Phil Collins, Al Murray and 2 Drummers Drumming on Lunch With The Hamiltons

Phil Collins on TV shock!
Firstly, a big apology for not updating this blog sooner but as the Edinburgh run got into it's stride and we decided not to let the rain dampen our enthusiasm for the festival, attention to blogging seemed to be a minor casualty.
So this is a little update to say that we are and will be keeping the 2 DRUMMERS DRUMMING show and even this blog flying. We are undergoing a redesign on the 2 Drummers drumming website @ www.twodrummers.com but it will up and running and structured to keep the news and debate central.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control we had to cancel the very last show of our run on the bank holiday monday August 25th. However the previous day, the 24th August we had a storming last show after our appearance on Lunch With The Hamiltons, where we seemed to go down really well.

Did you see Phil Collins, as a guest on the first in the new series of Al Murray's HAPPY HOUR on Friday?
As you know, we always felt close to having Phil as a guest on the show and it brought a smile to our faces when he ended his slot with Al, with the two of them playing the set of a pub with drum sticks... we like to think that somewhere in the ether, when we ended most performances of 2 Drummers Drumming taking a leaf out of our hero Buddy Rich's book, when he said
"when I play a club I like to PLAY a club"
that that found it's way to the researchers on Al's show. It would have been a true joy to literally, have Phil Collins PLAY.. the Bongo Club at Edinburgh with us. Perhaps next year eh? We'll be in touch.
M&M

Our guests, Toby Litt and is 2 Drummers Drumming - comedy or music?

Hi there, sorry we've been a bit lax the past couple of days posting here - but that's because this Edinburgh adventure is full on and takes up most of the day, however today we have a rest and make way for the Amused Mouse? comedy awards at The Bongo Club, which also means that Math can scoot off to Scarborough to play a festival with Dodgy.

There's so much going on, where do we start?
Well before we do. Perhaps check out the Podcast in the latest edition of the Three Weeks magazine. Here's a link
THREE WEEKS PODCAST

So perhaps we'll start with the last two days shows, both very different but equally fantastic.
On Friday(15th) we had author Toby Litt as our special guest. Anybody who has seen the show will have heard us introduce ourselves saying "My name is Mathew and I play the drums in a band called Dodgy" and "My name is Maurice and I play the drums in a band called The Love Affair" - ok, it is on our minds but Toby's most recent book is called 'I Play The Drums In A Band Called Okay' .. see what we did there. Any novelist that can make a drummer the central and title character of a proper book has got to be a hero in our book and Toby popped in to say a few words about the book and join in our 2 Drummers Drumming Five Minute Drum Lesson (pt 2). We really like the novel and Toby lived up to all our expectations.

Then yesterday Saturday (16th) we had a near sell-out crowd which totally upped the ante on the show and we were truly amazed at the response.
When we first came to Edinburgh the August 16th show was an enigma from the start. We noticed that tickets appeared to be flying out and this wasn't just the Fringe ticketing system going awol again. No, we were genuinely selling tickets for this show. It turns out that one of the reasons for this was that the best man of a certain Edinburgh drummer called Dan had organised 2 Drummers Drumming to be the first event on his stag night day. When we got the email asking if we could acknowledge him in the audience, we were only too pleased, it's not every show that gets such a nice block booking. The best man sent us some photos of the groom that we duly adapted to the shows theme and hopefully gave him a good time whilst providing a bit of additional entertainment for the rest of the audience.
Quite frankly, even if we say ourselves, this show rocked and we'd like to thank everyone there for making it a good one for us.

We're still fired up about this whole Edinburgh experience and are looking forward to hitting the third week of activities. Because we are spending a lot of time flyering and doing what we can to promote the show it's been hard following up our guest drummers, though it seems everyone who has seen the show so far appreciates the story about Charlie Watts and the lengths we went to to try and get him up to Edinburgh.
We do have a couple of guests lined up next week though. John Otway will be coming onto the show on Monday. John has devised a system of electronic drums attached to his body and he is a great character - we had a great time at John's Edinburgh show with Wild Willy Barrett. We'd recomend it but think that it's run has finished now. We've also got Andrew Paresi coming on the show on Wednesday. Andrew was once Morrissey's drummer and has got a few stories to tell as well as being a very funny man.

Finally, a couple of extra curricular bonus appearances by 2 Drummers. We are particularly excited about being invited onto Lunch With The Hamiltons as guests which will probably be on Sunday August 24th.
This coming Wednesday, 2 Drummers Drumming will be at the Drum Central drum shop on South Clerk Street in Edinburgh, where we will be doing excerpts from the show in the window and chatting to anyone who wants to drop by.
Hopefully if you are in and around Edinburgh and haven't seen the show yet you will be able to pop down next week.

Is 2 Drummers Drumming music or comedy - Where are the reviews?

This is just a (hopefully) short musing on one of our current dilemmas.
2 Drummers Drumming is going really well but the one thing we have had difficulty doing is getting reviewers down. The main reason for this appears to be our categorisation in the Fringe Programme under the 'Music' category rather than 'Comedy'....
We are really appreciative of the way that we're getting our audiences by genuine word of mouth but obviously some reviews would help. A good review even better and a good review with a couple of positive quotable sentences Fringe olympic gold. But our problem seems to be that we have listed ourselves under 'music'.
We originally, and humbly thought.. well, we have no right to call ourselves 'comedians' because we're not, we're drummers. Though a couple of people at the Fringe Roadshow we attended did say.. oh go on .. place yourselves under comedy regardless. But in the end we struck a compromise, put our listing in Music and our fringe programme advert in the comedy pages. Now this obviously works for punters but for reviews editors we have hit a wall. There are obviously bunches more theatre and comedy reviewers than there are those for music.
We have been really flattered by the amount of people who come up to us after the shows and say things like, they've had more genuine comedy laugh moments at 2 Drummers than they've had at a lot of stand up they've seen and so now we're trying to change our listing to comedy as 2 Drummers is definitely more of an entertainment than a music show.
Once again, next week, we'll be doing what we can to get some reviews.. let's see what happens..
best
M

Our first ever review for 2 Drummers Drumming (Scotsman)

Think we had a genuine Edinburgh moment today, in fact there might have been more but none so strange as an event that occurred while flyering for 2 Drummers Drumming on the Royal Mile.

It's been a tough two days for 2 Drummers, well probably everyone trying to promote a show on the streets. Now don't get us wrong. We have taken to street publicity like ducks to water. Our homemade sandwich board is a work of art even if we say so ourselves and cost about 5 times to make as it should have .. but it well...works and we have totally enjoyed being able to talk to people and video your 'drummer joke' contributions.... But it would work even better if the weather conditions up here for the last two days hadn't developed into the category of monsoon. We bought three umbrellas and then felt greedy and took pity on some rain drenched urchin trying to hand out soggy remnants of some other show's publicity and gave one away.

However, just for a moment today. It all got too much.
Now in all the hustle and bustle around the street, it is quite likely that things get misheard.. but we had an interaction on the following lines... perhaps for a moment we were staring into space when someone comes up and the voice of an actual show-goer says
"What's up there, you ok?"
we reply, clutching our own paper mache version of the soggy flyers..
"..sorry.. just for the moment I lost the will to live!"
reply:
"oh really? What time are you on?"
perhaps you had to be there

We had another 2 Drummers first today. Our FIRST REVIEW. In the Scotsman. That's the first review of 2 Drummers anywhere. Needless to say after we all nonchalantly dismissed it claiming not to care about reviews, we dissected it with a fine scalpel. Overall our conclusion is positive, helped immensely by the fact that in the same edition Math had managed to get us a nice fat column called SellUsYourShow, with a photo. The review itself was 3/5 .. not at all bad, certainly over half full on the good side and considering these are our first baby steps on the boards, speaking as opposed to banging, a little victory. Our current favourite bit is that the show is "bad news for fans of drum solos, but good news for well adjusted members of society" - Would that work as a quote on future publicity? the reviewer also described 2 Drummers Drumming as "an easy going, ramshackle but endearing hour of music industry anecdotes" if we could have added "that's getting better every day" we would certainly take it.

The reviewer also took the opinion that we hadn't fully developed the concept of our DIPC (Drummer Identification Playing Cards), she might have a point but our biggest current challenge is to fit so much material into our 1 hour slot (we have been able to add 5 mins on our advertised time). If we had time we'd explain how all the Jacks are Juniors, that the Queens are girls but that if you've got Roger Taylor from Queen then he really had to be a queen (see what we did there) and that haven stolen a DIPC 'place' from the girls, it was even hard filling the other 3 places with girls who might conceivably make it to Edinburgh. Meg White has been having anxiety attacks and we probably haven't helped by bombarding her with emails and letters and approaching people around her at every possible opportunity. So the girls just got too hard, so we allocated a card to Karen Carpenter, the thinking behind it being that we had as much chance of getting her to Edinburgh as any of the other girls and if we are going for impossible targets why not have the top impossible target.

Anyway, we're posting this because there's the possibility that we won't be posting for the next couple of days as both of us are off to play festivals here and there. Mathew to do Summer Sundae with Dodgy in Leicester on Saturday, preceded by a benefit gig in Oxford tomorrow night and Maurice who's off to Germany with The Love Affair.
We did our show this afternoon and had a special guest Ken Andrew from Middle Of The Road, what a sport he is. Ken's band Middle of The Road sold millions of copies of the single Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, impressive indeed and will be playing with Maurice in Germany at the weekend.

We'll miss the hustle and bustle of Edinburgh for a couple of days but not the peculiarly idiosyncratic rain and intend to come back fighting fit for Sunday's show at The Bongo Club at 4.30pm. Hopefully see you there.

The art of Sandwich Board manufacture -John Otway and Wild Willy Barratt - Edward Aczel - Edinburgh Fringe Opening Party

Well we are slowly getting into the fringe. We have moved from our highland rehearsal rooms into Edinburgh. For the next two weeks we are splashing out on a flat share. What happens after that depends on how well we can do getting people into and interested in the show, if we can afford it we'll be able to keep the flat on... it's a cut throat business this Fringe...

There's something about Edinburgh that brings the bohemian/artisan/randy puppy out of all of us all here at 2 Drummers, but I daren't say who is which but we are seriously considering getting someone in the party spaded.
Christ, he's like King Kong on heat.

Maurice arrived back safely from Germany on Sunday and we swung straight back into the show, which went really well. Not least because we had augmented our flyering efforts with the manufacture of a .... sandwich board on Saturday
And what a sandwich board it is! It's a work of fucking art, and actually cost as much. Ok we obviously aren't the best sourcing team.
Get this:
£20 for 2 pieces of hardboard
£8 for two curtain retainers (used as straps)
£30 for TWO A2 posters

Yes, fifty eight quid for a sandwich board but I must say I think we are seeing a return on our investment. Having sweated over the manufacture of this glorious edifice we treated ourselves to our first Edinburgh show, the 'comedian' - term used loosely Edward Aczel only loosely in the sense that Edward is an exponent of almost (non) comedy. A thin line between genius and crap, which is kind of where you might want your comics to be.

We also went to the Fringe Opening Party. We had a bit of a dilemma, because we are a team of three but it was a strict two persons per show policy. Anyway, our rock and roll experience meant that we have guest list blagging down to an art, though as we say in the show, we are not comics, we are not actors, we are not historians but we ARE drummers and as impersonations of a person from an unknown theatrical troupe goes it worked. Perhaps we shouldn't have bothered, it was a weird ol' doo but perhaps we were just tired.

On Monday night we went to check out the show by John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett - absolutely brilliant 5/5 and thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in music and having a laugh. So impressed were we that we invited John down to be our special guest today - another genius and nutter. Maurice used to play drums for him and was his manager for a while. He was brilliant value - thanks John

Our next guest is booked for Thursday (Aug 7th). Do you remember Chirpy Chirpy Cheap Cheap?

Anyway, speak soon and keep smiling

Math xx

Another 2 Drummers Drumming preview under our belts and Maurice off to Berlin Mathew a Castaway

Well, we did another preview of 2 Drummers Drumming yesterday and it's really coming together, especially all the multi-media stuff What was really pleasing was to see a young band in the audience, who seemed into it and spoke to us after the show. We were getting a lot of advice before the show on the lines of
"is it going to appeal to the girls?"
"what about young audiences?"
well we've been trying hard to make what we are doing as accessible as possible to everyone and certainly don't want to exclude the ladies or young people interested in our show, so it's great to have a young band saying that they enjoyed it and especially Maurice's stories of being in a young band in the 60's. We find ourselves reminding everyone, that all of the stories in 2 Drummers Drumming are true.

There are no shows on Friday (1st) or Saturday (2nd Aug) this is because Maurice has flown off to Berlin to play a couple of festivals with The Love Affair. Lucky we had news last week that we are as fit as premiership footballers because on Sunday Maurice has a mammoth journey to get to the stage on Sunday at 4.30pm for our last preview before we open on Monday, we place our trust in British Airways and um... Easyjet.

Mathew's suddenly had a load of people coming up to him here (more than usual!) saying
'aren't you the guy from Dodgy? I saw you on tele last night"
This was because the BBC showed a programme called Return To Taransay and featured Dodgy landing on the Castaway reality TV show island during filming. We had cut this story from 2 Drummers Drumming but as a few people obviously caught the programme we might throw the story or clip back in. You can check out the programme on the BBC iPlayer, it's Return To Taransay episode 3.

We are getting new material from the show from all sources - perhaps too much. The first thing is that The Guardian are continue to insist on printing new 'drummer jokes' each day. This is fuel to our producers who then say "learn this" for the show. We've written to The Guardian in the hope that they'll stop printing any more 'drummer jokes' thereby making our job easier until we get more comfortable with this stuff ;-)

We were out and about yesterday getting our first taste of flyering to the masses... wow! it certainly is mental up here. We also set up the video camera to get some of the public's 'drummer jokes' for the show. There are obviously a lot of Guardian readers up here because there are quite a lot of people happy to offer themselves before our camera. The aim was to edit them and get them straight into the show. So we sat down at the computer at 4pm and realised that none of us knew how to operate imovie to put them up. Don't worry, as well as everything else, we are doing a crash self course in iMovie so hopefully we can have some on the screen for Sunday's preview.
If you're in Edinburgh would be great to see you there.
Best
M&M

AND they're OFF! 2 DRUMMERS DRUMMING first preview @ The Fringe

I'm writing this from the warm glow of the post show comedown from our first preview, sitting upstairs at the Bongo Club. I'm allowing myself a self congratulatory slap on the back but I can't quite reach so I'll have to settle for an encouraging tap on the arm as we were fecking great today and I'd really like to thank the folk that came down and gave us an audience.
We were able to get off to a topical start because there were still 'drummer jokes' on the letters page of todays Guardian after last weeks drummer frenzy in the national press.

We have been rehearsing VERY hard and very intensely for the last few weeks in our Scottish hideaway - it got fractious and frustrating but we've all been working long hours to make it work and I personally felt that, for a first preview, it was ace. Along the way we have discovered new things about ourselves, new talents that we never realised we had - we also realised that the director/producer is a secret Nazi as well as been autistic, therefore I'm faced with the rather difficult problem of whether to call him Goering or Rainman.

The Bongo Club is amazing. The actual place that is.
Their website still has a 2007 Fringe Brochure up and I would like to confirm we are at their new Holyrood Road location NOT the old one in new street that Google throws up.
The people here couldn't be more friendly and helpful, the food is lovely and cheap, they have free wi-fi and there is a constant flow of young, nubile foreign students coming through the doors. Shame. It's certainly a place I feel I am happy to be calling home over the next few weeks

We've now got GODGE on board as our audio-visual guy and needless to say, he is a drummer and he was great today, in fact so good that there was no opportunity to take the piss out of him as we relentlessly did to Rainman when we tried out a range of the show's content at the hotel in the village of Dunning on Sunday. We're really pleased that some of our videos and the multi-media stuff is working so we can relax a little bit...

Now we have the show up and running we're going to be stepping up our efforts to get some good drumming and drummer-related guests onto the show. We got a nice bit of feedback from Cherise, who you might know from Mika's band yesterday. She's got a massive excuse for not making it up to be in Edinburgh with us - the one-off gig of a lifetime but we can't say until she's actually done it.
As you know, communication channels are open with Phil Collins, I actually spoke to him on the phone the other day and what a lovely chap. He genuinely loves the idea for the show and wishes the best of luck, not sure if he'll be able to make it as a guest though as he's taking his annual pilgrimage to the Alamo during August, but bless him. Cheers Phil. You'll be pleased to know that I managed to make it through the whole conversation with him without trying to pun on him not needing a Jacket, or that I must be going or indeed that it's another day in Paradise.

On to our second preview tomorrow. If you are reading this and are in Edinburgh we'll offer any blog readers a two for one deal tomorrow, just send us a text with your name to 07500 548722 and we'll put you on the guest list.
You might even find us out and about looking for 'drummer jokes' and handing out a few flyers before the show. Please don't hesitate in saying 'hello' if you see us.

Speak soon

Onwards

Math and Maurice xx