Category Archives: Hire

Where to have your party

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When your corporate event or private party has come to a close, the food’s finished and it’s time to crack open another bottle of bubbly and get the party started. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy. Get a function in a town hall and you might not have anywhere to set up a party band; have an event in a hotel and you might find your night winding to a rather quick close when the music is turned off at eleven to accommodate the other guests. Here are some venues below that would be perfect for an all night party..

Gibson Hall
For those of you who would love an outdoor reception, finding one in London can be tricky – unlike an isolated country venue in London you run into the risk of the surrounding neighbours putting in a noise complaint and getting the party shut down. Fortunately, Gibson Hall, a former bank transformed into a beautiful venue for hire, boasts a stunning courtyard garden and no noise restrictions – you can host a magical garden wedding beneath the stars without having to worry that you’re about to get told to ‘turn it down’.

Smiths of Smithfield

This venue is perfect right next to the City of London it’s conveniently located in the bustling hub of the city. The restaurant’s two private rooms can be opened out for larger parties and – most importantly – it is licenced for live music right up until 1am, so you can keep dancing as long as you’d like. The restaurant is even a short walk away from some amazing London clubs so, if you really aren’t ready to stop, you can head on over to keep the night going.

Southbank Centre
Ideal for any celebration – This world famous multi-art centre is known for its unparalleled festival programme, reaching 6.25 million people a year and featuring 5000 events by world-class artists.

The Level 5 Function Room is the largest of their events rooms; it comes with free Wifi, a fully integrated PA system and can be opened out onto a balcony for incredible views of the London skyline.

The room is accessible by lift – so you won’t have to worry about lugging heavy speakers up and down stairs – and comes with a variety of optional hired extras. These include: A sound technician to set up, two radio mics, a plug in and play system for background music. The room is licenced for entertainment until 2am, so the party doesn’t have to end.

Product launch ideas

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A product launch brings in huge numbers and the feedback you receive is invaluable. Not only that but a good product launch will ensure that people remember your brand and you may just notice a number of people sharing your special hashtag all over social media. How to attract the public to your product launch though? Well, we have a few party entertainment ideas.

Lian The Robotic Man
Stop for a moment and imagine what you’d do if a walking robot came out of nowhere, started dancing around to a hit pop tune and then managed to announce your product to the world. You’d be impressed, right? Lian the Robotic man can do all that and much more! A hit at corporate events all over the world. A brilliant example of strolling entertainment that is a little bit more unique than most acts in the industry!

Illusionists
Who doesn’t love magic? Rather than be specific by naming one of our brilliant magicians, we thought we’d go all-encompassing and simply suggest hiring a magician for your next product launch. Whether making your company business cards disappear and reappear or producing the exciting new product into your hands, magicians are a brilliant way to launch a product and it’ll certainly be a memorable moment for the members of the public lucky enough to see the magic first hand.

Chicks on Sticks
You need only look at Chicks on Sticks not only are these wonderful entertainers on stilts – so sure to draw a crowd from far beyond the eye can see at street level – but they can also offer up a drink or two to your guests as they arrive. A sparkling sensation for events far and wide, we highly recommend this entertainment and they have been particularly successful at product launches in the past!

Splitting Images
A celebrity lookalike is great for pulling in the crowds. Not only will a good lookalike be able to pull off an uncanny impression of a popular character or celebrity, but they’ll also be more than happy to pose for photographs and video. Sneak your brand into the shot and hey presto, your product is going places! Fun for all sorts of brands and product launches, a celebrity lookalike is an absolute must.

Don’t waste anymore time

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If you don’t want to use an entertainment directory, you can go ahead to hire a band by yourself. You have to create time to locate a reliable band. You need a band that has the best musical instruments. Such a band should also have the best artists. You need a band that has experience in covering different kinds of corporate events. You can be sure of entertaining your guests when you find such a band. Of course Red Masque has done all the hard work for you and you will find excellent artists just waiting to be picked by you.

Entertainment is very important in corporate events. Different calibres of individuals are usually invited for corporate meetings and occasions. They deserve to be entertained all through the event. If you’re hosting an important corporate event, you need to plan everything concerning entertainment very well. You need to keep your guests happy and satisfied.

The first step you can take is to engage a reliable entertainment directory. Such as Red Masque our website will help you organize every aspect of the entertainment required for the event. Our portfolio can help you choose the best music band that will entertain your guests. They will save you the headache of making choices by trailing through the internet as we have the best entertainment in one place. They will also save you time since we understand exactly what you need.

Again, you can decide to hire a DJ for the corporate event. The DJ will play popular recorded music at the event. You can choose the specific musical pieces that will suit your audience. You must sit down with the DJ to arrange all the songs. You have to avoid playing songs that will not be suited to certain guests.

It’s important you decide on the best attire for the DJ or the band you’re hiring. Corporate event requires corporate attires. The band or the DJ must appear cute on the very day of the event. They have to entice the audience by their appearance.

Meanwhile, you need a good MC for the corporate events. You can hire a professional MC that renders quality services. You can also engage a DJ that also serves as an MC. This saves you some cash in the process.

The Origin of Shrove Tuesday

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Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, is the traditional feast day before the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Lent – the 40 days leading up to Easter – was traditionally a time of fasting and on Shrove Tuesday, Anglo-Saxon Christians went to confession and were “shriven” (absolved from their sins). A bell would be rung to call people to confession. This came to be called the “Pancake Bell” and is still rung today.

Shrove Tuesday always falls 47 days before Easter Sunday, so the date varies from year to year and falls between February 3 and March 9. In 2019 Shrove Tuesday will fall on March 5th.

Shrove Tuesday was the last opportunity to use up eggs and fats before embarking on the Lenten fast and pancakes are the perfect way of using up these ingredients.

A pancake is a thin, flat cake, made of batter and fried in a frying pan. A traditional English pancake is very thin and is served immediately. Golden syrup or lemon juice and caster sugar are the usual toppings for pancakes.

The pancake has a very long history and featured in cookery books as far back as 1439. The tradition of tossing or flipping them is almost as old: “And every man and maide doe take their turne, and tosse their Pancakes up for feare they burne.” (Pasquil’s Palin, 1619).
The ingredients for pancakes can be seen to symbolise four points of significance at this time of year:

Eggs ~ Creation
Flour ~ The staff of life
Salt ~ Wholesomeness
Milk ~ Purity

In the UK, pancake races form an important part of the Shrove Tuesday celebrations – an opportunity for large numbers of people, often in fancy dress, to race down streets tossing pancakes. The object of the race is to get to the finishing line first, carrying a frying pan with a cooked pancake in it and flipping the pancake as you run.

The most famous pancake race takes place at Olney in Buckinghamshire. According to tradition, in 1445 a woman of Olney heard the shriving bell while she was making pancakes and ran to the church in her apron, still clutching her frying pan. The Olney pancake race is now world famous. Competitors have to be local housewives and they must wear an apron and a hat or scarf.

Dinner party entertainment ideas

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Pianists
Pianists are fantastic for creating mood and providing a soundtrack to your evening, no matter the function. Providing a repertoire of modern and classic hits, they tend to provide a fun and informal atmosphere for a whole host of events including dinner, drinks receptions or a small networking function.

Classical Guitarist
What is there to say about classical guitarists that hasn’t already been said (or assumed)? Well, for starters it’s not only western styles of music that are often booked; flamenco is extremely popular whilst many prefer a slightly different sound to what they ordinarily listen to as it promotes a sense of occasion for the evening.

Magician
Now you may be thinking that a magician wouldn’t fit in at all at your intimate soiree but they can be extremely effective for engaging a room and have been proven to be great for informal networking events. For dinner parties, there are some brilliantly parlour magicians that can sit with you at the tables.

Cello
The cello is the perfect sound for a classy dinner private party amongst a few choice guests. It has a sound that many people absolutely adore, its low timbre fitting perfectly with a number of other instruments or in a solo setting.

Violin
The Violin is popular across all private parties and corporate events, no matter intimate or otherwise. Mixing a Cello and a Violin are extremely popular which fits for virtually any occasion. Another act combination that people enjoy for intimate dinner parties is violin and…

Harp
The harp is a gorgeous, gentle instrument that many adore but rather interestingly, rarely get to experience live. It could be because it’s a rather bulky instrument for a child to play, so many performers actually learn when they’re adults. Perfect as an accompaniment to dinner, the harp is also great in combination with strings or woodwind.

As ever with these things, it’s all about finding the right entertainment for you.

Photobooth alternatives

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When it comes to booking entertainment for events and parties around London, clients often opt for a photo booth. But what if they could be improved? That’s where Staged Photography comes in!

The backdrops are what this is all about. You can pretend you’re in a horror movie, a Venetian ball, a rainforest. Pretty much any photo is possible with these backdrops. All you have to do is book Staged Photography, state the background you’d love to see on your photo and… That’s it. Come the day of your event, the incredibly immersive – “Is it 3D?” – backdrop will be unfurled and you’ll be stunned at the realism. Even more so when you join the picture later on!

Staged Photography will require a little more room than a hired photo booth. Most booths can take up a small space in the corner of your venue, while a Staged Photography takes up quite a bit more space than that. But here’s the thing, you won’t mind because you want people to notice this amazing form of entertainment. You want people to have an incredible photo taken against the backdrop that you have chosen for your event!

Just like a photo booth, photos are available almost immediately so you can take your home your entertaining snap for use however you please. Want it digitally? That’s not a problem either! A truly brilliant form of party entertainment.

A quintessentially English game

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The game of croquet was introduced to Victorian England by John Jaques and marketed to the growing middle class via the manufacture of croquet sets, which were showcased at The Great Exhibition of 1851. Great Exhibition sets were reissued in the 21st century by Jaques of London to mark 150 years since the introduction of croquet to England.

The popularity of the game in Victorian times engendered a wave of publications. Each publication offered a different number of rules, ranging from 20 to 126! Consensus arrived in 1870 with the publication of The Conference Rules of Laws. The current Laws of Association Croquet number a modest 55, though that number climbs into the hundreds if you count the many sub-sections.

As the world went to war in 1914, Stanley Paul & Co. published Lord Tollemache Croquet. The text describes the game of the Edwardian golden age, supported by event photographs demonstrating the techniques of a sequence game (as golf croquet today), involving ‘tight croqueting’ where the striker put his foot on his ball and hit it to move the ball in contact over the lawn, sending it ‘up the country’.

Croquet illustrates hoops run from circles rounding them on a square court with 4 baulks, 6 hoops and 2 pegs (1st below fifth hoop, 2nd above sixth hoop). The player was required to hit the 2nd peg (turning peg) with the striker’s ball, thus gaining one stroke before advancing to 1-back. The end game involved a peg-out at the peg below the fifth hoop.

As croquet grew in popularity, so clubs were formed. In 1860 the first club was established at Worthing in west Sussex, followed by the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon in 1868. A need to coordinate the activities of a growing number of clubs led to the formation of The Croquet Association (CA) in 1897; it remains today the national governing body for the sport in England and produces the Laws of Croquet for both Association and Golf.

The introduction of lawn tennis in 1875 challenged the popularity of croquet, but croquet continued to be played and perhaps benefited from the higher standards of lawn care that tennis demanded. Lawn mowers, first invented in 1830, improved and evolved to suit the leisure market.

History of the Caricaturists

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When it comes to booking entertainment for events, one of our most popular strolling acts is undoubtedly a caricaturist. Blessed with the skill of being able to draw both accurately and quickly, with a nice comedic slant, caricaturists often manage to draw ten to twelve people in just one hour at an event! Not bad at all! But where does the art of caricature come from? Who invented it? Let’s find out…

It’s hard to know exactly when caricature started but we do know that there are examples of the form in graffiti that can be found at Pompeii. This would confirm that the style of drawing has been popular for almost 2,000 years but it’s highly likely that it has been popular for even longer than that.

In more recent times, the form was highly enjoyed by the aristocratic circles in France and Italy, with portraits passed about friends for mutual enjoyment. Leonardo Da Vinci’s caricatures are some of the oldest on record; he would seek people with deformities to use as models, hoping to offer an impression of the original that was more striking than a portrait.

The first book of caricature can be dated to 1762 when Mary Darlas published A Book of Caricaturas. The first North American caricatures can be traced to just three years before that when Brigadier-General George Townshend would draw caricatures of other high ranking officials like British General James Wolfe during the Battle of Quebec. These drawings were often highly exaggerated to elicit laughter and amusement from his fellow officers.

Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray are perhaps the two most important British caricaturists in history; they were great friends and often visited pubs together in London. Rowlandson preferred to focus his efforts on artistry and drawing members of the public, whilst Gillray aimed his pen squarely at politics, satirising his subjects to great effect.

Rowlandson and Gillray’s differing approaches to caricature are still evident today with a drawing able to gently mock a subject for humorous effect or wound them with a serious social or political point. We would rather advise booking a caricaturist at an event to dish out the former rather than the latter for the good of the party atmosphere!

Remembering information

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The Method of Loci might be familiar to fans of Sherlock on BBC1 because Sherlock once used his ‘Mind Palace’, which was much ridiculed online. Even so, this method of remembering information is highly praised by memory experts and is used by those to whom memory is very useful indeed.

Derren Brown utilises a system for his incredible live shows whilst Simon Reinhard, European Memory Champion, showed such an effective deployment of the strategy that he was able to remember the position of all 52 cards in a deck in just under 21 seconds.

The easiest way to perfect the Method of Loci is to think of a journey that you make on a regular basis. For most that would be their commute to and from work. The trip should go past a number of distinctive ‘landmarks’ – a skate park, a memorable building, a colourful fence – which you tend to pay attention to every morning. The more memorable the place, the better the method will be.

Next you write down every bit of information that you’d like to remember. After assembling your list, you then attach a picture or symbol to each item. If you need to remember to buy a birthday card for example, you’d simply affix an image of a birthday card in your mind to the skate park we mentioned earlier. Every time you walk past, it will be instantly imprinted in your mind!

This technique may sound simple and that’s because it is, but it will still take some time to perfect.
And why is it called the ‘Method of Loci’? The reason being that ‘loci’ is the Latin for ‘places’ and the method itself has been around since around 80BC.

It is referred to in the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, Rhetorica ad Herennium, and also features in Cicero’s De Oratore in 55BC and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria in 95CE. Considering they have been around for well over 2,000 years, you can be certain of the fact that they work!

Ice Venue

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The Ice bar will give your guests an experience that will be a talking point for months to come. Ideal for receptions, hen and stag parties and even team building exercises as staff brave the environment with an icy cocktail in hand! After the 40 minute session you can recline in warmer areas outside of Ice bar. They can dine on delicious dishes in the restaurant which has a capacity of up to 180 guests standing. Enjoy drinks and canapés in the smaller lounge with space for 45 guests or the ground floor cocktail bar for up to 70 guests.

This is one of the most unique party venues that London has to offer; just off Regent Street. As the name suggests this stunning venue is made completely out of ice – the walls, bar, tables and even the glasses – kept at -5 degrees all year round, this venue isn’t just a seasonal occurrence.
Using the clearest ice, a team of skilled ice designers and sculptors create this stunning ice landscape, which is completely reinvented once a year. Sessions are booked in 40 minute time slots due to the low temperature inside the venue and guests are given thermal gloves and capes to wear when experiencing this amazing environment!

London is one of the world’s most multicultural cities offering a whole host of exciting attractions and activities that you won’t find anywhere else. Amongst the bustling streets is a treasure trove of unique venues perfect for hosting corporate events and private functions. You can look forward to venues with stunning Birds Eye views across the city, boudoir-style cabaret clubs, a floating cinema and the UK’s only permanent ice bar and to name only a few…

No corporate event is complete without entertainment to impress and engage staff. Red Masque entertainment directory has a number of walkabout acts that would fit perfectly with this cool venue. Our canapé girls will look right at home wrapped in elegant furs handing out mini oeuvres will add to the winter atmosphere and create a great talking point.