5

Busking Report – Waterloo (Pitch 3)

 3 years ago
source link: http://danhough.com/busking/2018-06-17-waterloo/
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.

Busking Report – Waterloo (Pitch 3)

Published 17 June 2018 in London, UK

Hi 👋 Welcome to my busking blog. If you wanna know more about my adventures visit the main busking page, or subscribe on my YouTube channel, my My Facebook Page, or Twitter.

Back in Waterloo! This is the third and final pitch in Waterloo not to have been blogged this far. So now, Waterloo is wrapped up. It was a good day today. Bit of a last-minute decision, but I’m glad I did it, as now I’ve written blogs about 47.73% of the stations. ONE MORE AND I’LL HIT 50%! I know which station it will be. But do you?! Put your answers in the comments and if you get it write I’ll, err… congratulate you on Twitter? Yeah, I’ll do that.

Anyway, today’s takings: £24.84 in total - so, £12.42 for Crisis and the rest for me. It was actually a ~2.2hr set as nobody came to get rid of me after two hours, so the hourly wage for this spot is £11.29. Not bad. The 18th best so far.

Some notable moments

Kiss on the cheek?!

Before I’d even received my first tip, a group of women came down the escalator and one of them spotted me, got very excited, walked up, leaned in very close and placed a very sloppy kiss on my right cheek.

But no tip! Cheeky!

Contactless

Last time I blogged I wrote about the introduction of contactless to my set-up. This time around I had another couple of payments via contactless. One of them even used their phone, which was an exciting development. Woo, future!

The pitch
The pitch

Interview

I went on a contactless-related Twitter rampage the other night when I was hyped from using it for the first time, and ended up talking to a Journalism student who was looking to interview a busker using contactless about their experiences so far. I volunteered, and today Barbara came to interview me about it and record some music. She said if it gets a good grade she’ll share it with me. Presumably if it doesn’t get a good grade, I’ll owe her one degree.

Missing children!!

During my set I spotted a couple of elderly travellers who came back and forth from the lift to the hall way several times. After a while, one of them approached me and sheepishly asked how to get up one floor. I told him to use the lift or the escalator. His English was a little shaky and I could tell he was struggling to get across a useful question, but eventually he expressed what he was really worried about. He wanted to know where the lift could possibly go because he’d lost two children!!

Naturally I realised quickly that I am neither qualified nor knowledgeable enough to deal with this situation. So I took them, with my guitar, to the nearest help thingie, which is fun because I’ve never used one before. It’s like a giant white circle on the wall with a red button or emergencies and a blue button for information. Usually you see teenagers messing with them, but this time I used it responsibly and successfully handed off the troubled people to a member of staff.

But if you’re worried about the missing children, fear not! He came back later and said they’d found the kids. Turned out they’d both gone back home because they couldn’t find their (I think) grandparents. London kids can look after themselves, apparently!

The first tip

I started with Breakfast at Tiffany’s again! Yay! And I got £1.20 from a very friendly man.

The view from the pitch
The view from the pitch

The best performance

In my opinion, but probably in the opinion of literally nobody else, the best performance was a particularly spirited rendition of Linoleum by NOFX. Unforunatey not a lot of people seemed to recognise it (or maybe they didn’t like it), but I had fun.

The biggest tip

No opinions allowed here: The Lazy Song wins, with about £3.50 including one £1 contactless payment. It went down really well!

How to improve

I’m not gonna lie, folks. I’ve gotten pretty lazy on the song-learning front. What I am singing I’m doing well, but there are a few hits I’ve not played lately because I don’t feel confident in them. But as we know there’s only one way to improve confidence in a song: play it for crying out loud! So I’m gonna resolve to practice Fat Bottom Girls a bit before I next play, plus Ironic, and perhaps as a special for the world cup, Three Lions by Baddiel & Skinner. That’d be pretty fun. I’ll report back.

Heckle me on Twitter @basicallydan.

Think we could work together? Get in touch.
Get more in your inbox.

About Joyk


Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK