Some Socks sets from 2011

And, with a private party in Edinburgh done and dusted, the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre have completed their live performances for the year. And what a wonderful and varied year it's been, with the Socks performing in the widest variety of venues. Here are just a few of them...


A nice big room in Peebles (our second appearance there, at the Eastgate Theatre).


Stafford Gatehouse, a particularly photogenic set. We return next May.


A civil partnership celebration in the Castle that Paul McCartney used to own on the Mull Of Kintyre. I know. And yes it was as brilliant as it sounds. Okay, our gig was 45 entertaining minutes worth of the festivities. Getting to join the party and to stay in the castle was even more memorable. As was the three hour drive each way from Glasgow, making it the most remote gig of 2011 (just beating Woodend Barn in Banchory, Aberdeenshire).


A field, in a less-then-well-populated festival in Lechlade, Gloucestershire. Sadly the 100 or so people who tried valiantly to fill a field were not enough for the event to make a profit. I have yet to be paid.


A gig that we never thought would work, with our set stuck in the middle of the foyer of Fairfield Halls Croydon while the audiences for two other shows filed in and out. Amazingly it went so well we return next year.


Falkirk. Er, not much to say about this one. I'm sure it was brilliant. (There was an audience, by the way, this was taken before they'd arrived. Obviously.)


And here's us in a conservatory. Again you wouldn't think this gig would work, playing to 25 people in a private house at 6.30 on a wet Tuesday night in December, but what can I say, we killed.

Most of the time I'm much too busy to take a photograph of the set (and sometimes it just looks a bit rubbish, er, that is to say I hardly do it justice) so you'll just have to imagine this year's Socks performanes at another civil partnership and two 50th birthday parties (in Margate, London and Edinburgh), our international sellouts in Aarhus and Copenhagen, the thirty-odd theatre shows that comprised our Spring & Autumn tours, and our less conventional gigs including an open air show in a hardboard mock-up of Shakespeare's Globe in a park in Windsor and a return visit to the historic Britannia Panopticon Music Hall in Glasgow which holds the record for the coldest gig of the year (they're not allowed heating, it's a conservation thing).

2012 holds the prospect of a month of nightly gigs in Adelaide and the same again in Edinburgh, with an additional 20 theatre gigs already lined up, with more to come as well as comedy clubs and the inevitable private parties, it looks like being a busy enough year to be getting on with. Here's to it.

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