The Trash

Where did the last eight months go?

Oh, hello. Let’s cut to the good stuff right up top - here’s another storytelling video I made. It’s a true story that I wrote and drew all the pictures, wrote and performed all the music singlehandedly¹. Watch it here and then tell all your friends to do the same².

Now that’s out of the way, here’s a thrilling glimpse behind the scenes.
This was made for and performed live at the Show N Tell³ event that David Gaffney and I ran at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival in September 2024. This was the second time we ran this event, and it was a lot of fun, some real good times.
We had stories read out by Aimee De Jongh, David Gaffney, Emma Vieceli (more about Emma’s story below) Isabel Greenberg, John Allison, Kate Charlesworth, Kevin Raymundo and Luke Healy.

Emma illustrated and performed a number from the musical that she’s written, Unfolding, accompanied by her husband on guitar. Good times.

The event itself was a lot of fun, but a ton of work. In addition to formatting everyone’s presentation so it all ran smooth, I also illustrated David Gaffney’s story about a man who steals a whale’s brain. I think we should/could record a video version of this so that it lives somewhere other than only the minds of the people who were there on the night.

I had decided for my story, that instead of just recording a soundtrack and playing it in the background while I told my story about a nighttime creep, that it’d be MUCH MORE FUN to play it live. Nobody asked for this. I do, however really like a mix of storytelling and music. I got to see Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborn performing The Balled Of Roger And Grace⁴ while I was putting this together, which was very enjoyable.

Here’s an early look at me prototyping the audio workflow⁵

The audio setup changed a little as I developed the story. I was running rhythm and fx from Ableton live⁶, triggering clips with an APC mini. I was then setting clips to record with a midi commander pedal, which was taking a signal from my pedal board with various effects and loops⁷ and running that into the amp and back into Ableton to be retriggered later on by the APC. I realised at a certain point that my life would be easier if I just got my own PA system⁸. I found one for sale for £50 on eBay and now I have a PA system in my studio that gets very sparse use⁹.

I then released that if I’m running complicated audio through my nice laptop, then how do we run the keynote presentation? I figured that out and everything was fine¹⁰.

I originally started work on a different spooky story about gold prospectors in a secluded coastal valley going bananas and dismantling each other, but jettisoned that idea onto the ‘one day maybe’ pile in favour of recounting a story from my own life from the summer of 1997¹¹. This is a true story, it all happened¹², but maybe not all on the same day¹³. So yes there was a weird guy with a porno cape and top hat¹⁴, and yes he did the weird squat thing and yes it was the early hours of the morning¹⁵.

Back to the event. I had a letter from the hospital a few weeks before asking me to come for surgery¹⁶ the day after the show at 7am. My schedule was: get to the festival in the Lake District, get set up, do the show, pack everything into the car immediately, drive home, get very little sleep, go to the hospital and get some surgery.

So I did that¹⁷.

Then, as often happens I realised it is eight months later and I haven’t edited the story together or really done anything with it, so here we are. I should get better at this¹⁸.

In other news, I am making and selling pens again, you can get one if you want.

1. This is a frankly heroic level of dedication to the narrative arts, I eagerly await my medal and sceptre from the committee.

2. Nobody shares anything any more, right? We all agreed that only the algo can feed us all the nutrients we need right? GodDAMN I miss blogs.

3. I wrote about the first incarnation here.

4. Always a treat to watch Daniel Kitson perform. Heckuva storyteller.

5. Ughh so sorry you had to see my “harbour-corpse-day-4” hands.

6. I hadn’t used Ableton much before, but I really like it, especially in this setup.

7. I eventually replaced all the loopers with Ableton and my life got much easier at that point.

8. The PA was from a social club that had recently shut down somewhere in the midlands. The couple I got it from were very nice, and didn’t seem at all put out that I was the sole bidder on a system that should have rightly sold for much more than I paid for it.

9. No, I’m not a hoarder, I just like to have all the things that I covet and build myself a snug nest inside them all from which I can observe the outside world untroubled.

10. I found a MacBook Air on eBay for about £90 and used that. Now I have too many MacBooks BUT if I get mugged on the street, I can send the criminals away with the cheap one and get away with it, because who in their right mind would carry TWO MacBooks?

11. I think it was 1997? Who cares, come at me “fact checkers”

12. That building used to catch fire all the time, and at least once it was probably my fault. I blame a lack of proper training and culture of bravado in regards to health and safety.

13. Print the legend, right?

14. The image of this guy doing this is seared into my brain, I think about this dude a lot.

15. As a man who has not had a nighttime job in literal decades, I don’t really know if this kind of oddness still happens today. It felt like it happened a lot in the 90s but I probably did spent a lot more time outside at night back then?

16. Nothing very exciting, I had an umbilical hernia that needed popping back in. Simultaneously gross and underwhelming.

17. It was fine, although I didn’t have time to unpack the car until after the surgery, so although I had been told not to lift anything heavier than a kettle for six weeks, I was shamefully and very carefully lugging PA speakers and amplifiers about the very next day. YES, I know.

18. I will probably not get better at this.