Thetford Conservative Club

New Agent and New Venue! Local job for me so I left at 6pm and found the gig with the aid of SatNav. Dan and Dave / Jen were already there and parked up, so we got the gear in together. The entertainment hall is down a short flight of stairs and has a small stage in one corner. Just about managed to squeeze on. The governor asked us the keep the volume down and explained the sets and raffle arrangements. We were using the new Lexicon MPX1 on reverb duties and I was using the Digitech harmoniser pedal rather than the TC rack. Set up had a few problems with leads. I wanted to omit the snake to see if I could prove whether that was involved in the monitor problems or not. We did get wired up eventually and had time for a very brief soundcheck before we had to leave the diners in peace for 45 minutes. Dave Ainsworth and his wife Pat arrived to watch the band, we explained to Dan that Dave A was our preferred dep at the present and he was likely to play through May and June with us. Got off to a good start with set 1 and it went well until Apache when Dan’s lead pulled out - but we joked it away and just restarted. We were going down very well with some good audience response and a few dancers. About half way through Dave’s monitor started to create noises so he switched it off. Unfortunately, Dan turned his monitor up to compensate and we ended up with a conspicuous bathtub sound on his mic. I was able to fix this by altering the monitor mix at the end of the set, but it points to the most likely cause of Dave’s problems being his monitor! (confirmed this at a practice session with Dave A on Sunday). Set 2 was short. We were finishing off with “No Matter” but the governor indicated one more so we actually finished with a bit of rock’n’roll. Set 3 went OK as well and we had a good dance response towards the end. I made a note that the rock’n’roll reverb was too much (and I fixed it the next day at the practice session). The governor was well pleased and said he’d like us back and we began the long process of packing up. Got away just after midnight, but unbeknown to me Dave was stuck with a jammed starter motor. He called out the AA and eventually got going just before 1am, by which time I was in bed!