This article was written by Colin Flaherty and first published by The Groggy Squirrel in 2008 while I was promoting my 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Show.
The original article is HERE.
Edinburgh Fringe – James Hazelden in Freeloader
A regular visitor to the Edinburgh Fringe as part of Man Bites God, James Hazelden is attending as a solo performer this year. Between roadtesting some songs for an audience and preparing for the trip, James spared a few minutes for a chat.
The name of your show is Freeloader. Please explain.
When I travel overseas, I only ever go to countries where there is a couch for me. I have an aversion to hotels, so it’s very me; a very couch lifestyle. I’m doing 19 shows in Edinburgh and afterwards I’m going to Europe. I only go to places where someone goes “There’s a mate, they’ll be cool & will have a couch for you to sleep on”. It suits me.
Will you be performing all new songs for the show?
No. There is a lot of new songs, but I was overseas last year playing cello in a folk duo with Chloe Hall, spent two months in Europe and did a few solo shows in Wales. I wrote a lot of songs in that time & they form the basis of a lot of the stuff, but Edinburgh hasn’t seen a lot of my stuff. I used to be in band before Man Bites God called “The Drowning Hitlers” and in fact one of the songs I played tonight (James was warming up with a couple of sets at Local Laughs) was from the old days, so it’s kind of a mixture of old stuff and really new stuff, but stuff no one has really seen before. I’ve brought it out and updated.
Do you often have to adapt your songs for different audiences in different countries?
Sometimes. Man Bites God was in Edinburgh in 2004 and there were a couple of songs we found just didn’t work. We had a song that we thought was hilarious about threesomes, a very silly song, and in Australia it killed; totally killed, it was a great song. On the first night of our Edinburgh show we knew it was going to go right off. Everyone in the audience was European, they were looking at us and literally you could see them thinking “Yeah. Threesomes. I’ve just come from a threesome. To be here tonight I had to leave a threesome.” From the second show, that song was cut so there is often a learning curve. I actually really like that though, I’m not really a big fan of doing the same show every night. You can see me mucking around on stage, I’m happy to fuck around and do different things. When you do nineteen shows at a venue it’s going to morph into something else. There’s going to be songs that don’t work & ones that turn out funnier than I thought. It makes things interesting and that means you’re not doing it on automatic pilot, so with no beginning, middle and end I am free to wander.
Will there much of the genre hopping that you do with Man Bites God? Or it just you and a guitar?
Yes, it’s just me and a guitar which is a really interesting limitation. How stupid is this? What I did was, I’m going to take the two funnier members of MBG out of the equation! I’m going to miss them but what it means is the show, by it’s nature I have to rely more on the lyrics and singing. Man Bites God was never gimmicky, we love music so much that we play in a lot of genres. By taking the folk approach this time around, it’s more storytelling and getting the songs across to people. After writing 6 or more festival shows, this is bringing it back to basics. I’m not the best guitarist in the world, so it really does all come down to the content of the songs rather than the arrangement. It’s a new way of working that wakes me up after millions of gigs.
James will be performing Freeloader at Nicol Edwards (29-35 Niddry Street, Edinburgh). See the Fringe Website for full details.