Upcoming Gigs

In the great tradition of Do What I Say, Not What I Do, I have managed to persuade most of the Air Team to blog on this site and yet have neglected to do so myself for some time.

Well here's a new one about the last week or two:

Things have been kinda busy at Air. Though we are not the official PR's for the London Jazz Festival, we were working on the majority of the main concerts by dint of representing the individual artists performing or their record labels. In addition, artists represented by our booking agency were playing all over the festival as well as Jamie playing a couple of guest spots, and so November was pretty crazy. Jeff Beck at Ronnie Scott's was special, particularly when Eric Clapton joined him on stage on Wednesday.

RyanDan continue to be the hardest working band on the roster with a punishing promotional schedule which took in Canada, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Ireland and Finland in November alone. The album has garnered great reviews and is on its way to passing the 200,000 sales mark.

I Am Kloot played an amazing run of shows in Manchester, the setlist of which ran to twenty six tunes! For the first time ever, John Bramwell's voice gave up the ghost during the first show of the London run, though he bravely struggled through a handful of songs, enlisting the crowd's help on the big numbers. Even though his vocal chords were shredded, the gig was still named 'Gig Of The Week' in the News of the World, whose article included the following lines: "They're like the ghosts of Arctic Monkeys' Christmas futures. If Alex Turner is still writing songs as clever and bluesy as Storm Warning in 15 years' time, he'll be doing very well for himself...If any new band came up with a song as powerful as Even The Stars Die, it'd be No 1 for weeks...They're Britain's best not-quite-famous-yet band". Go Kloot!

Jamie Cullum recorded the last ever Parkinson TV show, aptly performing Don't Talk About Me When I'm Gone. It was Jamie's fifth appearence on the show in as many years. I think that's a record for a musical guest. Other guests on the show included Billy Connolly, Judi Dench, Michael Caine, Peter Kay, Dame Edna Everage, David Attenborough and David Beckham. It was a hell of a show. Don't miss it when it transmits on ITV1 on the 15th December.

Not being satisfied with meeting such luminaries, Jamie and I flew to LA last week for the premiere of the film Grace Is Gone. Starring John Cusack, the film is a low budget independent offering recounting the story of a young family and how they deal with the death in Iraq of their soldier wife/mother. Having won prizes at Sundance and other film festivals, Grace Is Gone was bought up by The Weinstein Company, who asked Clint Eastwood if he would be happy to write music for the film. This he did, and via his son Kyle, asked Jamie if he would sing the theme tune.

The premiere was much lower key than you'd expect in the UK, I guess a film premiere is almost an everyday occurence in Los Angeles. The film itself is heartbreakingly sad and not in a forced Hollywood saccharin kinda way. The performances by Cusack and Shélan O'Keefe are exeptional. As a measure of the quality of the movie, this is the first time Clint has scored music for a film dire cted by anyone but himself, and his musical motifs suit the mood of the film perfectly. There's talk of the song being submitted for an Oscar. Fingers crossed!

Jamie met the cast and crew at the aftershow, including Clint who invited us to hang with him on set the next day. True to his promise, twelve hours later we were on Lot 15 at Warner Brothers studios in Burbank where Clint is directing a film named The Changeling. It was a sureal experience. On the same Lot were filmed The Big Sleep, Giant, Blazing Saddles, Gremlins and Ocean's 11, among MANY others. We sat quiet as church mice for ages not daring make a sound lest we mess up a shot, but then Clint and the production team beckoned us into the actual set where we hung for the rest of the day. It was a huge priviledge to be able to see such professionals working in such close proximity and an experience we'll never forget. Clint and his team looked after us so well, even introducing us to co-star Angelina Jolie and Steven Spielberg who popped in to say hi. We had a late lunch at the studios and spent time in the Malpaso offices with the lovely Jenniphur and Deena and in the sound studio with Joel Cox, Malpaso's Oscar winning sound editor. Fascinating.

The next day was spent mostly in meetings, and we saw in passing at the hotel Liza Minelli, Larry Flint, Linsay Lohan and Britney Spears who was preparing for her birthday party. Friday evening was a huge treat, the guys at CAA managed to get us tickets to see Carole King and James Taylor at The Troubadour - part of a run of shows I believe to celebrate fifty years of the venue. Oh My God! What a gig! Words couldn't get close to describing just how good it was. Each song played is part of the fabric of any music fan's life and we all spent the evening beaming at each other.

On Saturday I was treated to the biggest college football derby of the season, USC versus UCLA. 90,000 fans, four hours long, sold out. Amazing. I'm thankful for having played 'John Madden NFL' on the Sega Megadrive all those years ago; I could actually understand most of the rules.

Hopefully December will be a little quieter, but probably not.