Oh, hello. Let’s cut to the good stuff right up top - here’s another storytelling video I made. It’s a true story that I wrote and drew all the pictures, wrote and performed all the music singlehandedly1. Watch it here and then tell all your friends to do the same2.

Now that’s out of the way, here’s a thrilling glimpse behind the scenes.This was made for and performed live at the Show N Tell3 event that David Gaffney and I ran at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival in September 2024. This was the second time we ran this event, and it was a lot of fun, some real good times. We had stories read out by Aimee De Jongh, David Gaffney, Emma Vieceli (more about Emma’s story below) Isabel Greenberg, John Allison, Kate Charlesworth, Kevin Raymundo and Luke Healy.

Emma illustrated and performed a number from the musical that she’s written, Unfolding, accompanied by her husband on guitar. Good times.

The event itself was a lot of fun, but a ton of work. In addition to formatting everyone’s presentation so it all ran smooth, I also illustrated David Gaffney’s story about a man who steals a whale’s brain. I think we should/could record a video version of this so that it lives somewhere other than only the minds of the people who were there on the night.

I had decided for my story, that instead of just recording a soundtrack and playing it in the background while I told my story about a nighttime creep, that it’d be MUCH MORE FUN to play it live. Nobody asked for this. I do, however really like a mix of storytelling and music. I got to see Daniel Kitson and Gavin Osborn performing The Balled Of Roger And Grace4 while I was putting this together, which was very enjoyable.

Here’s an early look at me prototyping the audio workflow5

The audio setup changed a little as I developed the story. I was running rhythm and fx from Ableton live6, triggering clips with an APC mini. I was then setting clips to record with a midi commander pedal, which was taking a signal from my pedal board with various effects and loops7 and running that into the amp and back into Ableton to be retriggered later on by the APC. I realised at a certain point that my life would be easier if I just got my own PA system8. I found one for sale for £50 on eBay and now I have a PA system in my studio that gets very sparse use9.

I then released that if I’m running complicated audio through my nice laptop, then how do we run the keynote presentation? I figured that out and everything was fine10.

I originally started work on a different spooky story about gold prospectors in a secluded coastal valley going bananas and dismantling each other, but jettisoned that idea onto the ‘one day maybe’ pile in favour of recounting a story from my own life from the summer of 199711. This is a true story, it all happened12, but maybe not all on the same day13. So yes there was a weird guy with a porno cape and top hat14, and yes he did the weird squat thing and yes it was the early hours of the morning15.

Back to the event. I had a letter from the hospital a few weeks before asking me to come for surgery16 the day after the show at 7am. My schedule was: get to the festival in the Lake District, get set up, do the show, pack everything into the car immediately, drive home, get very little sleep, go to the hospital and get some surgery.

So I did that17.

Then, as often happens I realised it is eight months later and I haven’t edited the story together or really done anything with it, so here we are. I should get better at this18.

In other news, I am making and selling pens again, you can get one if you want.