Not much news volumistic term this month, but exciting content-wise!

Read my January newsletter here

The main event in it is our biggest ever Festival of the Spoken Nerd show, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket! ZOMG!

£10 tickets available here

Contains news about co-hosting the biggest show I’ve ever done, and the smallest show I’ve ever done, in the space of a fortnight, plus links to the latest “Extra Time For Questions” podcast. Here’s me, Matt and Steve, making idiots of ourselves in the name of science, maths and general nerdery again:

Photo by Idil Sukan/Draw HQ

I’ve just popped out another heinously long newsletter:

Read it, in all it’s blue and purple glory, here

Things of note include:

• A handy discount on my Festive album “It’s going to be an awkward Christmas, darling”
• Tickets are on sale for our biggest Festival of the Spoken Nerd at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 18th January (handy ticket discount here too)
• Mounted, framed and signed copies of this amazing portrait of The Balconettes are being sold to raise money for Shelter on December. Cor!

Plus about a million other things including multiple podcasts, songs on BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4, and my spangly new website.

Happy Christmas, eh?

I’ve just sent out a newsletter containing something I’ve been working on for months… an animated music video for my newest song, You & Me & Walt Disney.

There’s lots of other bits and pieces in it, like new free songs and gig around the country soon.

Here’s the link: Helen Arney – October News

If you want to sign up to receive these in the future (see, they’re not so awful?) the link is here

Illustration by Tom Humberstone

It’s that time of year again… I’m on a train speeding toward Edinburgh for the month of August.

One of the main reasons I’m there is to write and perform in Alchemy, an awesome secret sketch show happening most weekends. It’s full of new stuff, new comedians and I’m sorting out lots of music for it. It is going to be awesome. For all the latest about that, follow AlchemyEH1 on twitter.

The other reason is our one-off Festival of the Spoken Nerd on the Free Fringe on Wednesday 16th August (see flyer above by brilliant Tom Humberstone!)

Of course, that’s not enough so I’ve found another 40 or so gigs to do, including Robin Ince’s lunchtime science show, Storytellers Club, The Great Sketch Off, Bitch Doctors, Tricity Vogue’s Ukulele Cabaret, Richard Wiseman’s Secret Society show, Comedy Countdown at the Gilded Balloon, Devil’s Advocate for Skeptics on the Fringe, Totally Acoustic with MJ Hibbett, Richard Sandling’s Perfect Movie, a tonne of mixed bill showcases including one with my girlband The Balconettes and…

…well, I could go on, but they’re all listed here:
helenarney.com/live-dates

If you’re in Edinburgh any time in August, come to one of them and say hello!

Hello,

I had a bit of time this weekend to do something I’ve been meaning to do for ages… which is find a home for all the demos, jingles, audio experiments and unperformable songs I wrote for kids shows that never happened.

It’s all here:

http://soundcloud.com/helenarney

I’ll be adding various bits and pieces of audio from the Fringe throughout August, using the new SoundCloud iPhone app, and I think there’s some sort of Edinburgh Q&A shennanigans happening as well…

I suppose I should say “watch this space” but with your ears not your eyes. You know what I mean.

A quick post with a link to my newsletter, fresh out this morning:
Helen Arney :: July news, Radio 4 and summer festivals

Warning: contains added Tim Key and a heinously cute picture from Latitude 2009.

Just a quick post in case anyone has come here from listening to The Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4 this afternoon… it was an absolute blast to be part of that live Cheltenham Science Festival show. I hope people listening at home thought it sounded like fun too (it was!)

In case you missed it, the iPlayer link is here:
20th June, Infinite Monkey Cage

And it’s available as a BBC podcast here. My song “The Sun has got his Huff on” is about 20 minutes in.

If you like my huffy sun song enough to want to own it, well you’re in luck: I’ve just put it up on my Bandcamp site as a free download. You can also pay a bit of money and get the hip-hop remix of my song about sexy(ish) animals at the same time, if you’re so inclined.

It’s all here on Bandcamp. Thanks! And bye for now!

Hello there,

So, I experimented earlier this week with putting three of my science songs up on Bandcamp for free, hoping that people would listen, download, like, share… and maybe also buy the hip-hop version of Animals sitting alongside it for £1 (which would mean I can finally give some proper money to the musical genii Mr Simmonds and Professor Elemental who helped create it)

As an experiment, it’s worked waaaaaaay better than I expected. I should have listened to all of JoCo‘s rants much earlier than this. Massive, massive thanks to everyone who has downloaded and shared the songs so far, especially the new cryogenic love song (YouTube video) and even more thanks to anyone who bought Animals, often for more than RRP. I’m a really happy rabbit right now. And with the money from Bandcamp I’ll buy fresh uke strings, Jamie will eat fancy owl biscuits all month, and El can be kept in clean fighting trousers for the rest of the year.

I was only going to let it run for 100 downloads, but there’s just way too much joy to be had from giving these tracks away. So I’m going to extend these free downloads indefinitely, and adding more acoustic tracks as I get round to recording them.

I’ll probably gather up all my science songs and re-record them for a studio album this Autumn, but for now it’s free acoustic tracks all the way. Cool? Cool.

They’re here by the way. Still free! Enjoy all that.

helen

Hello again,

I’ve been saving up the things on this latest update for a while, but here it all is:

Helen Arney News for May

Shield your eyes, it’s very yellow. There’s news about lots of shows on sale including 2 new Festival of the Spoken Nerds at our luxurious new bigger venue, and a series of very awesome Edinburgh Fringe previews at the Green Man. Plus cardboard cutout immortality!

Sign up to my mailing list to get this sort of thing direct to your inbox.

Bye for now,

helen

Today, the apotheosis of ukulele-based comedy hip hop has been reached, and you can own it right now as a download. I present to you… Animals!

It’s released today as the first track in a mini-album called Geek Like Me. You can download the whole thing from Bandcamp, iTunes and Amazon, and it also marks the start of the  2011 Geek Pop Festival.

All the links and lyrics you need are here.

I think is sounds pretty amazing thanks to Mr Simmonds & Professor Elemental, but I’ll let you listen and decide for yourselves… Bye for now.