Straight Outta Scotland is Paul Brook’s new lecture and I was there in Manchester to see it. I’m sure you already know by now that I’m a huge fan of Paul’s work so I was really looking forward to this.
I met up with Paul earlier in the day for lunch and he gave me the lowdown on his life before mentalism.
He spoke of his love for musical theatre, wandering around Electric Avenue with his gang and DJing at the world famous Wünkerling Ehrichs Bar.
Get on with it!
OK, I can do that… As I’ve mentioned before, Paul always goes that extra mile with his products and his lectures are no different.
He has a whole array of pop up banners, essentially bringing his own backdrop for his performances, it’s those little details that make a big difference! Paul started off telling us a bit about himself (although he didn’t mention the gang stuff) and the kind of mentalism he does, where and how he works.
Oh, I almost forgot about Paul’s “gift” for every attendee; We all received a couple of his marketed effects, lecture notes and a £10 coupon to spend in his online store, all completely free… Talk about generous!
Surely this qualifies as a gift?
Then he jumps straight into the other good stuff.
Due to the complex nature of certain universal components, whose presence is determined from gravitational attraction rather than luminosity, I’ll just give you a brief overview of the full lecture.
Snaparazzi
This routine is a very clever, visual, punchy effect involving a participant and some randomly named celebrities. Paul opened his wallet and displayed a folded ‘post-it’ note on top of one of his bank cards, he then left his wallet in full view and after a bit of fun involving an invisible camera Paul removed the post-it note from his wallet and showed that he had already predicted the choices made by the participant. This routine was so clean and seemed so innocent. The method was really quite cheeky too.
The 3 phase book test
If you know me then you’ll know that I absolutely love book tests. They are one of my favourite things to perform. Paul’s 3 phase book test routine is really engaging and has some great comedic moments and oh guess what? It can use any book test!
Each phase builds on the previous one and Paul’s subtleties are the perfect justification for each phase.
This was devilishly delightful and great fun.
Puppet Master
Remember those little folded paper things that all the girls had in primary school? They were called love predictors or something like that. Well, Paul has a great routine involving free will and one of those little finger flicking paper things. He chose a participant from the audience, asked them if they believed in free will, then asked them to name any city in Europe, after this the spectator was given choices to make, each choice was entirely the participants choosing which led up to the finale and proved they had no free will whatsoever.
But that’s not all, there was a kicker ending; The love predictor is unfolded and the randomly thought of city is written on the reverse. This completely floored me, I had no idea how this was even possible!
Were you like me and unable to make those flipping things?
No problem our kid!
Paul provides crystal clear instructions in the lecture notes.
Ori-Know-Mi
This was a great routine involving a clipboard and a piece of paper with some randomly drawn objects by the audience, the paper was cut into pieces by a member of the audience who then gave pieces to random members of the audience and Paul divined which drawn object each person was holding. This was a really fun routine and everybody was amazed. Again it was Paul’s pro tips that made this routine really special.
At this point Paul had run out of time but still had two effects he wanted to share, so by a show of hands the audience voted which effect he should show us.
The Shortest Story
An envelope was given to an audience member for safe keeping, Paul spoke a little about movies and got three participants on stage to help create a new movie, consisting of a title and some key details.
Each participant chose a different aspect of the movie, Paul later revealed that each choice was predicted ahead of time.
Inside the envelope was a hand drawn movie poster consisting of all the key details freely chosen by the participants on stage. This was an absolute killer effect and although I thought I knew the methods involved, I didn’t know them all and I certainly wasn’t aware of all the subtleties’ and professional tips that can only come from someone who has worked the circuit for many, many years.
A great night was had by all.
This lecture was packed full of EFFOMS!
(Fantastic Feat Of Mentalism)
And Paul is a working professional who really knows how to engage his audience, he’s extremely generous with his time and is generally an all-round super nice guy. Should you get the chance to see Paul lecture,
DO NOT let it pass you by!
You will learn so much from him he has a wealth of knowledge and you just know he has a helluva lot of real world experience. This lecture is without a shadow of a doubt the best I’ve seen in a very, very long time, I learnt so much and absolutely everything taught can easily be adapted to fit in to any type of act.
Hey, what about the effect he missed off the lecture?
We didn’t miss out as it’s in the lecture notes anyway, I’ll leave it as a surprise in case you ever get to see him lecture.
You can check out Paul’s website for some great mentalism and free gifts.
What is here is elsewhere
What is not here is nowhere!
Thanks for reading and have a great day.
Ryan