March 2026 Blog Post: Better Than The Book's Debut LIVE show, meeting online friends, press & guest features, Jabun's Lost Tracks Vol.1 Early Access, collaborator updates, a LIVE album to come + more!

Hi everyone and hope you had a great February! It has been a heck of a month over here with some of the best times of my life followed by a few weeks of the dreaded seasonal lurgy! Better after the gig than before it though and I'm mostly better now. Should be back to 100% soon! There's a tonne of stuff to share today so let's get straight to it!

First of all and huge on the news, on Thursday 5th February 2026 after 14 years being purely a studio project, my ska punk project Better Than The Book finally made its LIVE show debut at The Hope & Ruin in Brighton in celebration of Ten Years On from the debut full-length album Two Years On! It was an unforgettable night of ska, pop-punk and alt-rock supported by Brighton's very own Look What Happened and LUVD and included an amazing cameo (and LIVE debut) from long time friend of BTTB/Jabun, Swedish Rapper, Bob Axell AKA Cyberdevil! We were on stage for over 70 minutes(?!), playing to ~80+ people! Not bad for a first ever show on a wet and rainy Thursday evening!

For those who couldn't make it or want to relive the moment, we managed to capture the FULL Better Than The Book LIVE set on Sam's Phone (The Sam-CAM)! This video is a single camera with raw camera audio, BUT we've been collecting various clips from people at the show AND also managed to get the FULL MULTITRACK RECORDING from the sound desk so there will be a Hi-Fi LIVE album and more LIVE videos coming later this year!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq1xvfEewDA

Special thanks to: Ben Bonham who did the live sound and lighting on the night (and for THIS completely improvised and mindblowing moment of lighting magic: 43:30), to Jack from LUVD for hitting that first pad on the MPC to start the show, to Cyberdevil for his amazing cameo and sharing his first time on stage with us, and to everyone who came to the show for an amazing night and celebrating with us including the rest of LUVD and Look What Happened who were FANTASTIC and a pleasure to share the stage with!

The Better Than The Book LIVE band is:
Nick Standing: Lead Vocals, Guitar & Sampler
Dr. Eamon D. Standing: Backing vocals, guitar & Harmonica Horns
Sam Brown: Backing Vocals & Bass
Andy Forman: Drums

Stay tuned for more gig videos to come and since then, I've been busy working on the studio mix for the live show which the $10 patrons have a sneak peak demo for in their rewards today! In the spirit of preserving the moment, there will be no performance edits, timing or tuning correction or overdubbing in the studio, just the pure feed from the concert as it came, mistakes and all. If I can't fix it with EQ, gating or volume changes then it won't be fixed! Read more and check out the first demo mix below:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/151544028

Following the an amazing cameo at Better Than The Book's debut live show, Cyberdevil (who also made his live debut at the show) also penned this amazing and heartfelt verse about the experience! Check out the acapella, the lyrics and the description too! It's all marvelous! Much love to you Bob. Gotta do this again at some point :) This acapella was also featured on Takeover Tuesday on Newgrounds this month!

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1526382

And lastly on the gig news (for now), Hannah Calver of Punktuation Magazine was in the audience for the show and kindly wrote a lovely review of the entire night! Check it out below and thanks so much to Hannah for coming and partying with us!

https://www.punktuationmag.com/better-than-the-book-celebrate-ten-years-on-at-the-hope-ruin-brighton-5th-feb-2026/

Next on the news for this month and sort of following from the gig, I had one of the most surreal but amazing experiences because of it. As you can probably figure out from above, Cyberdevil came to the gig all the way from Sweden, but on top of that, another close online friend David Klein came all the way to the gig from New York! Both of these guys I've know for ~12-13 years online and met through Newgrounds and had regular contact with, worked on collaborative projects and stuff, and generally been some of the best and most consistent friends both on AND offline I've ever had so it was amazing to after all this time actually spend some time together IRL for the first time! Lots of showing them around Brighton, hanging out and chatting and doing (and eating) various things around the city; it was an absolute blast! And you know, there's always that worry that meeting online peeps is gonna be strange or awkward, but it really wasn't at all! Everything felt natural and cool and it was just amazing to hang out! Thanks so much to Bob and David for sharing Better Than The Book's debut LIVE show with me and for all the good times before and after the gig that week! It truly will be a trip I'll never forget, and I'm sure it won't be the last!

And speaking of Newgrounds, after performing BTTB's debut gig and turning a small but noteworthy profit (which I was pleasantly surprised about), the first thing I put my BTTB spoils towards was an annual Newgrounds Supporter subscription! It's about time and I'm happy to be able to finally contribute a little something back (other than the music and stuff) to this amazing community which has been my creative home for all these years! It really is one of the last great places on the internet IMHO and I hope it continues to be as such for many more years to come!

Onto some Jabun news! Now that that Better Than The Book's debut gig has been completed I thought it was finally the right time to start releasing Jabun's Lost Tracks! The first 8 tracks are complete and ready to go out and will released for streaming only to the public weekly over the next few months! Lost Tracks is a collection of unreleased Jabun material dating from mainly 2019 - 2025 with a few even earlier pieces and I'll be releasing the collection of 20+ revisited compositions over this coming year to finally get them all out there.

Some were spur of the moment ideas and experiments while others came as part of Jabun albums or EPs which never got finished/released but may eventually be recollected into such projects once all the Lost Tracks have been completed. I hope you enjoy this deep dive into my musical world that I've been keeping to myself all these years. It's time to let other people hear them. Lost Tracks will be available for streaming on YouTube and Newgrounds only, and available to download exclusively on Patreon. My subscribers on Patreon will be getting the artwork, MP3s (and WAVs for the $10 patrons) for the first 8 tracks (Vol. 1) right now, so it's early access before the rest of the world! Grab those rewards at the end of the post l and I hope you enjoy the first volume of Lost Tracks!

​Onto some collaborative updates, the recent online game Ally's New Life by Some-Crappy-Edits just received an update and features Side Character In My Own Life by Better Than The Book in the hidden skateboarding mode! To access the mode hit "Esc" on the Palette Lock screen after completing the game to enter debug mode, then type "OLLIE" (all capitals) and press "Enter". You should hear a chime after which you'll be loaded into the bonus skateboarding mode! Check out the update below and thanks again for featuring BTTB in the project:

https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/1011029

Next, my long time animator colleague Sif Savery recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a TV pilot for her animated series Tales of Zale! You may recognise the name as I did the sound mixing for much of the online web series and the Flickering Lights short film! The campaign actually was funded for the first goal in the first 2 HOURS after launch and there's over 500 backers of the project already, but there's still some stretch goals to meet if they're able to really show the industry what the project is made of! If you have any money to spare please consider supporting this project:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/foxcap/tales-of-zale-new-tales-animated-pilot

Finally for the month, there's just a tonne of videos to share! It's mostly promo for Better Than The Book's Ten Year On show, but there's a load of behind the scenes and fun videos there! More to come soon and check out the updated playlist below:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWEmqIhrNPvQTBoOjZdKLgL4ecTvLz6sm

That about wraps things up for this HUGE monthly news and rewards post! I'll be busy mixing the live show and working on the next batch of Jabun Lost Tracks over the coming month while the first batch makes its way onto YouTube and Newgrounds over the coming weeks! I hope you enjoy all the new music and thanks as always for supporting my projects however you can! Take care and see you next month!

$1 Rewards: https://www.patreon.com/posts/150409704
$10 Rewards: https://www.patreon.com/posts/151544028
Reward Archives: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50344842
Find out more: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding