Snowballs, Disco Balls, Ballrooms. Can you guess what the theme of this blog title is?

We are fresh back from New York City and our mini-tour, it was an amazing trip! Our events went so well, especially at the very lush Soho House New York which was incredible (with members hugging Helix for his DJ skills, no lie) and our gig in New Haven, Connecticut which was very raucous and very fun. Whilst we were there, we got caught in a freakishly early snowstorm that managed to grind the Tri-State area to a halt for three days. Of course, you all know that when life gives Jess & Helix snowstorms, we make a snowman!

Yes, that's me in something other than a minidress.

We will continue to bring our show to the States on a regular basis because they are totally loving us, and our next trip back is planned for February. We will also be bringing our addictive fun and games to a certain European city this winter… stay tuned for the announcement!

Meanwhile, for you Londoners, we have some exciting events planned for you this month! Below is a summary about our fun goings on in November, we do hope to see you with your bingo daubers, in a ballroom, or under a disco ball soon.

Don’t forget to read the bit about Christmas parties, we still have a couple of dates left in December if you’d like to plan your best company party ever!

ALSO be sure to read about our November competition: we are offering FREE PRIZES for fans that spread the good word about us. To enter, read the last bit of today’s blog entry.

Love,
Jess Indeedy xx


THE CONSTANTLY SOLD-OUT GIG

Our Thursday nights at Drink, Shop & Do are perpetually sold out, but if you speed-click your way to our web shop right now you might just get tickets to one of our December events. The next gig there on Thursday, November 17th is, er, sold out, but the tickets for the December & January dates can be bought here.
DSD is so gorgeous, and we love their amazing vintage decor and tasty menu – it’s possibly the coolest bar/cafe in London. For real.


BINGO IN A BALHAM BALLROOM

South Londoners, prepare to shake it. Our first foray at The Balham Bowls Club in October was simply legendary, and we can’t wait for the next one on Friday, November 18th. Their upstairs ballroom is beautiful, and how often do you get to play bingo in a ballroom these days? Get your tickets to ensure the best seats in the house here. 

NEW HOME IN OLD STREET

Because we are so popular with private events for companies in Shoreditch and the City, we thought we’d start a regular night based in Old Street so the large number of our fans based in that area could get their regular musical bingo fix! We didn’t have to look very far, the supercool City Arts & Music Project was the obvious choice, and we will be making our debut there on Wednesday, November 23rd! This place is always packed with fun-loving, music-appreciating people and we can’t wait to introduce them to our addictive live game show!
Work or live nearby? Grab your tickets here.


Ho, Ho, Holy Crap, It’s Almost Christmas!

If you haven’t already sorted out your company Christmas party, let me do it for you!
We love doing company parties because they’re the wildest! Maybe it’s down to the ever-flowing free booze. If you’d like to see your most uptight colleagues completely thawed out, email me for our shiny gorgeous private event info pack. We also offer a complete event planning service from menus to decorations to make your life easier, and we’ll let you take all the credit for planning the best party ever.
www.musical-bingo.com


SPREAD THE WORD AND WIN A MYSTERY PRIZE!

That’s right! You can win prizes by simply getting 10 of your friends to ’Like’ our Facebook page! All you need to do is email the names of the ten friends you’ve put forward to info@musical-bingo.com. We will check for the new names* on our Facebook page and either post your prize, or you can collect it at one of our upcoming events. Prizes include free drinks, entry to our sold-out gigs, VIP guest list for Shoreditch House, t-shirts, mix tapes, tea, and a wide array of sweets! www.facebook.com/musicalbingo 

*The 10 names must be new to our Facebook page. Yes, you may enter more than once, in fact we encourage it! You will receive a prize for every ten names. UK mailing addresses only please!


We’ve Arrived

Good day to you lovely bingo fans!


Autumn is by far my most favourite season of the year. Here we are at the end of September, and I am on top of the world. Not only because autumn brings me apple pies, chunky sweaters, changing leaves, Fashion Weeks, and crisp weather, but also because this particular autumn will be bringing me Musical Bingo with Jess Indeedy’s radio debut, more events at new and tried and true venues in London,  New York and New Haven, an appearance at a huge record label party at The Scala where I’ll have run of my own room, my first ever gig in South London, a land that has been courting me for years, and a sold out show at our North London home, Drink, Shop & Do. (Don’t worry, the chunky sweaters will be safely in my closet for these appearances, giving way for sequins and the like.)

Not to mention that I’m getting contacted daily to put on Musical Bingo at company Christmas parties, which I absolutely love doing. It’s only September and my holiday season is looking pretty busy already!

I’m going to list all these exciting happenings for ease of reading, feel free to click on their corresponding links to get involved:

1. The RADIO DEBUT (oh. my. goodness.) of Musical Bingo with Jess Indeedy will be on Monday, October 3rd at 9pm GMT on Dom Servini’s Unherd Show on Colourful Radio which is both digital and online so you can play from anywhere in the world! To sign up to play, just click here.

2. Our SOUTH LONDON PREMIERE will be at the Balham Bowls Club on Friday, October 14th at 8pm. Have you seen this adorable place? You can buy your tickets here.

3. Our appearance at the BIG RECORD LABEL PARTY is at Wah Wah Live! at The Scala, featuring Gilles Peterson, Colman Bothers, The Boxettes, Stac & Blue Daisy, Greg Wilson, Scrimshire, Gideon Conn and many more, plus special surprise guests! Tickets are £15, buy them here or to get on my discounted guest list just email me at info@musical-bingo.com

4. The SOLD OUT gig on October 20th at Drink Shop & Do is, er, sold out, but we still have tickets available for the November & December dates which you can buyhere. DSD is amazing, and we love our crazy Thursdays here.


5. The latest NEW NEW YORK venue to host our addictive craze is gorgeous members club, Soho House New York on October 25th! This event is just for members but if you are writing a piece on us or you are one of my BFFs email me at info@musical-bingo.com and I’ll add you to my teeny personal guest list.

6. Our NEW NEW HAVEN venue is an amazing addition to our roster, it’s called Box 63 and has reeeeally good American food and drink. I will be getting my cheeseburger fix on here no diggity. Grab your tickets here.

7. Our tried and true BROOKLYN venue, Berry Park, is ready for another night of our hot musical competition on Thursday October 27th. We love this place and Brooklyn loves us. Boom. Get cheaper tickets in advance here.

8. Ho, ho, ho. Yep, we’re already getting lots of CHRISTMAS PARTY bookings. We love doing company parties because they’re the wildest! Maybe it’s down to the ever-flowing free booze. Email me for our shiny gorgeous private event info pack. We also do weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, Gary Barlow’s birthday parties (if he’ll have us, apparently he loves bingo).
Also don’t forget to visit our website for more information about how the game works.

www.musical-bingo.com

I hope to see you at some of our events, whether you’re in London, New York, New Haven, or via the airwaves!

All My Love,

Jess Indeedy

Hot Fun In The Summertime

Hello Readers!

There have been so many fantastic things happening since I last blogged!

DJ Helix and I moved house in July and we’re so happy with our new place and our leafy new neighbourhood. One of the first things we set up was the DJ booth, naturally.

We celebrated with champagne when we got the keys to our new place.

Then we celebrated our one year wedding anniversary on July 24th, by reenacting our wedding menu and wearing our wedding best once again. Check out this Lancashire cheese soufflé I made:

Lancashire Cheese Souffle = heaven.

We also put on Musical Bingo for a private investment firm in The City in July, and I have to say this is one of the best private gigs we’ve ever done. We added a team competition element this time and had to create a tiebreaker between two teams at the end of the night. The result? Two teams of finance professionals performing a dance- and sing-off in front of their colleagues. I won’t post photos or videos of it here to protect the innocent, but I do have them on file and often have look whenever I need cheering up!

The party was held in the company's massive training space, high up in a City building. They put our logo up on these giant monitors - how cool is that? I love corporate parties!

July also brought us our first event at London’s most adorable design shop and café, Drink Shop & Do. The show sold out a week in advance, and on the night there was lots of winning, dancing, drinking, and dauber decorating! Our events at this spectacular venue have been selling out repeatedly so the early bird really gets the worm in this case. You can buy tickets in advance at our web shop.

Our 'Decorate A Dauber' craft table - fun!

August has been amazing so far, I went to New York and Connecticut to spend time with family and to bring Musical Bingo to Brooklyn once again! I really enjoyed hanging out with everybody, my nieces are just getting cuter and my grandmother is on top form. Our gig at Berry Park went down a storm, these Brooklyners are seriously competitive let me tell you! We’ll be back in New York in October when we play Berry Park again and at the exquisite private members club Soho House New York!

They look sweet, but they're really out to whoop your arse at musical bingo. They scooped up a lot of prizes.

That's me with one of our New York DJs, Chrispy. He's also my little brother. We're a family of entertainers.

Now I’m back in London and it’s been nonstop since I landed. I meant to blog all of this from Brooklyn but there were too many non-laptop based things to do!

Tomorrow night we rock Drink Shop & Do again (it’s sold out so don’t get excited, unless you managed to get tickets of course. Then you should get really excited).
And then, after a flurry of really fun meetings and team nights out, we are doing our first gig at the sumptuous Baby Bathhouse in Stoke Newington on September 8th! We are really psyched about this new venue because a) the owners rule, we’ve worked with them before at their sister venue, The Bathhouse, b) because we have always wanted to do a ‘local event for local people’ in Stoke Newington, the land forgotten by the London Underground and c) it’s my birthday! The Baby Bathhouse is an absolutely gorgeous space and I’m already thinking about what to wear on the 8th to complement my surroundings. Get tickets in our web shop.

One quick public service announcement: We have a shiny new mailing list signup form, if you’re not on our list yet you should be. You get free stuff, invites to our exclusive gigs, and love letters from me every once in a while. Just click here to join our super fun mailing list.

My next blog will include photos of tomorrow’s event at Drink Shop & Do and other fun morsels of information. Hope to see you all soon on one side of the Atlantic or the other.

Love,
Jess Indeedy xx

 

 

Arts & Crafts & Bingo (of the musical variety)

Great news, bingo lovers. We will be putting on regular nights at Drink Shop & Do, the amazing café, bar and shop in King’s Cross! The first installment is Thursday, July 21st at 7pm.

As I’ve foreshadowed in my previous post about our official Musical Bingo with Jess Indeedy Daubers, we will be introducing ‘Decorate A Dauber’ at this next event. For a squid you get our official dauber with sexy logo (as designed by our DJ Helix, graphic designer extraordinaire) and your choice of ribbons, buttons, gems, pom poms to bling it out to the max.

How fun will it be to get your arts and crafts fix whilst listening for tunes to mark off your bingo card and subsequently win prizes? Very fun. Plus you can bring your dauber to future events and get discounts on entry and drinks and things. Nice!

To buy tickets to this event please visit our webshop (!), they’re £5. Please make haste because there is limited capacity for this one and you don’t want to miss out.

Love,

Jess Indeedy

Drink Shop & Do make dreamy cocktails.

Official Musical Bingo Daubers!

Introducing our official Musical Bingo Daubers! Bedazzled and bingo-ready.

I feel privileged to be in the same photo as this gorgeous little dauber.

Shoreditch from the rooftops!

Let’s hear it for summer! Thanks to the pleasant weather last Tuesday, we got to do our first al fresco Musical Bingo on the roof of our home away from home, Shoreditch House. It was an amazing night, the room was full to the brim, and Helix and I agree it was our best gig yet!

We teamed up with Shoreditch House to create bespoke drinks for the evening; introducing the Musical Bingotini!

We gave away champagne, a bowling session, a bucketful of sweets (literally) and many more amazing prizes.

Our first prize winner for the evening!

Helix, making a fashion statement in one of his designs.

For more amazing photos, please check out the photo album on our Facebook page. And don’t forget to click ‘Like’!

Love Jess & Helix xxx

P.S. Special thanks to Uslan Cevet for his excellent photography on the night.

The ‘No Handbag’ Trend

I am sick of lugging heavy handbags around London. At any given time, the contents of my handbag include:

Five lipstick/gloss options
A massive wallet
Blackberry
iPod (or two depending on battery levels)
Burt’s Bees Hand Salve
A comb (for emergency backcombing)
A pack of Extra gum
Sunglasses
Oyster card
Keys
Pen
Pac-Man notebook
USB stick
Hair elastic
And a lot of the time, a Nintendo DS and a C3PO Pez dispenser.

To some of you, this list will look quite minimal.

For me it all adds up to one heavy sack of pain, and I’ve never been a fan of the ‘pack horse’ look. I hereby declare the birth of the ‘No Handbag’ trend. It’s a more carefree effect, and involves putting your debit card, keys, oyster card, and phone in your pockets. Men have been rocking this look for years.

Doesn’t your shoulder feel better already?

 

My everyday handbag, the Aspinal 'Barbarella' is made of patent leather and weighs in at 4 lbs. before you've put anything in it. Gorgeous, but heavy.

If I were an album…

…it would have to be Carole King’s Tapestry.

My Dad had it on vinyl when I was growing up and we listened to it a lot, especially at dinnertime (when we grew tired of Herbie Mann’s At The Village Gate, that is, which was on constant rotation). This copy is probably now safely in my brother’s record collection in Brooklyn. We later got it on CD and it came with us when we spent summers at the beach in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.  I sang ‘So Far Away’ in concert when I was in high school, and put on regular performances of the album tracks in the ladies’ showers in my dorm at university.

Carole’s voice is so honest, you can truly feel her love and her pain when she tells her stories.  She is fearless with her emotions as she sings. Her piano is perfect and neat and soulful at the same time. I have always identified with her lyrics and her poetic, beautiful, yet matter-of-fact delivery of truths.

A few years ago a Californian friend of mine gave me a copy of the album on vinyl that she had bought at a vintage record shop, not knowing that it was sort of my ‘life anthem’. So now I have a vinyl copy out here in the UK and it gets regular play on my husband’s living room turntables, taking me back to my family dinners, beaches, and memories of simpler times.

I would tell you what my favourite track is if I could only decide.

This album follows me around and I hope it never stops.

Flaunt your bingo love.

I’m pleased to introduce this season’s must-have fashion item: our glorious Musical Bingo t-shirt!

Work it, own it.

Sizes available are Small, Medium, and Large and they’re £12 each. To order please email info@musical-bingo.com, we accept Paypal only and we’ll post it to you within a day.

Here are some photos of the t-shirt in action:

That's me in a customised t-shirt in medium, with my adorable grandmother.

A happy fan at The Hospital Club.

Smiley bingo lover at Berry Park, Brooklyn.

That's me and my t-shirt again, this time against a beautiful Costa Rican sunset.

NOTICE TO FANS: If you ever spot someone wearing one of our t-shirts, it is mandatory that you give them a high five! They will most likely be one of the lovelier folks on this planet.

Spring Recap: Brooklyn

We played our first ever international gig in Brooklyn in March. It was a huge success, we packed out a bar called Berry Park which is a converted warehouse in Greenpoint. Brooklyn loved us so much that we’ll be back playing regular events there starting this summer!

This lovely winner was awarded Cheetos.

I invited some birthday girls up on stage.

This lucky guy won a giant calculator. Notice its brand name, "Big Daddy".

Whist in Brooklyn, we spent time with family and explored the many restaurants and shops this fantastic borough has to offer. My personal highlight was definitely Brooklyn Mac, a takeaway restaurant in Greenpoint that serves nothing but macaroni and cheese.

Helix chose Bacon & Gouda (left) and I chose the traditional purist's version (right)

This is the best idea since buffalo wings. Maybe one day there will be a Dalston Mac? Perhaps that would cause too many Londoners to go there looking for raincoats.