Auntie Flo Live + Plants Can Dance - 29th March, London

Auntie Flo Live supported by Plants Can Dance in London, 29th March. Support live music! Visa system and touring economics. Exploring Audio-Visual, live in Kenya and more.

I’d like to invite you to a special evening of music and nature sounds that I’m hosting on the 29th of March in London. Tickets are here and there are only a handful left. Apologies for those of you reading this who are not based in London!

I’ll be performing live as Auntie Flo for the first time in the UK since my band closed the main stage of the Saturday at the first We Out Here festival in 2019. I often refer to this as a high point of my career, a culmination of a 18 months of touring with the Radio Highlife album on Brownswood Records. However, after we experienced a stage invasion and our set getting cut short as a result, I said to myself that I’d take a break to rethink my approach to playing live. I didn’t think that would extend to almost six years!

The economics of live touring were hard back then, but they seem to be twice as hard now. And yet, I’ve had a growing urge to get back on stage, and off the back of my new album, In My Dreams (I’m A Bird and I’m Free), wanted to figure out the best way to present the music to a live audience, rather than settling for a proxy of a stream or Bandcamp purchase or DJ set play.

This time, instead of forming a traditional band similar to Radio Highlife tour, I set myself the task of introducing visuals. Visuals on stage have not been something I’d previously thought much about exploring mainly due to not wanting to detract from the music itself, but having noted the rise of techno-as-cinema in the EDM world, and understanding the impossible economic climate of touring with more than one person, thought this might be the right time to explore this dimension.

Visa System Economics

Forming a band for the music I do is supremely hard. Most of the musicians I worked with on the album are not based in the UK and I’ve experienced first hand the pain and expense of gaining artist Visas for my band members. Last time around, we had such a bad experience with the UK Visa systems for Mame N’Diack, our Sengalese vocalist/percussionist, that I really didn’t want to repeat that trauma. The track Mame’s Story on Radio Highlife is an tale of these woes:

At We Out Here, we projected this video highlighting similar artists who have experienced Visa problems getting into the UK.

And this was all before Brexit… It’s a shame that the Visa systems and costs for travel post-Brexit make the economics of touring with a band so difficult.

We did manage to warm up for this London show with a live band performance in Kenya last month, but this was entirely funded by the PRSF (Performing Rights Society Foundation) International Showcase Fund. They granted us £4500 to put the band together, enabling me to fly Mame and Ziggy Funk from Europe and bring in Ambasa Mandela from Kenya to front everything up and perform at Kilele Festival.

As the above video hopefully shows, it was an incredible gig, and one that renewed my love of playing with others on stage. I do hope we get a chance to perform as a band again but doing so just isn’t possible in the UK this time around. Even if we sold out twice over, we’d be losing significant money… Despite the level of investment we got from the PRSF, the Kenya gig didn’t break even!

It seems it’s not only me feeling this pinch: Kate Nash revealed how difficult it is for her, despite selling out much bigger venues:

@bbc6music@katenash talked to Huw about the financial reality of being a touring artist. Search for 'State of Independent Venues' on @BBC Sounds and listen on your Smart Speaker 🔊

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Auntie Flo AV - 29th March, Omeara, London

For my new live show, I’m attempting something new. I’ve been working with visual artist Tiernan Crilley to take the album visual aesthetic onto the big screen. He’s been mapping bird flocking behaviour and syncing it with the music, accompanied by beautiful dream-like sky shots.

We’ve been working on a way for the birds to flock together to create the vocalist’s face and sing the lyrics of some key tracks, which should hopefully be a bit of a ‘wow’ moment. I won’t share any previews yet as don’t want to spoil the surprise - hope you can make it along!

I’m hoping to find balance between it being a show for primarily getting lost in the music, for dancing and, on occasion, finding time to admire the visuals. We’ll also have Ziggy Funk doing a live cameo on guitar for what will hopefully be a memorable rendition of Green City.

Warm Up: Plants Can Dance

The warm up slot will be dedicated to the sonic wonder of plant life with my new concept ‘Plants Can Dance (and Mushrooms Sing)’. If you haven’t already, check the live stream I did on My Analog Journal earlier this month. I’ll set up a generative synth to convert the bioelectricity from plants on stage into sound. So for perhaps the first time ever, plants (and perhaps some mushrooms) will be given a dedicated support slot.

Merchandise

We’ll have a merch stall with brand new Plants Can Dance t-shirts, vinyl records and more. I’ve kept back a few copies of the new album and the Green City 12” which is now on its third repress! It’s sold out at my Bandcamp but I’ll have a few copies for sale on the night - get down early to pick one up. It’s also available across dozens of record stores globally, so you can support your local shop by buying it there.

That’s it for my update. Hope to see you on the 29th! There are around 50 tickets left - so please support live music by grabbing YOUR TICKET

For those in Scotland, I’ll be performing both with the live AV show and as Plants Can Dance at my favourite festival- Kelburn Garden party, later this summer. I’ll also be announcing more summer dates shortly - if you’d like to book me, please get in touch.