It’s been a busy week. I played a load of gigs, and ended up on the BBC.

I got back from playing the Little Fish gig in Manchester at about 4:30am on Sunday, and by 2pm I was down in the Half Moon warming up for a Troubadour set as part of James Bell‘s rather excellent Offshoot festival. I revived 12×12 and played some of my more folksy numbers (Hugh F-W, Already Know, some of the Tweet Suite) before finishing with a particularly gruff rendition of How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around, my favourite Dr John song.

The Twitter song on the BBC World Service

In the evening I was playing some piano with Jooles from Little Fish at the Holywell Music Rooms (another Offshoot event). As we were setting up I got a call from the lovely Chris Vallance asking if he could use the Twitter song for a BBC World Service piece. I’m still quite pleasantly surprised that people contact me about using the song in podcasts, radio shows, presentations and lessons.

Like a proud parent I’m glad that something I created has done well for itself, and like an errant child the Twitter song calls home every once in a while to let me know what it’s up to. So (like an unwanted and slightly braggy Christmas family newsletter) here’s the bit of World Service radio with the Twitter song on it. It’s less than five minutes, and worth a listen even if I wasn’t on it. ;)

Little Fish on the BBC home page

And as if that wasn’t enough, I ended up making an appearance on the BBC home page on Monday. A tiny, badly lit part of a video of me playing Hammond behind Juju and Nez, but an appearance nonetheless. It was a video that BBC took of Little Fish playing the Radiohead song Just at the Oxford gig last Saturday. It was a classic BBC mix (loads of vocal, everything else dry and flat), but they filmed it on three cameras and it looked pretty cool.

The video seems to have disappeared off the BBC Oxford site since it was on the front page, but I recorded it while it was up so I could always sneakily post it somewhere…

The Twitter song I wrote last week has been getting some serious and much appreciated Twitter love and even a blog mention. And within a couple of days I got a message from the BBC (delivered by a mustachioed messenger on horseback) asking if I would give them an interview for the Pods and Blogs show on Radio Five Live.

Despite having a tyre explode on my Volvo I managed to dash home greasy-handed just in time to answer a Skype call from the BBC studio (I was only kidding about the horse earlier – the Beeb is pretty hi-tech these days ;o). If any of you happen to be listening to Five Live at 2am tonight, I’ll be there. I will undoubtedly be tucked up in bed, but I’m assured it will be on the podcast (and I assume the iPlayer) afterwards.

If you found my site from the radio show, hi. Be sure to subscribe to the feed or the email list, or follow me on Twitter!

I took self publicity to a new level on May Day morning by playing Jungle Book songs at a champagne breakfast in Oriel College and getting booked to play their Guest Night dinner next week! And then on Sunday I played a great set with Jont on Radio 2…

h3. May Day shenanigans

May Morning in Oxford is a wonderful time, when 10,000 or so people gather on Magdelen Bridge at 6am to hear the choir sing from the tower. Then the pubs open at 6:30am and everyone has a few beers and some sausage sandwiches before cheerfully wandering off to work (or back to bed).

This year (my tenth time) was a little more adventurous – we went on a bit of a breakfast crawl round the colleges. And this was how I ended up in the Oriel MCR playing I Wanna Be Like You at 7am. I had expected frowns and possibly expulsion, but instead they asked if they could pay me to entertain the guests at their formal dinner next week. Brilliant.

I’m entertaining the troops at Wolfson College Formal Hall on Friday too, and I haven’t played this sort of singalong/request/comedy set since my residency at the QI Club, so I had better get some practice in.

If you want me to play at your college, let me know! I’m on a roll.

h3. How many Johnnie Walkers does it take…

My dad’s called Johnnie Walker. So was his dad. And his grandad. And my cousin is also a Johnnie Walker. And now that I’m thinking about it my first name is John, which makes me a Johnnie Walker too! So I was almost dreading meeting Johnnie Walker, Radio 2 DJ and all-round legend. As it turns out I had nothing to worry about. His real name is Peter Dingley.

The session was super quick – Johnnie started interviewing Jont as he tuned up (and I set up the piano really quietly in the corner), then we had about 2 minutes to soundcheck before Johnnie introduced Candlelit. My banjo playing was extraordinary, as usual, and the whole vibe was very energetic and fun. Another 2 minute gap while Mr Walker played some sixties pop hit or other, then we kicked off a splendid rendition of Supernatural – as good as we’ve ever played it, I reckon.

h3. Next stop, Glastonbury

Jont has managed to blag us Glastonbury tickets, which means we’ll be playing the Small World stage sometime on Glasto weekend. We have “more gigs”:http://www.jontnet.com before then, but I’ll be happy finally to play the famous festival only a year after “my brother”:http://www.myspace.com/asilentfilm made it there. ;o)

I played on “Radio 4″:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/looseends.shtml on Saturday. It was the first time I had played on radio, the first time I had played Candlelit (Jont’s new single) live, the first time I had played the banjo in public and the first time I had met my childhood hero “Clive Anderson”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Anderson.

I learned a few things that day:

Clive Anderson is (as I had hoped) a thoroughly good egg;

Loose Ends is recorded around a table as if it’s live, so you sit and listen to all the clever folk yapping about their latest achievements before (and after) performing your own slice of marketing gold to a very diverse group of non-music types;

Radio 4 (at least this bit of it) is crammed with fascinating, eloquent and passionate people;

The intonation of a new banjo isn’t necessarily perfect, so playing the twelfth fret can be really under the octave.

The most interesting guest was “Emmanuel Jal”:http://www.rhymehouse.com/featureemmanueljal.html, a Sudanese child soldier who was rescued by a British aid worker and has become a rapper here in London. He’s a great guy, and his rapping is much more poetic than your average talk-singer. ;o) He’s going to come to the UNLIT on Friday and play with Jont and me, making it the best line-up to date (“Sam Sparro”:http://www.myspace.com/samsparro is coming to do his Live Lounge acoustic set too).

We’re playing “Johnnie Walker’s show”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/walker/ on Radio 2 in a couple of weeks, and I get to play piano (as well as banjo again) on that one. I doubt there will be quite as many “Egyptian novelists”:http://www.internationalpen.org.uk/go/event/the-writer-next-door hanging around though, which is a shame.