Notes From The City

By Londonist_Laura Last edited 211 months ago

Londonist_Laura Notes From The City

Notes From The City

Apologies for the lack of "Notes..." in recent weeks - I've been on tour! It all finished yesterday so I'm currently in an advanced version of the usual post-gig scratchy-eyed, achey-muscled, brain-freeze comedown haze.

Long hours spent in a splitter bus with the most uncomfortable seats in the world + no sleep + bad motorway snacks (as a vegetarian it's cheese or egg or egg or cheese for me) + jumping around on stage and screaming down a mic every night = superb fun but it does take a little while to get back to normal. So this week it's healthy-healthy eating, lots of gym visits and sleeeeeeeeeeeeep for me. How utterly rock 'n' roll, dahhhling.

I love being on tour. There's no better feeling than jumping on stage every night, even though sitting in a bus all day is a drag. The band I'm with at the moment are really lovely so the boring travelling time passed pretty quickly, luckily, and every gig was sold out - a first in my ten years of gigging. The only irritating thing I found in the whole time was the support bands assuming that, because we're playing with a burgeoningly successful act, we've all been given a load of free equipment and have 'people' to lug it all about for us! That's not quite how it works, sadly, and I found myself having to tell one boy off after he scoffed loudly "Haha, look, a girl carrying her own amp, hehehehe snort snort" (read in a Beavis/Butthead voice and you get the idea). In the immortal words of our sound engineer, "Jog on, knobhead!".

What with various TV promo work I've been doing recently I've been meeting and being in the same room/plane/area of the airport as a few semi-famous and semi-interesting people. I enjoy being surrounded by bands and other people in the entertainment business because we have a shared interest in performance and as such are colleagues. It's fascinating to be able to watch successful creative people at work, not because they're famous but because they must be doing something right to be doing well in their field and I want to know what it is! It's all good research.

I don't usually name names in this column but it's been a very celeb-heavy month or so and I'm proud to have shared the stage with some bands that I really like recently. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get to play at the Coliseum in Verona - the most amazing venue I've ever seen, let alone performed in. On the way home I shared a plane with Muse, The Feeling, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Nate James and Skye (formerly of Morcheeba, now solo), all of whom performed on the same show as me. I'm not one to be impressed by celebrity for celebrity's sake, as I've mentioned, but it is a surreal thing to be standing near so many well-known musicians at baggage claim. Sadly Mick Hucknall, who went on stage directly after the artist I was playing for, was not on board.

Last Thursday I made my Mum proud by appearing in the new series of 'Extras'. Much like Andy Millman himself in Series 1, I sometimes work as a 'background artist' or, as anyone who realises just how unimportant they actually are on set calls it, an 'extra'. It's not a bad job - it can be long hours and the pay isn't brilliant but pretty good for standing about not having to do much, I'd say. The day that I got to stand right next to David Bowie was a great one, though, and I only realised it had screened last Thursday when I started getting texts from bemused friends who had been surprised to see me on their screens.

Having recently detuned all the TVs in my house, perhaps ironically for someone whose job gets them on it fairly regularly, I'd missed both new episodes but was pleased to discover that they can be watched on BBC 2's page in their entirety. And at the risk of doing a complete Andy Millman, I'd like to share that moment with you all: