Not Bad for a Girl: Getting older is getting better!

By Katie Marie, on Thursday, September 30, 2010

You may remember from last week’s article that I was getting myself prepared for two things, 1) My Birthday Party (aka KT Fest) and 2) Venturing into being a 30 year old person (aaarrrrggg!).

KT Fest was a pretty chilled affair with lots of beautiful moorland scenery, music and booze (well, I was more cups of tea than booze… but I think everyone made up for me not drinking lol).

After we’d had our 2.5 hour long jam on Saturday night, we cleared up our stage (made out of straw) and cranked on the cheesy choons. By that time everyone had sunk enough beer that they were all well up for taking to the dance floor and throwing some shapes, nice! I’ve got a fantastic photo of a line of people attempting to dance the Macarena as well as a certain male some-one skipping round with pink pom-poms (hmmm, can’t think who that could have been ).

After we’d all recovered from my birthday weekend it was time for me to get all organised to head out to Germany again, as I was entering a singer/songwriter contest being held in the beautiful city of Leipzig. I’d never been here before, but it was a really great place and I hope I can go back there again very soon.

A very kind German lady put us up in a lovely apartment that was in a side road near the town centre. All the buildings are very tall (if you’ve ever been to Berlin they were all very much like that) which a ga-zillion rooms in each. Our apartment was hooooge with the biggest bed in the world (ever). Yay!

The singer/songwriter contest I entered was held over two days (Friday and Saturday) and there was a total of 20 acts involved. I was playing on the Friday along with nine other peeps and I really had no expectation as to where I would end up (plus I’m really not a competitive type of person). I was just very grateful to be there and was also very much looking forward to seeing some of the other artists doing their thang.

The whole event was very well organised (it’s in Germany, why wouldn’t it be?!) and there was a voting system in place whereby the audience had to vote on each night for which act was their fav and also the artists had to vote for each other (which I really didn’t want to do! lol).

There were loads of peeps there and the atmosphere was great with lots of friendly smiley faces who just wanted to enjoy some good music. Each act had just 10 mins (or two songs) each to wow the judges and when I got up and played I had the most wonderful reception which was lovely.

If you fancy checking out my set, here’s a vid that Lisa uploaded to Youtube:

The standard was pretty high and there was a real mixture of styles and genres, very hard to score from my point of view.

At the end of the Friday evening they announced who had won the audience vote, which I couldn’t believe was little old me! It was such a wonderful moment that I’ll never forget.

Saturday night soon came round and and I had to do more voting for each artist who performed. Again, the standard was high and it was tricky to say who was the best!

Then came and final scores from the artists, which combined with the audience votes made up the overall winner. I really did think I’d had my moment the night before (which I was very grateful for) and honestly didn’t think I’d come third, second or even first.

They announced who was third, followed by second place…

‘And the artist with the most points and who is the winner of the singer/songwriter contest is… Katie Marie!’

WTF!?

I really couldn’t believe it, me? What, little Katie from Totnes? Nooooo way! lol

When I stood there looking out at all the people with big grins on their faces and clapping and cheering I had lots of emotions rushing through my veins – pride, thankfulness, happiness to name a few. But the main thing that it reminded me of was all the really awful gigs I had when I first started 15 years ago… and there were many! I was young, and not very good, but I had countless occasions where I was told I was rubbish and boo-ed off stage or had things thrown at me or
been told I was wasting my time wanting to be a musician because I was never going to get anywhere… and despite all of these things I still carried on, because I had a belief that one day things would get better (thankfully I sound a darn sight better than I used to!!). And the moment they said I was the winner made me so very thankful that I never walked away from doing music, no matter how hard things got.

And this was my wonderful reward, yeeeeessssssss!

Maybe being in my 30s wont be so bad after all…