So hurrah, we’ve got another Free Gig coming up, this time at the Moseley Arms and kindly organised by Spotted Dog Gigs.

You can find out more about Ace Bushy Striptease and Cast and Crew by following them there links in this here sentence. As always there’s a Facebook Event.

The Moseley Arms is on Ravenhurst Street

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Poster by Alex from Devil and Casey Jones.

Also, excitingly, I think Rotunda-sault is in a gigable state. There. I’ve said it so we’ll have to play it now.

Falling & Laughing Present… a free gig! It’s a free gig! And we’ve lined up four ace bands for you

There’s a Facebook event here. Write up below…

Kidnapper Bell are an Anglo-American band in Birmingham, they touch upon musical stepping stones such as emo - when it was a genuinely good and not-at-all over-marketed genre. They bring other influences to the party too - such as room filling shoegaze guitars and interesting song structures and dynamics more typical of post-rock bands such as Mono (ooh, who have a song called Kidnapper Bell - coincidence?)

http://www.myspace.com/kidnapperbell

Black Heart Generator are one of the main proponents of the pre-post-new-Birmingham-rabble-core genre. Alright, so there’s no such genre, but imagine if there was and you’d be close to Black Heart Generator’s sound. Combining shouting with Dinosaur Jr influences and ace drumming and rhythms. They put on a cracking live show, you’ve never really experienced them until you’ve seen Greg stood on a stool strumming a guitar into someone.

http://www.myspace.com/blackheartgenerator

Falling & Laughing are us and it’s always hard to write about yourself (other people have here - http://is.gd/60zNI). I’d like to say we’re halfway between indiepop and post-rock but, um, I suppose it’s your call on whether we’ve achieved that.

http://www.myspace.com/duncsfallingandlaughing

Magnetic Four were a fantastic Birmingham band who sadly split up a few years ago, and we held on, hoping that they’d find a new drummer or carry on as a band somehow, but sadly it never happened (though there are free M4 downloads here - http://is.gd/60ApN). However, when bands split up the excitement of new bands and solo projects follow and Cast and Crew are one such solo project by singer and bassist Nick - who composes songs in a similar Hefner inspired, slash, good emo (there’s that phrase again) vein.

http://www.myspace.com/allweneediscastandcrew

It’s all free entry and is at The Victoria - http://www.thevictoriabirmingham.co.uk/

(some of the keys on my keyboard have given up the ghost while typing this. I blame overplaying Realm Of The Mad God)

As this site is a) new and b) being launched on the cusp of 2009, I thought a good first post might be to tell you a little bit about both Falling and Laughing and Lime Chalks and what we did in 2008.

Well the year started off with a mass exodus from the Falling and Laughing line up that had played with Pocketbooks, Wave Pictures and Bearsuit [/namedropping] - with Darryl heading off the the US of States for 6 months and Stu heading off to Belfast, seemingly forever and ever and ever.

This left Falling and Laughing as just me, which is quite embarrassing when you’re performing as a band name (especially called Falling and Laughing - luckily I never tripped up on stage so avoided the witty and insiteful “where’s Laughing” heckle).

I had one solo acoustic gig in February at Bohemian Jukebox with Superman Revenge Squad and The Voluntary Butler Scheme, both on their way up to megasuperstardom, in relative terms.

The world of Birmingham open mic nights were a good place to work on some new songs in absence of bands too, with The Secret Music Club being a welcoming favourite. Open mic nights aren’t as fun without friends and I played several times with Nick from Cast and Crew (”where’s Crew” etc) and a lovely chap I know called Mike Falzon.

At around this time, Rob Howard (who seemingly manages to write as many songs at the same rate that most people listen to them) expanded his Lime Chalks line up to encompass a drummer and a guitarist (me) although this later evolved to playing uke and melodica on top of the guitar (I mean as well as, rather than indulging in bizzare jazzy impressionist post-rock instrument stacking).

Lime Chalks went on to have lots of fun gigs with a slightly changing line up each time - and you can get a flavour of the bands we played with by frisking these links - Betty and the ID, Ballboy, The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut, Seth Faergolzia and Little My [/yet more namedropping]. We also played a monster night of pop put on by This is Tomorrow with Ace Bushy Striptease, The Bumblebees and Das Wanderlust.

The rest of Lime Chalks finished the year off at Colour playing with the fantastic Epic45 though sadly I couldn’t make that one myself but this is one of the things about being in a slighly changing line up.

They year finished off with Falling and Laughing at Bohemian Jukebox with Little My (again, and it was good to see them back in Brum), Don’t Move and David Leach.

So that was 2008 then. Apologies for the link heavy me heavy first post, but hopefully it’s given you an idea of what both bands have been up to and what we might be doing in the new year. Cheers!