NO2ID Night

Following on from our last festival show on Friday, on Saturday night we played the NO2ID Gala Benefit at the Old Fruitmarket. As you may be aware from previous posts this was a gig that we initiated and helped to set up.

There was always an uncertainty over the line up and over how many tickets could be sold. In the end around 150 people turned up. Which is fine, but really we were looking for 200 at least.

No fault though of the NO2ID campaign guys who had tens of thousands of flyers printed. Several folk at work told me they were handed flyers through the week, so they were out and about all over the place.

As for the show it was an odd night. Several of the acts touted to appear didn’t. Mostly I think this was down to the promoter not securing them.

He did land an extremely good compere in Gordon Brunton and he had his job cut out for him. Paul Pirie opened the night and went over well, pretty much everyone who was on went down well with the crowd, who were up for enjoying the night.

We were on next. The Old Fruitmarket is a pretty big venue and as such we needed microphones. Radio mics were too much of an expense I was told, so we used simple cable microphones. It was a bit awkward, but not too much and we got through our 5 sketches fine, going down well with the crowd.

After us Green MSP Patrick Harvie went on to rally the crowd into opposing ID cards. From what I saw he gave a pretty good speech that was met with a warm reaction.

Through a lot of Gordon’s time on stage compering there were no comedians in the building and he just had to keep talking until someone turned up. This was down to the fact that everyone apart from us were doing other gigs at other venues.

Keir McAllister was another who had a good spot, before Lucy Porter came on. She got into some banter with the crowd about football and made the first mention by any comedian of the night of ID cards.

Canadian-Scot Phil Nichol was the highlight of the show, doing a fantastic twenty minutes where he closed on his famous song ‘The Only Gay Eskimo’. A fight kicked off in the balcony just as he left.

Gordon then had to announce that the headline act hadn’t turned up and that was the evening done. So a gigantic anti-climax, though I guess fitting for an evening in which the promoter bailed out on some weeks ago.

I think the audience enjoyed everyone they had seen however and the guys from the NO2ID campaign were very happy at the response they had from people there.

From there I went on to the late show at Blackfriars. Glenn Wool, who was apparently booked to do the NO2ID gig, was first on and performed a really good set.

It was quite a ramshackle night, which ended with everyone’s favourite comedy promoter stripping off onstage.

Our spot on Saturday was filmed and should appear on the Glue YouTube page later this week.

Photographs from the night and from Friday can be found here.