Blog: The Debut Of The Hibbett/Thorpe-Tracey Collaboration

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I was in an unusual situation when I awoke on Friday morning, as I was already IN Brighton and would be STAYING there for the whole day and night to do another GIG. For LO! That evening myself and Mr CJ Thorpe-Tracey were due to appear at the This Machine Kills Wasps night to DEBUT our COLLABORATION!

As previously revealed, for the past several months myself and The Artist Formerly Known As Chris T-T have been secretly getting together to practice a bunch of songs together, with me singing and him playing piano. The original idea was to learn up enough song for us to go into the STUDIO and record them as an album, but the last time we had a practice I suggested that we also try and book a GIG in order to try some of them out in The Live Arena. I based this idea on the FACT that every time me and The Validators have recorded an album we've pretty much always then gone on to TOUR the songs and done much better versions that we'd done in the studio, and so we agree that it made sense to give these ones some time out in the OPEN AIR in front of people first.

So it was that we contacted ace promoter and all-round groovy guy Mr James Walsh to ask him to sort something out for us, please. This he very much did, and it was only when it was all booked that I released it was actually the day after the gig I was already coming down to Brighton for at The Catalyst Club. This meant that I was not only ON TOUR, but that we could also fit in ANOTHER practice during the day on Friday! WINZ!

Before that though I was dead sophisticated and went out for BREAKFAST like one of those influencers you read about, and then accidentally fell into Dave's Comics, which turned out to be a) really nice b) playing The Beatles when I walked in, which resulted in my spending LOADS more CA$H than I had any intention of doing.

I then headed to Chris's where we did our usual job of having a RIGHT OLD NATTER about Topics Various over a cup of tea, doing a few songs, and then having ANOTHER YACK before going round the corner for some lunch. This time however we did quite a lot MORE of the playing songs section than usual, including a whole RUN THROUGH of the six we'd chosen to perform. It was so RIGOROUS and grown-up - and also AMAZING - that I began to worry about the state of the delicate instrument what is my voice, for it is not used to being utilised at such length, either in singing or indeed NATTERING.

After the afore-mentioned lunch I wandered over to collect The Sea At My Beach from the train station, and then we strolled down to the SEASIDE for a bit of an old PADDLE. It was a gorgeous day and the beach was FULL of people, so it looked like the cover of a Beano Summer Special!

Soon it was back to the hotel and then onwards to The Venue, which was Sweet @ The Yellow Book Bar. It's got that lengthy name because the bar downstairs is called The Yellow Book but the room upstairs is run as a venue by the Sweet organisation. Sweet are comedy club promoters who have venues all over the place so, although it was only a tiny room with a capacity of around 25 seats, they ran it like a proper THEATRE or something, with somebody properly running the door, a really good soundman called Gabriel, a backstage area and Quite Strict Rules about shutting the door when it started. It was another excursion for me into the world of Theatrical Spaces, which seems to be the world I'm living in at the moment!

The full show itself was GRATE, hosted by the VERY funny Leslie Bloom who was really JOLLY funny. James organises these nights as being in two halves, with comedy in the first bit and music in the second. Originally Chris East aka The Artist Formerly Known As Winston Echo was meant to be coming but couldn't make it, so the host came on instead as another character called Verity, along with Lilla Multipass doing a bit of her clowning show "Woman (33)" (coming soon to The Museum Of Comedy) while James himself did a bit of helping out with the hosting. It was fun, and also QUITE WARM!

The second half kicked off with James's own band The Highchurches, who were GRATE - annoyingly GRATE in fact, not least because they paired their EMOTIONAL bunch of songs with some very funny in-between song banter, which Chris and I then had to attempt to follow by doing THIS:

The Perfect Love Song

Chips And Cheese, Pint Of Wine

Born With The Century

7 Hearts

It Only Works Because You're here

In The North Stand

As you can see, it was nearly all OLD SONGS by me - we do have some NEW ones but I think we felt safest doing these for our debut performance. We also did 7 Hearts which is basically my FAVOURITE of Chris's old songs, even though it has felt a bit weird to be practicing it in his house with him for these past few months!



It all went pretty well I think - before we went on I'd realised that I had NO IDEA how the Being On Stage bit was going to work. Chris and I have known each other for LITERALLY DECADES but have never done anything like this before, so there was no set pattern to who would be introducing songs, or what TONE we'd take, or anything like that. However, once we got started it all felt entirely natural, with us chatting between us and to the audience, and there were even some NEW JOKES!

The songs sounded lovely too, I think, and I was amazed to discover I was entirely comfortable to be doing a whole set of singing without a guitar round my neck - another thing that, as far as I remember, I have never done before, not for a whole GIG anyway. I did worry at some points that the songs were all QUITE SAD and, for the first several songs, almost entirely lacking in choruses but, as I say, it all seemed to go all right and there were BIG CELEBRATORY HUGS in the backstage area afterwards.

There were then some BEERS and some more CHAT before it was time for us all to head home. Thinking about it now, the funny thing was that it DID all seem quite normal. I've done over a THOUSAND gigs but I have never ever done anything like this before in all sorts of ways, and it was all fine. I think part of it was that palling around with Chris is so DELIGHTFUL that it makes everything else seem pretty do-able, even giving me the self-confidence to think that, actually, some of these songs might be WORTHY of this kind of treatment and that I might even be able to SING them.

It's all Quite Exciting anyway, and means that the NEXT step is for us to get booked into a studio at some point in the next couple of months to RECORD this first batch. We've then got about ten other songs that we've been working on, and after the fun of doing THIS gig I'm hoping we might well do the same sort of thing again, but that's all still to come. For now I'm just really really happy that we've got this far with it, it was BRILLO!

posted 17/8/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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