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.

You’ll not believe how hard it was for me to not call this post ‘Don’t Go Changing… channel’ or some equally awkward pun.

Anyway, a big huge thank you to Paul Busst who taped our whole gig from Saturday and has initially put together this lovely video for Don’t Go Changing from the images of us packing away.

Justin the sound man from the evening and drummer for the awesome Seeland, and Pagan Wanderer Lu also feature.

Hurrah, so far Falling and Laughing have played two gigs outside of Birmingham - one in London and one in Stourbridge - so we’re looking forward to our trip to Bristol!

It’s on Saturday 3rd October at The Mother’s Ruin on St Nicholas Street

Big Pink Cake are hosting. There’s a facebook event here.

£3.00 in. Think we’re on first, probably sometime soon after half past eight. Also playing are Hi-Life Companion and Phil Wilson. Ace, hopefully he’ll pull out a version of No Place Called Home.

Mother’s Ruin is one of the strangest (in a lovable way) venues I’ve ever been to. The bands play upstairs on the right hand side of the stairs, and the audience stand on the left on a balcony which sort of overlooks the stage. There is a little bit of space to stand in front of the bands, but it involves balancing precariously at the top of the stairs.

I sat at the front last time I went, and here was a picture of Manhatten Love Suicides that was taken from there -

There’s another DIY Falling and Laughing gig coming up on the 18th July at Island Bar.

On this poster I’ve again plundered the artistic talents of those far better at this sort of stuff. This time from Tony Millionaire, who’s work swings from profound and beautiful to straight up gross.

We’re trying a pay-what-you-want on the door experiment. Kind of like the whole Radiohead/In Rainbows thing. Except we’re not going to release the gig for full price in HMV after a few months. Um, and unlike Radiohead we’re trying to cover travel costs for The Kick Inside.

Ok, so Falling and Laughing are back as a two piece! Along with Shana Tova, The Will to Rally and David Leach.

And it’s FREE!

All the info should be on the poster, but The Victoria - if you’ve not been - is on the map here, and has a website.

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!