The People's Republic of South Devon

Many hats make varied work: Katie Marie has to make many hats as a musician

Well it’s been yet another busy one for me. Last week’s gigs at The Cheese & Grain and Exmouth Festival went really well and if you fancy taking a look and listen there just happens to be one of my random video blogs on Youtube:

Any hard working indie muso like my good self will more than likely own around 20 different imaginary hats for all sorts of occasions.

We of course have our favs, such as the performing hat, songwriting hat, gigging hat and so on. Then there are other hats, like the roadie and mechanic ones. There are, of course, hats that we’re not so keen on… the email hat, the book keeping hat and the banking hat, to name a few.

This week I’ve been almost permanently wearing my promotions hat. It’s one of those jobs that seems to always take up a stupid amount of time. It does more often than not pay off… but my eyes are seriously feeling rather square and I’m in desperate need of playing a few chords on my guitar, just to remind myself that I am really a musician!

The whole reason for me wearing this lovely promo hat is because we’re putting on a Monkey Moo Records Promo Night at the lovely Miss Peapod’s in Cornwall. It’ll all be happening on June 25 and the line up is… erm… me, lol, alongside instrumental guitarist Chris Woods and acoustic singer/songwriter Dan Crisp. It’s going to be a fun night and I can’t wait to play.

So… first things first, posters!

Monkey Moo Records’ Promo Night: at Miss Peapods in Cornwall, the evening has a top class line up!

We needed to get those and the fliers sorted and in the venue as quickly as possible in the hope that lots of lovely people will see them and be interested in coming along.

With the posters in the venue, next we needed to think about how to get other peeps outside of the venue to know about our gig.  The first obvious one is radio and we did a search of all commercial and non commercial stations.  Then I needed to find out who featured live music on their shows and get on the case e-mailing or ringing them.

Reading material was the next mission, in the form of newspapers, magazines and anything else we could think of.  Again I had to do lots and lots of Googling to find out who to contact and also send off a ton of emails to various places.

When I’ve had local gigs in the past, I’ve always found posters in shops to be more effective than you might imagine.  Especially if they’re on mass and people keep on seeing them. So over the next few weeks I’ll be heading off to lots of Cornish shops armed with posters and fliers.

It is *extremely* time consuming and I hope all my hard work pays off!

On a slightly related bit of news, I had a very nice email land in my inbox. I’ve been offered a support slot at one of the Acoustic Cafe evenings held at Salisbury Arts Centre. It’s a last minute thing, as the support act they had booked had to cancel and so they’ve offered the gig to me (woohoo!). I’ll be supporting a chap called Rory McLeod who I hadn’t heard of, but after doing some research I discovered that he played harmonica on one of Ani Difranco’s albums, and seeing as how Ani is one of my biggest influences I did think that was very, very cool indeed lol.

So if you’re free next Saturday  June 11) and in the area I’ll be there from 8pm and it’s always great to see ya

Anyways I really need to take a break from staring at this pooter screen, so hope you have a mighty fine week – see ya soon!

(image: Katie Marie Photo taken by Lisa (Indigo Blue Photography) and edited by Sandra (Soul Photography))

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