It’s called Man (hat on). I won’t tell you much more about it, because it’s all on the Man (hat on) blog! But I will show you this video, which is the best explanation we’ve come up with so far:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re going to be in New York in the first week of December, leave a comment or tweet me and I’ll keep you posted with the plans…

I won’t try to convince you that it’s a great idea, because Steve has made an educational video that does exactly that. I dare you to watch this and not want to book us to play in your office:

Check out the Office Gigs website for more about how it works, and if you work in a hipster kind of office why not get us to come and amuse you? ;)

And you know what? I feel better. I’ve done something today. I’ve put another recording out there into the ether and that counts. I’ve also arranged to screen print some tshirts for my New York tour, so I’m pretty much over-achieving now. I’ll make sure not to do anything too useful for the rest of the day.

Enjoy the song. And if you’ve never spent a Sunday morning listening to Little Feat, I suggest you address that pronto. The greatest hits (As Time Goes By) is a good start, and Waiting For Columbus is their definitive live album. If you’ve already been there and done that, drop me a note in the comments and I’ll hook you up with a wonderful 1974 radio session bootleg that you will LOVE. ;)

20 Million Things by ihatemornings

Singers of what, now?

Let’s face it. Nobody’s going to turn up to a gig called Singers Of Twitter II at random. Everyone in the audience knew one of the performers. Which always makes for a friendly and fun gig. But not everyone knew us in real life. There were people there who only knew us from the ‘tubes.

I met @postdocal at the bar after my set. “You must know Steve, right?”, I said. “Nope, but I know some of your stuff and some of Steve’s from the net.”, she said.

People connect.

And that’s what it’s all about. People connect. The music has context. Three acts that would confuse the hell out of an average pub crowd suddenly seem normal, familiar. Lloyd Davis‘ ukulele songs are joyful and then breathtakingly melancholy. My musical tweets and quirky songs are surprising and funny. Steve’s bass playing is phenomenal and engrossing. Lobelia’s singing is stunning and sweet. We (and I mean the audience as much as the performers) are like a musical family enjoying an get-together around the piano. Except we’re only related by Twitter and the piano has morphed into a ukulele, two guitars, a six-string bass and a rack full of magical looping gizmos.

If only Lily Allen could have been there. She’d have loved it.

UPDATE: Quality video

@edent took a few videos at the gig. Here’s the Twitter song live!:

You should also check out Lloyd Davis and Steve Lawson playing All Of Me with uke and bass and Steve and Lobelia doing a wicked country version of You Spin Me Round with crowd singalong!

UPDATE: Beautiful feedback

I got some great messages after the show (Twitter can be such a happy place…):

_Jo_: Great eve at Darbucka listening to @ihatemornings performing songs to tweets, v amusing. Plus wine , nice grub and good company.

catstress: Home from fab night at darbucka – much fun & great to finally get to see @ihatemornings live…

guitartim: In more +ve news, loved the Darbucka gig tonight. @solobasssteve & @lobelia awesome as always, @lloyddavis uke-tastic, @ihatemornings genius

lobelia: @ihatemornings So lovely to finally see you play. You and @lloyddavis were on top form tonight! Such a fun night! x

solobasssteve: it must be said, @ihatemornings & @LloydDavis make for a top quality double bill. Glad to have them both on board for @officegigs :)

Louforyou: @guitartim @lobelia @solobasssteve @ihatemornings @_jo_ @j_ane @catstress THANK YOU for a special evening :-) #darbucka

Jont is running a series of Sunday gigs at (Up)market, an outdoor market just off Brick Lane. The gig runs from 1-6pm, and there are four or five acts playing at each one.

I’m playing this afternoon (probably around 4pm), and again next week. If you’re in London, you should come and check it out. The bands will be playing in the market square (you can’t miss them), or if the weather won’t play nice we’ll be in the underground tea room. Either way, it’s going to be a classic UNLIT-style happening with (apparently) really good cake.

If I can carry all the technology I’ll liveblog some photos, but whatever happens I’ll post some video updates on my 12seconds channel and Twitter away like a maniac as usual.

TED

TED is a conference where massively successful people give 18-minute talks and everyone schmoozes. It costs thousands to attend. People tend to either give inspiring talks on success and creativity, or demonstrate some futuristic technology.

The most important thing about TED is that all the talks are filmed, and the videos are available online for free. It’s an amazing resource which you should definitely check out. It beats watching reruns of Dragon’s Den on iPlayer.

Tuttle

Tuttle is a ‘loose association of people’ with an interest in social media. The Tuttle Club meets every Friday morning at the ICA (10-12 in the bar). Anyone can turn up. There are usually between 50 and 100 people there, most of whom are wonderfully interesting. There’s no structure (Lloyd welcomes people at 11, but that’s it). People talk.

The most important thing about Tuttle is the connections that are made there, all under the watchful eye of the Tuttle’s ukulele-playing curator, Lloyd Davis. All the interesting online stuff I’ve done in the last year has been somehow connected to Tuttle.

TEDxTuttle

TED is huge. They run international spin-off conferences, and have speakers like Al Gore and Bill Clinton. This year they launched TEDx, which gives any group the opportunity to organise their own TED event. There are some ground rules, and the events are filmed and submitted to TED.

So TEDxTuttle was 90 people (some Tuttlers, some not) in a conference centre at Monument. We watched some TED videos, we listened to some speakers, we drank coffee and chatted. I gave a talk on Babble + Context = Conversation, including live performances of a few of the Tweet Suite movements, and sang the Twitter song.

Photos, blogs etc.

Being a social media event, there was plenty of coverage online, both live and afterwards. Here are a few highlights:

• Adam Tinworth was liveblogging. He covered Maggie Philbin on Tomorrow’s World, Rachel Armstrong on The Future of Buildings, Lloyd Davis on Tales of Tuttle, me on Twitter(ish) and Mat Morrison on Measuring Social Media.
• Benjamin Ellis took some great photos of TEDxTuttle (a couple of which I’ve used on this post under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
• Andy Roberts posted a quick blog about Rachel Armstrong’s talk on ‘living architecture’ (including a video of Rachel from a previous event explaining her work with protocells).
• Jennifer Jones blogged about TEDxTuttle from an outsider’s perspective.
• Alan Patrick (who organised the event) wrote up his thoughts about the TEDxTuttle event and all the talks.

I also believe that when people are grateful for music they will thank the musician. That might be a pat on the back after a gig, a quid in a hat, or a slice of cake. It might be a fan club subscription, a £200 gig ticket, or a yacht. But when people aren’t grateful for music there is no reason why they would thank the musician.

I don’t believe that I have a right to earn money from my music. When people are grateful for my music they offer me stuff.

Rather than leave argumentative comments all over the internet, I’m going to offer you links to some different viewpoints on the matter. All are well-argued and interesting. I don’t agree with all of them, but I think it’s important to try to see this issue from a few different perspectives.

• “To eliminate or to throttle file sharing is an assault on your rights as an artists.”, Just Say NO To Putting An End To Illegal Music Sharing. by Bruce Warila
• “In this day and age, of course, it’s particularly hard to persuade anyone to buy music, when they can just get it for free, anonymously, on the internet.”: Releasing a new album! Tell me your thoughts! by Nick Gill
• “This is like what happened when we moved from sheet music to recorded music. Only more so.”, Thing 20: Forget product – sell relationship by Andrew Dubber
• “Having an audience of 500,000 that aren’t currently making you any money would be an INCREDIBLELY WONDERFUL problem to have to solve.”, Promotion Is A Numbers Game (Get Heard!) by Steve Lawson
• “If it still sounds petulant to some people for me to say that I “expect” some reward when other people enjoy the fruits of my art, time and money, I can only respond that it sounds petulant to me when people say they expect it for free.”, Short Replies by Frank Turner

If I work out the answer I’ll let you know. ;)

Yesterday I played the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to the man himself. I’ll upload the photos and video as soon as I get some decent Wifi (Xander uploaded a quick photo yesterday where you can just about make him out).

The fiasco prompted some interesting, thoughtful and occasionally inspirational blog posts from Twitter sympathisers, the best of which was a post by @glinner called The Conversation. It is in fact a direct response to yet another badly-researched Twitter piece in the broadsheets, but it presents a good answer to the ‘babble’ accusation:

…we are communicating with each other on a platform that encourages good manners, that rewards us when we’re interesting and lightly smacks our hand when we’re not. For the first time in history, the human race is having a global conversation, and despite all our differences, we actually seem to be getting on quite well.

Twitter is all about context, and that’s what you can’t see from the outside. Let’s take the classic ‘what I had for breakfast’ tweet:

Avocado on toast. Breakfast of champions. @aliteralgirl

This tweet is not:

• newsworthy;
• literary genius;
• life-changing;
• hilarious;
• sponsored by the Avocado Board with support from the Olympic Committee;
• inciting hatred;
• illegal.

Neither is it:

• boring;
• pointless;
• narcissistic;
• laughable;
• ridiculous;
• a sign that society is doomed.

But it is:

• cute;
• positive;
• polite;
• pithy.

I know @aliteralgirl.

If I didn’t know @aliteralgirl, and I were browsing the Twitter public timeline trying to classify tweets for some shonky PR research assignment, and one of the categories available was ‘Babble’, I would probably class this tweet as ‘Babble’.

But I happen to know @aliteralgirl. And she knows me. We talk in real life once or twice a week, and the rest of the time we’re part of The Conversation on Twitter. So when I saw this tweet I read it as shorthand for something like this:

I’m eating avocado. It’s after 11, so I probably overslept and might be late for my teaching job. I’ll probably have to cycle like a demon to get there, but once I’m there nobody will really care that I was late and I’ll sit staring out of the window as usual. So for now I’m quite amused that I’ve made myself a slightly quirky breakfast, and I’m glad to be able to share it with a handful of people who might be reading Twitter at the moment.

Rather than just reporting my breakfast, which is acceptable but mediocre I’m adding a comment. Staking a claim. Not only am I eating avocado on toast, I’m telling you, the world, that it’s a great thing. Breakfast of champions. If you want to be a champion, you should really be eating this. If I were publishing this in a newspaper, or standing on a street corner shouting it, I would probably choose different words. Something more straightforward, maybe. ‘I love avocado on toast’ or ‘Eat avocado on toast’. But given that my boyfriend (who will definitely read this) and most of the other people who regularly spot my tweets generally have a certain quirky, British sense of humour, I’ve written it as a deadpan advertising slogan knowing full well that everyone will understand the spirit in which it was written. Except maybe the girl who’s watching the public timeline and classifying tweets. She’ll probably put it in the ‘Babble’ box.

You see, this tiny bit of babble is part of a huge conversation. My interpretation is only one of many, and the conversation carries over seamlessly into real life. You might even say that, in this case, the online part of the conversation is an extension of the real life part.

A justimanifestification for the Tweet Suite

I get a bit antsy and embarrassed when artists start to justify and explain their work, or produce manifestos, or make claims about the effects their work has on the world. But sometimes art does have a relevance beyond the aesthetic. Feel free to slap me round the face with a trout if I’m disappearing up my own arse, but I think the Tweet Suite has a message, albeit a simple one:

Babble is valuable in context.

In the context of a conversation, babble has value. With the Tweet Suite I’m setting babble to music, and that gives it context and therefore value. By making the avocado on toast tweet into an annoyingly catchy jingle, I’ve given it an unexpected life beyond its fleeting appearance on a handful of screens.

[The track isn\'t included in the RSS feed. Visit the blog to listen. ;o]

Don’t get me wrong. I’m writing the Tweet Suite (50 movements in 90 days) because it’s fun, it’s something interesting to talk about, and I work better to a deadline. But whenever Twitter gets accused of being babble, I’m going to jump on a chair and give an impromptu performance of Movement 7 of the Tweet Suite. So if you see a 9-foot fop singing about avocado on toast, you’ll know what’s going on. And I’d appreciate it if you could join in with the harmonies at the end.