Somewhere in the hinterlands of Shoreditch, moving towards the big bad city there is a nice gastro-ish pub tucked away called The Fox. The beer's good and they serve excellent sausage and mash. They have a lovely upstairs room in which a Mexican man called Jilberto has started his own night armed with a big speaker and a small hi-fi unit for iPhones.
The audience was made up of the comics plus the pub chef's girlfriend and two friends of the promoter. This put somewhat of a dampner on it being my first official "headline" show where my photo and biog had been featured on the Facebook invite. However, a show is a show and I settled in for an hour of comedy from faces new and old. William Lee was particularly strong with a whole arsenal of new surreal observations since I last saw him. Jilberto himself was charming and personable.
Given the numbers and the lack of a mid-show break I kept my set to two tracks and delivered them with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. Not even the hi-fi micro-system piddling out my backing tracks was going to stop me. It worked well enough for everyone in the room to join in and yet another audience member to start videoing me on their mobile mid-song, something that is happening at pretty much every gig I've done recently.
I've no idea what people do with half-song snatches of footage but if it means more people are seeing me somewhere I'm more than happy for them to do so. Maybe these small open-mic level gigs should be called social media nodes then we could start including our virtual audiences in the figures as well as those on the seats that night.
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