More Bear Explosion madness!

It's been an incredible summer for my latest project, Bear Explosion.  For anyone who doesn't yet know (can it be?), we're a comedy band producing videos and doing occasional live performances, loosely on a bear theme.

July saw us over in Northern Ireland, performing our first 'proper' live shows at the Belfast Bear Weekend, organised by Men Of The North.  We certainly were very busy boys that weekend, performing our stuff three times in all.  The Northern Irish audiences LOVED what we were doing, and we were incredibly proud and flattered by the comments we received during the weekend.  Add to that the fact we were all away together on a boys' mini-break, and that the very well organised weekend was fantastically enjoyable and we'd have to say a brilliant time was had by all!

We were then straight back into rehearsals for our first gig in our home town of Manchester, booked in to perform at the Village Square stage during Manchester Pride.  I could feel the lads getting a bit nervous as we got closer and closer to the day.  Even the rain (and there was lots of it!) couldn't keep our amazing audience from having a great time watching us.  And again we had so much fun, both on stage, and also during our drunken celebrations throughout the weekend!  Several of us even went for a boogie at G-A-Y Manchester, not something you'll hear me say very often! :-)

Bear Explosion have posted several new videos since the last time I blogged about them, so if you want to find out more about us, you can connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or on the Bear Explosion website.

Holiday Time

Just back from a fun fortnight in the Northwest of North America.

It started with a long journey: Manchester - London - Toronto - Portland. The flight from London to Toronto was delayed, then we discovered that to transfer to the US, we had to pick up our bags and take them through US Border Controls. Unfortunately, our bags didn't come off the flight... After much to-ing and fro-ing with a member of Air Canada's staff, we discovered the bags had been sent to the wrong belt in Toronto and eventually got hold of them... by now we'd been waiting over an hour. Then we had a look at the line for Border Control - that was going to take at least another hour, by which time we'd definitely have missed our connection.

We had conversations with two more of Air Canada's staff, both of whom were utterly useless and might as well have ignored us. Thank goodness we kept on trying, and the third one we asked finally helped and popped us in the front of the queue (sorry if you were waiting behind us!).

Why are the US border guards so scary? Already flustered through being about to miss my flight, the guard asked so many questions and made me nervous and stuttering! Eventually I got through and then did something I haven't done since the nineties... run! I surprised myself by how far I was able to run without dying... and somehow we made it on to the flight (which took off within a couple of minutes of our arrival!).

The weekend in Portland was fantastic - Oregon Bears really know how to put on a bear event. I'd highly recommend it - beartownweekend.com for next year! We met some great people, and even managed to swap our shirts at the shirt swapping party, no mean feat for two of the big guys!

Then on to Seattle, where we had a manic couple of days fitting in all the sights. We met up again with Jonathan, who we'd met in Portland and spent an enjoyable morning with him at the aquarium and getting fish and chips. We also did here what we always do on US holidays... find a branch of Casual Male XL (in Tukwila) and shop, shop, shop!

Final weekend was spent in Vancouver. We did our travelling between cities on Amtrak trains, which was a nice change from flying. Vancouver itself was very quiet, having been the location of a riot the night before we arrived. We spent the time there mainly pottering around, although we did have one night getting drunk on Peach cider...

Baby Got Back

Just a very quick blog post to say that Bear Explosion's first video is now online! You can find it here - and if you like it, feel free to share it... find Bear Explosion on Facebook, Twitter or here.

Bear Explosion!

Well, it does seem my blogs are getting further and further apart!

The reason, for once, is that I've been really busy... I've set up a new group - Bear Explosion. We're a bunch of gay guys based in Manchester, making comedy music videos. We also have an offshoot doing live performances. As a group, we've been hard at work since about November, and last Sunday we premiered our first two videos during the karaoke night at the Outpost.

It was in the middle of the Great British Bear Bash, a huge event for the Bear community (hey, look up bear (gay slang) on wikipedia if you're confused!).

The evening was very busy, and as well as showing our first two videos ("Baby Got Back" and "Bearband Medley"), we also planned to sing a couple of songs - an adapted version of Katy Perry's "California Girls", plus the Bear Explosion theme song, which I wrote, my friend Gary arranged and another friend, Will, created the backing track for.

Just to clear it up - yes, we do know the words to our songs :-) But since we knew it was a karaoke night, we thought it would be fun to put our lyrics on the screen as if they were karaoke tracks - that way the audience could follow us, or even join in!

So we had five nervous performers, some well rehearsed songs and some fun, crackingly well-edited videos... and they were all received really well. I was massively proud of the boys, who gave some brilliant harmonic vocals and even managed to enjoy what they were doing, despite any butterflies they were feeling... well done lads!

We're going to start putting the videos online sometime in early June, so watch this space for details - or find us on Facebook, Twitter, or on our own website. Our website is only just started, and doesn't contain much for now, but we are working on it!

Then at the end July, we'll be performing at the Belfast Bear Weekend organised by Men Of The North - we're really excited about this, so hope you'll consider being there!