Well, what a strange couple of weeks these have been! What have we been doing? As well you might ask good reader, we've been playing gigs, going to gigs and winning competitions by the truckload (quite literally in Den's case!). 

This all started with a gig at the Lord Napier. We thought this would be a tough show as we we going on late after the Rugby World Cup Final and chances were high that we were going to be playing to a load of depressed England fans as we were odds on to lose to the South Africans. Well, lose we did, but thankfully the crowd seemed to be half expecting defeat anyway and so were not in too bad a mood after the game. It was like everyone decided to drown their sorrows and just sing and dance with us instead. We ended up having a really good night and great fun watching the crowd generally jump around and play silly buggers! :-) Top night.

After the gig, Dennis was acosted by a nice young australian lady called Sara, who had heard me mention that Den was a regular caller to XFM. She asked Den whether he had heard about their Free Marketeer competition - where listeners were challenged with getting the most free publicity for the Alex Zane Breakfast Show. Den knew about the competition so Sara told him of her idea to win the £1000 prize, which was to get the station and the show mentioned between stops over the tannoy on tube trains. Now, as it happens, Den (being a sociable sort of chap) knows a couple of tube drivers and decided to help Sara with her idea. Den contacted his mates the following week and, with the aid of my video camera, went out and videod some footage of his mates making the announcements on the Tube. We then uploaded them to Youtube before Den called up XFM and put the idea forward, waiting to see who won on the Friday morning show...(to be continued)

Anyway, in the meantime, me and Den went to see the Kaiser Chiefs at The Scala in Islington  (again courtesy of another of Den's XFM competition wins! Being a lorry driver with too much time on your hands and a fast redial finger obviously pays dividends!). The place held about 300 people max and we were down at the front in prime position about 5 feet from the stage. Unbelievably, on his way to the bar, Den heard "It's Den from Monkey See!" and turned to see Sarah, one of our Cauli regulars, who had won tickets too. We all spent the rest of the night pogo-ing like teenagers (and mainly among teenagers, it must be said) as the Kaisers blasted through all of their hits. They were amazing (although we did have to resist the temptation to say "we play that better" every time they did a tune of theirs that we cover :-)

.... anyway, Friday finally came around and Alex Zane was due to announce the first £1000 prize winner of the Free Marketeers competition. I was in my car driving to work and listening to Alex say those immortal words "...and the winner is ...... Den from Barking!" Then Den came on with Sara to accept their well deserved prize and get in a great plug for the website and our Cauli gig the next night.

To see Den's competition winning entries, just click on the XFM logos at the top of this page!

Anywho...that brings us almost to date, apart from another cracking gig at the Cauli on Saturday night, where we gave Cauli debuts to Suburban Knights, Paranoid and Last Night by The Strokes. To see the first two from Saturday's gig, just click on the song titles! We felt that, under the circumstances, it was only fitting to open the show with Down In The Tubestation at Midnight by the Jam, with our own special intro! Den also kindly decided to donate his half of the win to to Corbets Tey special needs School - making Den a winner in the truest sense of the word.

See you all soon in November!

Andy :-)