We held our first Fishbowl Acoustic Showcase at the new venue, the Trinity Arts Centre in Tunbridge Wells on Saturday.

What an excellent evening!

We decided to move from the White Hart in Wadhurst for a couple of reasons. First of all, our old mate Gerry, who’s been running the place for as long as I can remember and is a lovely bloke who’s really into his music, is moving out to Spain. And although the new landlord has said he’s happy for us to continue running the Fishbowl there on the same terms, without Gerry the magic will be gone. Secondly, one of the problems about running an “acoustic evening” in a pub (any pub) is that you often get a bunch of loud-mouthed idiots who are there solely to get pissed and argue with each other about football rather than listen to and appreciate the music. So, it was time for a move.

We chose the Trinity because it’s a lovely venue with a great atmosphere. Which comes at a price unfortunately. Unlike running the Fishbowl in a pub, we actually had to hire this place out, which meant charging punters for tickets. The upside of this though, was that everyone who was there, was there for the music. And incredibly, it was sold out!

So we had a great venue packed with an appreciative audience, who enjoyed three great performances from Sound Sanctuary, Doon MacDonald and my own band, Little Fish Big Pond.

Of course, we recorded (and videoed) the whole evening, so check out the Fishbowl Acoustic site at www.fishbowlacoustic.com in the coming weeks, where we’ll be releasing those recordings and videos.

All in all, an excellent night. The next one is on Friday 15th June (where we’ll have Jo Hook, Sevenscore and The Diarys). Can’t wait.

So, less than a month to go until Podcamp Europe, which promises to be an excellent event. I’m looking forward to meeting for the first time various people who’s blogs & podcasts I’ve been following for a while but have never actually met.

I’ve never been to one of these Podcamps before, but all the reports I’ve heard of previous ones have been good. They seem to be a great opportunity for people to just meet, swap ideas and get creative about everything related to podcasting & Web 2.0. I reckon it’ll be a fascinating couple of days.

I’ve noticed that a lot of podcasters and people around the podcasting community are musicians. So in order to actively participate in the event and do something a little bit different (which I don’t think has been done at a Podcamp before), I’m bringing along an acoustic guitar and offering the use of it to any musician who wants to step up and perform an impromptu “podsafe” set. This can be as informal as just finding a suitable corner, picking up the guitar and playing/singing a couple of compositions to whoever wants to listen. Of course, I’ll have my Edirol recorder with me and (with permission) I’ll be recording those perfomances for the Fishbowl Acoustic Podcast.

And if anyone attending wants to bring their own instrument, so much the better - maybe we’ll get some off-the-cuff musical collabaration going and produce something new and exciting, who knows?

 See you there?

Today I did something pretty exciting - I put out my very first video podcast!

At the last Fishbowl on 29th April, I did some video recording and this is the first fruit of my efforts - Doon MacDonald, playing “You Got Me” from her album “Which Sister Knew”.

Because we always record the Fishbowl sets, I had pretty decent audio to add in (instead of having to rely on the camera microphone), so I loaded it all up into Sony Vegas, filmed myself doing an intro and outro, stuck a title sequence on and this is what I came up with:

There’s room for improvement, but it could be a lot worse! I’ll be posting more of these up on the Fishbowl site, so watch out for Origami Dinosaur and Sound Sanctuary in the next few weeks.