mostly david ephgrave

Today, Neil Innes told me off for writing a song so catchy it stuck in his head, which was a compliment I'm delighted to take on board. Posing with Neil Innes after tonight's Hitchin Mostly Comedy (03.10.19) He said it to me just after Glyn and I finished soundchecking Ukulele Girl for the evening's show; something I felt very conscious he was watching at the back. Being nonchalant about it was never going to be easy - this was someone who'd worked with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, after all - but I did my best to act like he was the sort of audience I put up with every day. He turned out to be lovely, which is always a bonus when you meet someone with his pedigree whose work you highly rate. I suspected I'd at least be able to talk to him quite freely about the work of him and his contemporaries, but it was nice that he was happy to discuss them, and was just generally a good sport. It goes to show how the biggest and best people we have at the c...

I had a worrying moment prior to Thursday’s Mostly Comedy, when I couldn’t remember a chord to the song Glyn and I were performing that night. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, as my musical ability is such that I’d normally be able to plug the mental gap (*smug face*), but the fact I was accompanying myself on the ukulele instead of a guitar or piano and am less familiar with its shapes, plus I'm severely out of practice, made it harder to retrieve the missing chord from the dim, dark recesses of my brain. The bizarre thing was, I'd remembered the song perfectly when I'd rattled through it the previous day. Then something about the stress of the set-up meant that when it came to doing a sound-check, the second chord vanished from my memory; the more I tried to remember it, the further it wriggled from my grasp. This made me panic, as I was the one who wrote t he song ; if I'd forgotten it, there was nobody to turn to: it would be gone forever.   My fi...

Last night’s eighth birthday Mostly Comedy was pinch-yourself ridiculous. Doggett, Bremner & Ephgrave at Hitchin Mostly Comedy (20.10.16); photo by Gemma Poole. If you’d told me when we started we would eventually play host to Rory Bremner, I would never have believed you. He was one of my comedy heroes growing up (without wishing to make him feel old), who played a (John) major factor in my awareness of current affairs. It was largely thanks to his sending up of the cut-and-thrust of the news that I learnt about the key players in world politics. While Glyn and I were hugely excited about having Rory on the bill, neither of us were prepared for just how lovely, low-key and undemanding he was. Meeting your heroes can be risky, particularly when you book them at your own event and have to shoulder responsibility for their evening. It turns out we had nothing to worry about; from the moment he arrived and we helped him park to when he left ...

A number of years back – I forget when, but it was more than a decade ago – I wrote a comedy song with my friend (and ex-Big Day Out drummer) Chris Hollis. We had a habit of doing this when we were in a band together. In fact, we never collaborated on anything serious. Our songs were written informally, with no intention for use, other than to amuse ourselves – and this one was no exception. I’d recently bought a ukulele, whilst touring the Netherlands, which became the song's starting point. I strummed a few chords on it while we sketched out the lyrics, which took an hour at most. This is what we came up with: The day I met my baby I was playing ukulele in the sunshine. Her name it was Talula And she travelled from Bermuda just to be mine. She loved me and my Hawaiian melody So Talula from Bermuda was my baby My ukulele girl. Well, sometimes I think that maybe That by playing ukulele I annoy her. And when she throws it in the ...