The gig was organised by Joe Viner - here is his report
I organised a gig for college for free called Hip Hop+, it was performed on the 10th of December, It was originally supposed to be a Deejay gig but as acts dropped out I ended up replacing them with Hip Hop acts, the acts that were confirmed for the gig were Rising Son, who had won a competition for his remix version of Nas’s Thief’s Theme in 2004 and it was released on the UK version of the album Streets Disciple. Madcap who has been recording in Strode College with a student who has been producing his beats, they have been working on an album for a year and a half and it is to be released early 2010.
Replay who is a student here at strode college who is from America his producer is also a student, Replay who has been performed many a times at strode college and is constantly recording in the college’s facilities, and he has a mix tape out on the 8th of January 2010 and an album to be released spring 2010. Then finally Dirty Welsh, he is also a student at college who hasn’t performed at college before but he has performed at gigs outside of college as an MC at deejay sets, he too has a mix tape out in 2010. Unfortunately Rising Son had to pull out a day before the performance because of other conflictions, he sent his deepest regrets and sincere apologies and promise’s to do another free gig for college. The way we managed to get around this situation, was that we increased everyone set times by five minutes, and had a little freestyle battle at the end of Replays set and the beginning of Madcap’s set. The next situation we encountered was that Dirty Welsh’s hype man couldn’t make it but Dirty Welsh’s mate who is also an MC Crazy legs replaced him, this encountered another problem because he is in a wheelchair, but fortunately the venue had wheelchair accessibility, Crazy legs also got to freestyle with Replay and Dirty welsh and at the very beginning of the show he did a quick freestyle with Dirty Welsh on one of his own backing tracks.
The show was very successful from there on through out the gig; we had a decent sized crowd of about 80 people, and I will be organising more gigs for the college and for those performers for outside of college gig’s this show that their were pleased with the gig.
The way I promoted this gig was using the social networking site facebook, poster’s and word of mouth, firstly I had a mate in the same class at college with me, he has done some other photoshopping and designs that I have seen, so I asked him if he could do me a poster, which he agreed to do, and it came out lovely. I got those posters laser printed in A3 and A4 and put at least 4 in each block of college, and many in the refectory and a jpeg of the poster on the plasma screen. As for facebook, I started an events page and used a jpeg of the poster and used it as the main image of the event, I then added all of my college friends on facebook and Replay did the same, then I sent out an mail every couple of days to remind people to come and give them info on the gig and tell them to tell their friends
