Dan Hough

Busking Report – Bond Street

Published 11 November 2017 in London, UK

I went to Bond Street at 16:00 on the 11th of November. My first time there. It was a good one! This session brought me in £36.01, or £18.01 per hour over a two-hour period. I played 21 songs in total! It was pretty busy. The pitch is in a rather narrow tunnel though, and it’s a nerve-wracking, worrying about people tripping over my gear.

The pitch.
The pitch.

Whenever I finish a song I fill in a Google Form with details: the song, the quality of the performance (I’m not always at my best!), the busyness around the pitch, and roughly how much money I was given for the performance. This goes into a Google Spreadsheet! Pretty handy for keeping track of which songs work best.

Anyway, this week I set up a Twitter account (@buskerbot) which takes the latest row and tweets the song data! Here’s one of the tweets from today:

My new robotic groupie.

It’s just like being there at the pitch, except you can’t hear any of the music and it’s 15 minutes behind 😂 it’s sort of experimental at the moment, and I’m going to try and improve it a little. Anyway, give the bot a follow 👍

The first tip

Just like last week, my first song was Torn and I did get two tips totalling about £1.50!

The biggest tip

During a performance of Big Yellow Taxi, someone who was really enjoying it gave me £4! Or Maybe £5, I’m not sure. At any rate, wow! Thank you, very generous person.

The best performance

I sang one of my own songs, Bored bored bored, and it was surprisingly well received! Usually people don’t really engage with original music on the Underground, but I got some smiles and some applause for this one, and it was a pretty fun performance!

The view from the pitch.
The view from the pitch.

How to improve

I still need more songs in my repertoire as I’m doing a lot of repeats.

Also, I try to say thank you to everybody who gives me a tip and sometimes it can throw me off so I might try to be a little bit more careful with this, and only do it when I’ve got a convenient opportunity.

Heckle me on Twitter @basicallydan.