The last few days
have been a bit of a mad panic dash to book line-ups for our autumn Mostly
Comedy season in Hitchin, which - despite being organised very close to the
finish line - has turned out really rather nicely, if I do say so myself.
The show I’m
personally looking forward to the most is the one I’ve literally just confirmed
in the last hour or so: October’s gig will be headed by Kate Robbins, with the no less
excellent Jay Foreman bringing up the rear. And while I haven’t had the chance
to speak to Glyn about it yet I suspect it will be the same for him too, as
Kate was someone we’ve both had in the back of our minds as an act we’d like to
book, ever since we went to see her Edinburgh show in 2008, while we were in
the midst of our first EdFringe run with The Balloon Debate, which was at
the Gilded Balloon too.
It was just so good,
and such a great mix of music and comedy from someone who was a consummate,
grounded performer who was as great at telling a story as she was doing an
impression or singing a song. It was particularly marked for me, as Robbins is
Paul McCartney’s cousin, so it inevitably led to me sharing the odd fact about
him to Glyn, who’s had to listen these snippets for years with patience. I seem
to remember Robbins sang McCartney’s tribute to Lennon, ‘Here Today’, which was
worthy of a Macca story from me (or two).
The booking today
came about purely by chance, when a Mostly Comedy regular happened to quote us
in a tweet about how much she’d love Robbins to come to the club, which was a
timely reminder while I was in the midst of booking acts, as it put it back in
the forefront of my mind as a possibility (I seem to remember contacting her
agent not long after we started the club in 2008 too, though it was very much
in its infancy at that point).
The catalyst from
that point was clocking that Kate had followed our Twitter account as a result
of yesterday’s little to-and-fro. On speaking to her by DM we discovered she
lives just a few miles down the road, and so the deal was struck. It was the
perfect way to fill the final gap in our autumn itinerary, which what with also
having the likes of Reginald D Hunter, Angelos Epithemiou and Barry from
Watford, looks pretty damn special; not bad for a few days' work.