Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes
I write a (more or less) weekly newsletter about comedy, art, creativity and other stuff that floats through my mind. It has a really lovely engaged readership who I love exchanging ideas with. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s thoughtful, sometimes it’s just a place to provide creative accountability for a community of other makers! Do feel free to delve in and join us. The community is over at Substack, where you can subscribe to the newsletter and join the chat, but I’ve archived every issue here for the sake of completism.
Browse the 137 Fruit Salad Therapy Tapes below.
Tape 92: Creativity Is Just A Job You Can Do
The End Of Magical Thinking In last week’s Tape I wrote about how to deal with disappointment in a positive way in the creative industries, and briefly mentioned that my least favourite thing about working in the creative industries is the “magical thinking” that surrounds it, because I think it gets in the way of the making […]
Tape 91: Rejection! Disappointment! Failure! And How To Move Past Them
Rejection! Disappointment! Failure! And Moving Past Them… As I wrote here back at the start of January, I’ve decided that 2023 is, for me, the Change year. I’d like it to be a year where I attempt to shake up old working patterns which I feel have served their function for now, move away from old mediums and models […]
Tape 90: Two Things To Master
The Courage To Be Disliked & The Courage To Be Happy Over the last couple of weeks I read the books The Courage To Be Disliked and The Courage To Be Happy, by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. Broadly speaking, they were very good – I don’t agree with everything in them, but they form a pretty good overview […]
Tape 89: “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-Style Shows
“Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”-Style Shows This week I’ve been thinking about the mechanics and formal decisions behind the recent rise in “choose-your-own-adventure”-style shows, a genre I have recently added to with the first outing of my new show Private Dancer. I’m not plugged into the conceptual theatre scene enough to know exactly where this trend started – I imagine it […]
Tape 88: Arts Council Funding
Access Festival – Thank You! First up, just a huge thank you to NextUp, Impatient Productions, Mark Watson, the audience and especially unwilling but show-stealing stooge Alex Preston for making the first performance of my brand new show Joz Norris Is Your Private Dancer (A Dancer For Money) such a success. I’m really bowled over and proud […]
Tape 87: Private Dancer
Private Dancer Some of you may well have been enjoying Mark Watson and NextUp’s Access Festival over the last couple of weeks, a specially curated online-only festival of livestreamed comedy shows from such heroes as Mark himself, Alex Horne, Tim Key, Bilal Zafar, Sarah Keyworth, Laura Lexx, John Robertson, Stuart Laws, and many more. It’s a lovely […]
Tape 86: Coming Up In 2023
Coming Up In 2023 Happy New Year! I hope you all saw it in in style, and are looking forward to a happy 2023. Thanks so much to those of you who reached out last week in response to my Word of the Year prompt, both to let me know how last year’s Words worked out for […]
Tape 85: Word For The Year, 2023 Edition
A Word For The Year: 2023 Edition Merry post-Christmas, everyone! How was it? How did it treat you? What did you eat? What did you make of Glass Onion? Tell me everything! Mine was lovely, thanks. Pretty low-key, but I sort of wanted a low-key one after I spent last Christmas carrying furniture up and down three […]
Tape 84: The Right To The Future Tense
The Right To The Future Tense Quick pre-newsletter caveat – this one isn’t very Christmassy. I wanted to write a nice festive end-of-year one, but then I finished reading a book about surveillance capitalism and I’d promised I’d put my thoughts on it into a newsletter, and 45% of the reason this newsletter exists is […]
Tape 83: Small Worlds & Big Worlds
Small Worlds & Big Worlds Ok, first up, I’m very sorry about the formatting in this newsletter lately. What the hell’s been going on? I’ll bet you’ve all been wondering. A few weeks ago, in this newsletter, Mailchimp seemed to delete all the spacing after I’d sent the email, despite it looking fine in preview. “Yuck!” I shouted […]
Tape 82: Repeating Ideas
Repeating Ideas I joined TikTok. I didn’t want to, but everybody kept telling me I wasn’t allowed to complain about not knowing where the next bit of work would come from, as I did in this Tape a couple of weeks ago, if I wasn’t putting my work out there on every possible platform where people […]
Tape 81: Dinner Time Update
Dinner Time Update As I wrote about in this Tape a few weeks ago, in October I launched a creative residency with Vault Creative Arts alongside collaborators and dear pals Ben Target and Miranda Holms. We’ve staged two nights of sharings at the Glitch in Lower Marsh. “How’ve they been going?” I’m sure you’re all wondering. Well, I thought I’d feed […]
Tape 80: Your Rhythm; The World’s Rhythm
Your Rhythm; The World’s Rhythm This week, a few thoughts on creative rhythms, and getting them to line up. In order to talk about it, I’m going to have to allow myself to be more pessimistic than I usually aim to be in these newsletters, or at least to give voice to a period […]
Tape 79: Wilson v Springsteen
Wilson v Springsteen: A Lesson In Authenticity Firstly, a big hello to all the new subscribers since last week! I’ve been growing this newsletter community for nearly 2 years now, and everything I read online about growing a newsletter suggested you eventually reach a sort of tipping point where the community starts to gather its […]
Tape 78: The Death Of Twitter
The Death of Twitter So, it’s finally happened. Twitter is dying. I won’t go into the ins and outs of how and why it’s dying – for anybody reading this who doesn’t know the broad strokes of it, you can give it a quick Google and it should be fairly easy to catch up with […]