maybe once every couple of months or so, but when we do it’s usually at a venue in Tunbridge Wells called the Grey Lady, on an evening run by local musician and promoter Paul Dunton.

The man who used to take care of all the sound engineering at these gigs was until recently a lovely bloke and hugely talented musician called Ollie Nicholls. Tragically however, he was killed in a road accident in the early hours of 30th March 2008.

Ollie’s sudden death had a profound impact on all who knew him.

This song, Sleep Softly, was written by Arthur in his memory.

Ollie Nicholls

Listen Now:

To listen to the song, click on the player icon below.

What is the Social Media Cafe? Well, a few months back, a visionary chap by the name of Lloyd Davis came up with the idea that it would be good to have a fixed location where social media types (bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, geeks, techies, creative folk, entrepreneurs, shameless self-promoters et al) could get together to chat, swap ideas, socialise, co-work, make deals and generally inspire each other. (See Lloyd’s original post on the subject).

It’s an excellent idea and Lloyd has done a fantastic job in making it happen. It’s now a weekly occurence, upstairs at the Coach & Horses in Greek Street every Friday between 10am and about midday. Although I’ve only been along to one so far (number 3 I think, which was indeed a very rewarding experience), reports from attendees are always overwhelmingly positive.

There’s always a danger with Social Media tools like Twitter and Facebook of only connecting with people online. What I love about the Social Media Cafe is it gives people the opportunity to go along and meet face-to-face and make real personal connections. Whilst “Web 2.0″ is great for connecting with and communicating with people, there’s no substitute (and I don’t think there ever will be) for real human contact.

So I’ll be going along tomorrow morning in the hope of meeting some interesting people and having some stimulating conversations. See you there?

I originally posted this gig report on the Little Fish Big Pond website, but I thought I might as well stick it up on here as well!

So, the first LFBP gig of 2008 was an acoustic set at The Grey Lady in Tunbridge Wells, on one of Paul Dunton’s music nights.

We were the second of four acts playing that evening, the others being Maidstone duo Staring at Goats, Paul’s partner in crime Ollie Nichols and our buddies and regular Fishbowl performers Sound Sanctuary, who were headlining for the evening.

We’d had a rehearsal earlier in the week to decide on the set and run through it a couple of times - much needed as we hadn’t played together for weeks. The whole thing was very democratic, we each selected two songs for the eight-song set and voted on the choice of two covers.

First up was “Better Man” a song off the new album Eye Candy, which went OK. Bit of an “interesting” guitar solo from Craig on that one (I think he got away with it!). Then Martin got his bodhran out for “Point of Departure”, which swung along quite nicely, then it was Craig’s turn to take lead vocals for “Good News”. That song always seems to go down well with the crowd and tonight was no exception, we got a big cheer at the end of it.

Now that the audience were warmed up a bit, we played a couple of blasts from the past - “Still I Stay” and “Can’t Get Away” from our first album (In the Can), both pretty upbeat tunes that got some decent cheers. We had planned to play “24/7″ next, but time was running out, so Mr Dunton got up on stage to announce the two alternatives for our “people’s choice” (i.e. a cover song selected by the audience) - Teenage Kicks by The Undertones or It’s Only Natural by Crowded House.

Teenage Kicks was the hands-down winner, so we grooved into our very bijou-sounding acoustic version, then finished off with another old favourite from our first album, “Doing the Right Thing”. Excellent response from the crowd, great vibe, all in all a pretty successful gig!

We stuck around afterwards to listen to “melancholy Ollie” settle the audience down with his beautiful songs, and Sound Sanctuary finished the evening off by playing a blinding set, especially their Warren G/Nate Dogg cover (pure class!).

We recorded the evening and you can get the MP3 from the Little Fish Big Pond website.

Next gig we have planned is at Fishbowl Acoustic at the Trinity Arts in Tunbridge Wells on Saturday 19th April.