Blog: Christmas Commences At The King and Queen

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Thursday afternoon found me heading into London's fashionable London area of London to do my final gig of the space year 2025, back once again at the lovely King & Queen. The idea was that I was going to meet Mr CJ Thorpe-Tracey in said pub at 5ish so we could go upstairs and have a bit of a practice, but things went AWRY as he got stuck in traffic, so I ended up having a whole extra hour to myself in the pub, which was both CHRISTMASSY (they have really gone for it, festivity-wise, this year) and LOVELY. It is SUCH a nice pub, even when RAMMED as it was that evening!

Eventually Chris staggered in and, after some much needed breath catching, we went upstairs to have a quick run through of the NEW songs what we were planning to do. The Highchurches then arrived, closely followed by Mr M Tiller so that, in an extraordinary feat of TIMELINESS, ALL acts were present and correct well in advance of 7pm. This made me very happy!

I was further delighted when the AUDIENCE also turned up with extreme punctuality, also in rather large NUMBERS (although with a surprising unwillingness to eat mince pies when THRUST upon them), so that we kicked off to a PACKED room at EXACTLY 7.30pm with a rousing rendition of the Totally Acoustic THEME SONG and then a GRATE set from Matt. Apparently this was his first gig for AGES but this was not apparent in the ROCKING nature of his set, which featured multiple "new" songs (as he said, they're technically new to The Live Environment but he'd actually written some of them years ago). My favourite bit of this part of the evening was seeing Matt WOW a bunch of people who had never seen him before, it was ACE!

We then had a break, a whip-round, and then brought on The Highchurches, who were once again FAB. One of the joys of Totally Acoustic is getting people to play with instruments that were DESIGNED to be played in this way i.e. you don't NEED to mike up a guitar, violin, ukelele voice etc when being played together, as they were BUILT to be the correct volume. It sounded FLIPPING LOVELY and again there were NEW songs deployed to a vast and also INTERESTED audience.

And then after another break it was time for Chris and I to prepare ourselves. As we consulted over the setlist I realised that I was EXCITED about doing this gig - I mean, I always AM a bit excited about doing gigs, but this felt different somehow, like we were about to lay something NEW on people - and it was in that vein that we turned to the audience and did THIS:

The Perfect Love Song

Chips And Cheese, Pint Of Wine

Was This What You Wanted

When You Hear A Bird

I've Been Wrong About Everything

7 Hearts

In The North Stand

It Only Works Because You're here

It was, from my point of view, PRETTY FLIPPING SPECIAL. The new songs went well - which was a relief as nobody had heard any of them before - and there was much chat and DELIGHT. With all of this stuff it gets a bit EMOTIONAL for me, as they are EMOTIONAL songs and I am denied my usual hiding place of LARKS etc. This is especially the case where there are instrumental sections where I don't even have a guitar to stand behind, and am left to just listen to Chris's AMAZING playing. It is, as I say, very very different to what I'm used to, but also lovely.

There was also a section where Chris gave a short speech about how GRATE my songs are which on the one hand was very lovely INDEED of him, but on the other TERRIFYING. I've sort of got used to the idea that nobody's hugely bothered about my songs, so having an Actual International Rock Star say that sort of thing to a room full of lovely people was a bit of a Sensory Overload. I think the only solution is for it to keep happening so that I can get used to it!

So yes, it was all LOVELY and ended with BOWS etc before we concluded the evening with BEERS and CHAT and more People Saying Nice Things. The only thing that would have made it even more delightful would have been people finishing off the mince pies, but I guess you can't have everything!

posted 5/12/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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