This Saturday 22nd October, The Sharp Darts are supporting Canadian chart-toppers The Trews at HMV Institute (Library).

Not only are we supporting a great band in The Trews, but we'll be playing a 45 minute set, so this one is well worth coming down to. On top of that, this will be our last full band Birmingham gig for a little while, as we take a break during November (we will be doing the odd acoustic performance).

It's our biggest support slot to date, so we're really hoping you can come down to support us so we can put on a good show and bag ourselves another one in the future.

Tickets are available from us at £7 (£1 off if you came to London, £1 off if you post a picture of FB wearing your The Sharp Darts t-shirt). So if you haven't already, have a word with one of us and we'll get you a ticket.

You can find out more about The Trews on their official website.

The Sharp Darts are through to the regional showcase of Surface Festival 2011 at O2 Academy Birmingham! In this post I want to talk a little about how this round works, as it's a little different to the previous rounds.

In the first two rounds of the competition, the scoring was reasonably complicated, being based on text votes (1 rating), audience votes (5 ratings), musician votes (20 ratings) and industry votes (30 ratings). In the semi-final this changed slightly with the introduction of a judge.

In the semi-final, text and audience votes were added together and the top four bands were presented to a judge who voted through two acts of their choosing, independent of how may ratings they got. In the regional showcase, judges will play an even bigger role in selecting which bands continue to the International Final at IndigO2 in London.

, gig

Tonight is our big Surface Semi-Final gig and we're looking forward to it. We'll be breaking out a new song for the first time (full band at least) and the set is sounding great!

The gig is at Asylum in Birmingham City Centre (5 mins walk from Snow Hill) and it all kicks off at around 18:30. If your able to make it and haven't got yourself a ticket yet, please get in touch and we'll do our best to save you money and get one to you.

We're really hoping to get through this round as the regional final is at the O2 on the main stage! We'd love to play that as well as getting that bit closer to some awesome prizes. This round will be harder than the first two, so we need all the support you can give us!

The Sharp Darts played an open mic night last Tuesday at The Yardbird as a warm up to Sunday's acoustic gig.

With this Sunday's acoustic gig looming and it being Rod's first run out on a stage with a guitar in his hands, we decided to cut our teeth at an open mic night.

Kicking off with "She Don't Know", we followed up with our cover of Basement Jaxx's "Good Luck" (which sounds great acoustic) and ended our short set with a second The Sharp Darts' original "Kids are Leaving Town".

We really enjoyed ourselves and it was good to play to a supportive crowd of people we'd never met before.

We'd definitely recommend popping down to The Yardbird on a Tuesday night to check out this night, it's on every week, free to get in and has some great acts playing. There was a good bunch of people there and the place was just about as full as you'd want.