PearShaped Launch Their Annual Magazine

After months of planning and intense publicising, our Annual Launch Event happened. Thank goodness for that. More pointedly, thank goodness for Jon Hall’s perfect organisation of the whole evening.

While my faith in the magazine’s content didn’t dwindle, as publicity officer I feared that the event would be perceived as just another ‘thing’ happening, especially when swamped by the business of Fresher’s week. Accordingly, Assistant Publicity Officer, Becca Shepard, and I attempted to jazz up our flyering technique with extremely well thought-out and original lines - from ‘live music?’ to ‘music?’ to ‘Cavern?’ - inspired. We desperately debated opportunistic moments to present our glamorous black and white bits of A5 paper to purposefully avoidant students, eyes wide with hope that one day soon, somewhere on the horizon, the huge stack of flyers would diminish. We even spammed your Facebook timelines with links to the event and posted pictures of pear-themed cupcakes to lure you – those marzipan pears took longer to craft than originally anticipated, to my dismay. Needless to say, we were chuffed to bits when the Cavern reached full capacity.

The event’s lineup was fundamental to its success. Tom Elliott kicked everything off with a mellow set, ideally suited to the beginning of the gig where occupants of the venue were, for the most part, sober and attentive. We all eagerly awaited our columnist, Emily Pratten’s reaction to the latest live rendition of Harbour – her enthusiasm towards that particular track is entertaining to say the least. It will probably find its way onto a Listening Post in the near future. Needless to say, when the time came emotions soared and we all swayed with thoughtful intensity.

Bloom had an extremely captive audience – a bit too captive in my opinion. I don’t have a particular passion for public speaking, and this certainly didn’t change when I attempted to give an announcement before the band’s set began. My pitiful attempt to advertise the selling of Annuals was swamped by chants of “We want Bloom!”, “Come on Bloom!” and “BLOOOOOM!”. How embarrassing. I can’t really blame the crowd’s enthusiasm because Bloom were great. Their style was perfectly suited to the Indie-dive interior of the Cavern, and those guitar riffs were blooming awesome (pun credit: Jack Reid). I was even momentarily distracted from the aforementioned ‘let the floor swallow me whole’ feeling.

Now onto our headliners: Isaac Indiana. Tracks both new and old were played, including a particularly memorable song featuring a saxophone. One seriously brave or seriously drunk (definitely the latter) audience member got up on stage and took over at one point. But to be honest, her ability to play the saxophone was not nearly as skilled as lead guitarist Tom Sturges’. Isaac Indiana are so good live – that cannot be disputed. In particular, Tempest, from their new EP, is electric when performed in tandem with the acoustics of the Cavern. Sadly, the band announced that they would be taking a break for at least a year as lead singer, Andy, is moving to Australia. We can only wait until then to see more incredible live performances from Isaac Indiana.

We felt incredibly popular when the bouncers had to tell remaining students to leave at 1 am. They just wanted to hang out with us all night. The power of friendship amongst strangers was palpable in that moment…

To everyone who came to our first event of the year: we hope you loved it as much as we did. Thank you for reading our content, and thank you so much for supporting us last week. We hope to see you again at future events!