It started innocently enough, on a wet friday night in Droitwich at the British Legion’s club. We weren’t even in the main room, the Worcestershire Jazz Orchestra was in there. We were playing what can only be described as the “youth club room” – we’re talking cans of pop, free burgers (weh hey!) and games of pool for twenty pence. The more observant will have noticed a certain element common to most Sexy Weirdos shows that was lacking here – that’s right, it was to be our first alcohol free gig!

Still, things were looking up. After a few talented locals opening up the evening with acoustic guitars, Worcester rappers Case Closed did an impressively tight set. They’d explained to me that the evening was part of a larger effort to bring together a music scene in Droitwich, and anyone doing anything like that deserves some respect in my book.And besides which, it actually worked! Despite all indications to the contrary, it went off – people actually danced and one kid did a backflip. Some of em actually bought t shirts and tickets for our gig the following evening in Worcester, that is, after they’d finished mobbing Dr Ross, our apparently endlessly attractive trombone player. We don’t have any particularly good photos of this gig, so here’s a lovely sepia shot of the great man himself by kirsty fowler for all the ladies that love cool ross…

The next weekend we were up bright and early (well lunch time ish) to go busking on Worcester high street. I haven’t “street performed” in a while and this was the first time we’d done the whole “play music in the street and hope someone throws some money at us” routine as a group. It actually worked pretty well – I won’t tell you how much we made but I will say we were all quite pleased at the amount. It would have been worth it anyway just to see the shock on the mild mannered shoppers’ faces, along with the obligatory staring kids being dragged away by irate parents. I personally buzzed off the occasional looks of disgust. Those folks with their screwed up faces don’t know how much they amuse me.

After a quick break, our next set of the day was at the opening day of The Hive, Worcesters swanky new multi million pound library complex ( http://www.wlhc.org.uk/ ) . As you can probably guess, we were on an all out mission to play the perfect venues for our music last weekend – youth club night? Check. Library? Check. It was a shame the nunnery and the old folks home turned us down……..

Anyway, The Hive was white, posh, massive and new, like you’d expect it to be, only there was a load of cool people putting on bands and workshops in there . Again, everyone was sober, and we had some of our youngest ever audience members ever as you can see from JG Beppe Tirelli’s aerial shot below. If you look really closely, you can see that some of them are covering their ears. I hope we didn’t burst any young ear drums…….

The evening gig was at The Marrs Bar ( http://www.marrsbar.co.uk/ ) with Andy Robinson and Texas Radio. The Marrs Bar is easily Worcester’s best known venue and this was our debut gig there. I was worried that exhaustion might get the better of us on this one as it was our fourth set in two days. However, once doors opened we found plenty to rouse our road weary spirits. It might have been deliberate, it might have been synchronicity, but a crowd from the night before had turned up – it’s a pretty massive compliment when anyone comes to hear you play two nights running, but this lot came dressed as clowns. Yep, that’s right, funny noses, neon wigs, garishly coloured baby grows, the works . Check out the photo at the start of the article if you don’t believe me.

Our percussionist Superjeff has a fear of clowns, but at that point it was just the inspiration I needed. Once Texas Radio started playing their rambunctious blues racket, we were all on our third or fourth wind of the weekend, ready to give it our best once again. Here’s a shot from that set by Cath Lowe -

And afterwards we sang and danced like loons to Andy Robinson’s set, we drank freely and totally lost all awareness of the fact we were recording the next day. Johnjoe’s bought a really expensive microphone which is going to make the album even better than it would have been anyway. Rest assured that Victory For The Monsters is coming soon, and we will endeavour to make it as ace as it can be. Here’s a shot by Anvil our cornet player showing us all hard at work trying to ignore our hangovers -

And here’s a video clip of that very session -

So that’s all for this post. You can find more photos and links to footage from this weekend on our facebook page. Thanks to Jim Lowe for filming and uploading the first clip, thanks to Beppe, Kirsty Fowler and Cath Lowe for sharing their photography skills, and thanks to the Droitwich Clown Posse for being bloody awesome!

Johnny K x