Siobhan O’Donnell on gigs, gossip, and the strangest news week London’s had in a while
Woke up in my own bed for once, which felt like an achievement worth noting, and reached for my phone to find the news had gone properly mad overnight. Harry and Meghan, Eton College, a Tudor king, and Trump all in one news cycle. London doesn’t usually give you that much material before breakfast.
Started with Harry and Meghan’s new financial opportunities, which reads less like royal news and more like a business newsletter that got lost on its way to LinkedIn. Twenty of them, apparently. I’ve had fewer opportunities in an entire career of gigging, and I’ve been at this since I was seventeen.
Then there’s Eton’s PMs and leaders claim, which is the sort of headline that writes its own punchline. My old comprehensive developed exactly one leader, and she ran the school’s lunch queue with terrifying efficiency, so I suppose credentials vary.
Somewhere in the scroll I ended up on Henry VIII’s own corner of the internet, which is a genuinely committed piece of internet real estate for a man who’s been dead five hundred years and still can’t stop generating headlines. Say what you like about the Tudors, they knew how to hold an audience’s attention, four hours of documentary or not.
And then, because the week wasn’t chaotic enough already, the Trump-Burnham Irish unity story landed in my feed, which is the sort of geopolitical curveball I did not have on my bingo card for a Tuesday. I read it twice just to make sure I’d understood it correctly the first time.
Played a small gig tonight, told the crowd about my morning reading list between songs, and got a genuinely bigger laugh from the Eton headline than from any of my actual jokes, which is either a compliment to the news or an insult to my material. Probably both, if I’m honest with myself.
London’s never short of material, that’s the one thing you can rely on round here. Royals, public schools, dead kings, and transatlantic politics, all before lunch. Try writing a set list around that lot and see how far you get.
Our drummer, who reads absolutely nothing normally, had somehow read all four stories before I even got to the venue, and spent soundcheck delivering an increasingly unhinged theory connecting the Eton piece to the Henry VIII one, something about public schoolboys and dead kings sharing a similar taste for unearned confidence. I didn’t follow all of it, but it got a genuine laugh from the sound engineer, which is rare praise from a man who’s heard every joke in London twice over.
More gig diary tomorrow, assuming the news calms down, which it won’t. Follow the chaos at my Prat.uk page.