When the Red, Red Robbins.


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.

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