New ideas

I felt a bit flat earlier this week. See, there was a point about 5 years ago when the Harvey stage show was taking off, and it was clashing with Fred's House at our absolute peak (we'd just toured China, our third and best album had just come out etc etc). The Harvey show obviously, finally, rightfully ended last week on an absolute high, and the band, well, we still exist but we're all doing other things now and nobody is up for touring anymore. Maybe that was it, maybe that was my peak, was that the good as it gets? Weird that I didn't notice it at the time, I remember just being, well, tired, because I was juggling a lot of projects. As always. 

That thought was buzzing around my head at the start of the week. That, and, because we've got a bit of a mortgage rise and an expensive holiday to pay off, I've had to extend my teaching hours a bit. It's great that I can do this; if I need more money, I just take on more work, it's really never a worry. Many don't have that luxury. But it did mean last week ALL I did was work, long, long hours. Not the most creative, but head down, crack on. 

As always, though, things work out for a reason. To give a little more structure to my lessons, I've written a 'how to be a wedding drummer' course for my students, and the playlist, all 30 songs, is an absolute winner. Even the most stubborn of teenage students couldn't help but enjoy it, in some cases the most they've ever enjoyed the lessons. At the same time, I met up with my mate Georgie (awesome singer/pianist) as I was teaching her child and she says she wants to gig more, and at the very same time, an awesome bassist friend, Paul, messaged saying if I ever need a bassist...so, out of nowhere, using that wedding set, the three of us have formed a wedding band. Big plans for this are now being made, mostly the branding of it. We're quirky, but experienced, this will be a bit of a treat. It'll still be creative in it's own way. And I'll write a show about it.

Today, I was back with FH, as we were running a workshop in Cambridge about how to be in a band. And I've got the best ideas ever for two more plays that will blow Harvey out of the water. Suddenly, everything feels fine again. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Departure from Stagnation Station

I had planned to start writing this in January, but, alas, I just ran out of time. Which is quite ironic because that’s the reason why I wanted to write this blog in the first place… See, I appreciate how lucky I am, I honestly do. I live in a lovely big house with my beautiful, successful wife, our perfect dog, and two cats, one of whom I like and the other I can tolerate. My creative endeavours as a drummer has seen me play in some weird and wonderful places with some mega talented folk, all over the world, with tours, radio airplay and everything else you dream of when you first learn to hit things in time, including all the non-glamorous bits, of course (but I dreamed of those, too - but who doesn't love a Ginsters slice from a garage at 2am for dinner?). In my parallel life, as a writer/performer of theatre stuff that sometimes drifts into other mediums, it's also gone rather well at times; 19 years of Edinburgh Fringes, some lovely national press, a few aw...
Read more

The end of Harvey Greenfield

In November 2018 I wrote what was to be my 'last ever play' - I was honestly done at one point, so started working on a nice, fun, energetic piece that I threw every last idea I had into. After a couple of house shows in early 2019, it opened publicly in April of that year in Swindon, before a bunch of other fringe festivals. In Edinburgh that summer (my 'last ever time') it was picked up by the national press and then it ended up briefly in the West End, and on several lengthy tours, and then there was the film which has won lots of awards including a few for me as an individual which was, well, never really the plan. And of course, it's success opened other doors for me, so I carried on writing, with new shows opening in New York and France. Not bad for a 'last' play, but it soon became a play I just couldn't quite shake off. Last summer, when performing it, I decided to just keep it going forever...maybe this play could be my living? This year I decid...
Read more

Awards bash

It's half-term, so a bit of a lie-in yesterday and a chance to catch up on some writing. I've nearly finished my new collection of short stories and I'm rather excited about them...some of them are really short, but there's plenty of them, making them perfect toilet reading, that sort of thing.  Last night, myself and director Jonnie went to an awards bash in Essex. The film was nominated for a few things. I've been lucky enough to win quite a bit over the last few years, but I've never won if I've attended the ceremony, it's almost like I've cursed it.  We were up for best feature film, Annette was up for best supporting actor, and I was up for best actor. I didn't win best actor (I mean, I've got two of those already, a third would be greedy), but we did win best feature film, which we were not expecting.  A long evening of networking followed. Left the house at 4pm, home by 1am. Networking is exhausting, but the awards keep coming in for t...
Read more