My weekly to-do list, which is typically a long list of admin tasks (book new tour dates, confirm gigs here and there and everywhere for such and such band, send script to this place) has barely been touched this week, mostly because of all the exciting creative things which have kicked off.
Our Edinburgh Fringe run is now confirmed - it's really great to be working with PBH again, we did shows with them in 2010 and 2011, our venue is a brand new one for the festival but we have the perfect theatre slot and it's all rather lovely. Takes a lot of work and persistence to get a fringe show at the best of times, but this year - with 40% more applicants to the free fringe, it's been even trickier, but we got there in the end thanks to the wonderful Mr Buckley-Hill's management. As I say, it's a good slot - now we just need to have the shows worthy of them. For week one of the fringe I'll be doing the, 'Some Plays By Paul Richards' show alongside Hind, and then for weeks two and three, Izzy is up and we're performing the 'Redundancy Club' show - which I'm still writing at the moment. The concept and painstakingly clear treatment for it has been ready for a while, I know these characters inside out and what will happen to them, where the big jokes will be, where the twists and turns will be...just need a couple days to nail that damn dialogue and then rehearsals can start. Izzy is away in Spain next week, I reckon I'll have it written by the time she comes back.
It's been quite a fruitful time as a writer of late, little things keep happening to me and then I elaborate them to develop stage plays - for example the smoke alarm next door kept going off (that's now the main plot device in, 'The Nights Must Fly By' which WriteOn are performing at the ADC Theatre Bar next month), a girl rejects me (that featured, perhaps a bit too heavily in, 'Filling In The Gaps' which we gave an airing of last night at the new material show - which was hit and miss, but more hit than normal). In the meantime we're booking more dates for the 'Some Plays...' show around the country with another little tour being plotted at the moment, 'Toxic Tornado' is being presented at the Hotbed Festival at the Junction, 'An Embarrassment Of Richards' is now live on YouTube. I'm back as the Director Of Theatre for Lodestar Festival this year which is an amazing thing, I always like to write something new for that festival alongside our fringe shows (Lodestar is conveniently 4 days after the Edinburgh Fringe ends), the ideas are coming in quicker than I can write them, but I guess that's what Red Bull was invented for.
Musically it's been great to be playing regularly with the British IBM and Eureka Stockade again, Flaming June are always gigging and that's been really fun, The Dowsing Sound Collective is kicking back into life ahead of the huge shows and with Trevor Jones it's ranged from being duo sets where I'm a manic conga player to full-band stuff where I've had to be the laid-back session pro - I enjoy it either way. Grace Williams and I recently started a new project and it's ludicrously ambitious (and this is coming from a man who plays with Dowsing) - this girl has a breathtaking voice and I can't wait for our recordings to go public, I wasn't in the market for another project but sometimes you just have to do these things, don't you? I've also got some recording sessions popping up in the coming months with bands I've never played with before (in one instance, never even met) which keeps things interesting, and particularly looking forward to recording jazz with the mighty Rohan Leach - a good friend and magnificent musician.
Things are moving in the right direction, that's for sure. Nowhere on my to-do list does it say calm down, Richards, but then again - there really isn't time for that right now.
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