In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.

The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…

I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.

Over the next five years I went to loads of his gigs. Some of them were UNLIT (a mixture of a house party and a gig), and eventually I put on an UNLIT of my own at the Gardeners Arms in January 2008. Jont played, I did a set at the piano and Stornoway played acoustic. Jont noticed that I could actually play, and I started to play piano at some of his gigs. We played a load of house concerts, small gigs and festivals around England (and a couple in Paris) through 2008/9.

Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.

And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures

It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond XK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.

Unfortunately it’s all sold out (in – like – 0.3 seconds), but we’re playing another half dozen gigs around the country in the next couple of weeks (Bristol tomorrow, then Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Nottingham, Manchester). You should come and see us!

Yesterday Jont posted the Oxford episode of his “The House We’re In” internet TV series, and already over 8,000 people have watched it! Wow. Why don’t you watch it too?:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So UNLIT was crazy. Almost a hundred people showed up, and the windows of The Boat (as the back room at the Gardeners Arms must now be known) were seriously steamed up.

I’m glad so many people made it, and loads of people have emailed to say what a great night it was. So for those that were there, and those that wish they had been, here are some fun digital memories. I’ll be adding to these over the next few days, and if I feel really crazy I’ll start cross-posting them to Facebook for that crowd…:

h3. Ben playing Dressing Up (with Spence on bongos)

Click here to view the embedded video.

h3. Ben playing Cutest Fish In The Sea

Click here to view the embedded video.

h3. More videos

I’ve uploaded all the other videos (2 songs from Stornoway and 4 from Jont) to “my YouTube account”:http://www.youtube.com/user/ihatemorningsdotcom.

h3. Photos

“Check out”:photos/tags/unlitoxford a whole load of UNLIT snaps.