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In June of this year I found myself knee deep in mud, struggling from my Glastonbury tent towards the faraway, more interesting areas of the vast festival site. I could go no further, marooned in the one place you don’t want to get stuck at Glastonbury – the dance field (well, I suppose the inside of the portaloos might be worse). Yet here, in this foreign field, I somehow zeroed in on one corner where richer sounds were concealed, chancing upon the BBC Introducing Tent. And there I discovered Spotlight Kid.

That was how I came to be at the Hoxton Underbelly last Friday. Sometimes people describe me as “lucky” so I suppose it was no surprise that, having discovered a great new band originating from my home town of Nottingham, I would swiftly find them playing just round the corner from my adopted Spitalfields. After the fates had conspired, it would have been rude not to attend.

Rude, but possible. There was a parallel invite from ITV to spend the night in the Jonathan Ross green room (the real one rather than what you see on stage) with Noel Gallagher (who did so much to revive British music at its most dead), Michael Sheen (who did a magnificent portrayal of the great Cloughie himself) and Miranda Hart (who did so little to win all those comedy awards) but I reasoned I can go to Wossy any week when he’s filming. But then there was an also a British Sea Power  gig at the Barfly in Camden and they are quite possibly Britain’s absolute best band, but I have seen them maybe a dozen times before. Nottingham’s finest won out.

This year I’ve been invited to see Muse in the private Wembley box of the head of Warner records, stood on the very front row for U2 at Glastonbury and even had to step in as John Taylor’s body double for Duran Duran (I told you I was a lucky so-and-so), but it’s this sort of gig, down in the basement of a small club with an energetic hungry young band that will always excite the most.

Spotlight Kid (the Spotters on Tour) had support: the long running order comprised four hungry bands, but I missed the first (apologies to La Bete). Next up came three-piece Alphastate, with singer Ani announcing it was her birthday. She sang well, but spoke quietly and moved little, but I liked her dreamy folky vocals. And that she asked if anyone had been lucky enough to get Stone Roses tickets earlier in t

On Tuesday, my studio mate Ellen Lindner and DFC comics colleague John Aggs and I took the train up to Nottingham to paint murals for a big festival called Game City. We'd known about it last year because the guys who used to work upstairs in our studio, Ian Gouldstone, Martin Lye and Dave Surman had done a lot of animation work for it, so we were prepped to expect a huge burst of creativity on Market Square.



Our brief was for each of us to decorate a gaming lounge by Wednesday afternoon. John's and Ellen's were more specific (John had a somewhat open mission to feature the video game Crysis 2 and Ellen's instructions from LEGO were fairly tight.) I wasn't given a set theme, so I decided to draw a 30-panel space opera comic featuring a bunny called Flummox. When I saw the guys across the way finish theirs in three hours, I realised I'd been stupidly over-ambitious, and I had to work like mad, and leave out a lot of things I'd planned to do to finish by the next day and catch a particular train. But hey, it's there now, ta-dah!



This was my rough outline. It's a choose-your-own-adventure type of story, inspired partly by seeing Daniel Merlin Goodbrey's pieces at the HyperComics exhibition at Battersea Park, and having tied the idea into a workshop I led there.



Here's the almost-finished painted version. It's sort of a mash-up of the bunnies from Vern and Lettuce comic book and the aliens from You Can't Eat a Princess! picture book.



Poor Flummox. The story had several 'Game Over' bits, so he died a lot.




Here's some bits of John Aggs's work, which was sectioned off in the 'mature' area, since the video game is rather violent. The subject matter isn't my cup of tea at all, but no one can deny that that this John guy can really draw. (And he'd only been commissioned at 5pm the night before!)





Ellen was still working with the LEGO people as I left, but you can get a glimpse of it here, next to the family arts-and-crafts area. They changed the brief completely when she got there, but she was great at coming to a compromise with them.



These were the guys who finished in three hours: Daniel Grey (daninski on Twitter) and Tom Brown (tomshqui on Twitter) from Holbrooks Films. They dragged black paint down the wall on bits of cardboard, a bit like screen printing, and their walls looked great.