Manor Park at Hunstanton

Dave had asked us to get over to the gig 5pm because there wasn’t much opportunity for set up later in the evening. So I set off about 3:45 looking forward to the first gig with Nigel playing as the permanent bassist. Arrived at 5 and just started getting the gear in when Nigel the Dave, Jen and Laura arrived. No one in charge there and the stage curtains were drawn. We had a good look round for how to operate the curtains and in the end Nige found a pully system in the control room on the left of the stage. By the time we got the curtains back and most of the gear on stage, Becks arrived to brief us on timings and use of the “Owners Lounge”. Got set up slowly. Nige got his finger trapped in his Bose legs. Dave had a bit of trouble setting up his bells. We decided to put a feed through to Nigel’s Bose for monitoring. It took quite a bit of time to get it right but it sounded fine to me once it was up and running. I adjusted the front of house PA to drop the signal levels from the mixer and decrease the power amp attenuation. There were quite a few adjustments to make and we still weren’t set up by 6pm when the dance class started. I had to admit I was quite stressed by then! We finally got a 1 minute check of “I Feel Fine”. Jen reported the vocals were too loud out front. It had sounded OK on stage so I decided to leave it in the hopes that it would work OK in a fuller room. I now had to shift most of my gear back to allow room for the bingo caller. With a few people coming up on stage and brushing close to my 12 string, I decided to put it back in its case. We only had 2 sets to do starting at 9 so we passed the time mainly in the owners lounge (I did manage a bit of a stroll round the site in the sun first). Despite having a good look at the running order, I couldn’t see an obvious way of splitting into 2 sets and we casually decided to play through the usual set 1 for a bit to see how it went. So at 9pm we were duly announced by Becks and off into “Foot Tapper” etc. The first few songs I had problems with the relative levels of the mics. Nigels sounded loudest and mine weakest. Trouble was I was doing most of the MCing and couldn’t get back to fiddle with the mixer, so we ploughed on. We were getting good applause from the audience but not much dancing. My bantering started off OK and got a bit of audience reaction, but it became increasingly hard to keep it up. Dave had retreated into his shell a bit and it was hard work for me to manage the sound, sort out my own gear, try and advise where in the book things are and do the announcements. So the band was getting increasingly tense and untogether as the set went on. Still we have to remember we went down well enough and got very good reactions to “Apache” and “I Believe”, and we also had a few people up and strictly come dancing to the slowies. Dave popped in the 70’s “Under the Moon” sequence which got some dancing response. The message I took from this is that (like last time) this set should have been all about entertainment and not about getting people up and dancing. Becks said as much when she said they too had been struggling with an odd balance of the young and old. Some of the more lively types were absent – was it ‘cos it had been a sunny day or the finals of TV talent had kept people away? Now the other problem was that Jenny said the vocals were too loud compared to the band. This could be an artefact of feeding the Bose LI with a monitor signal, or it could be down to the changes to the main PA I had made; I had increased the hi end enhancement and decreased the bass processing to take out some boomy feedback we were getting. Anyway we were a bit downcast after the first set and decided to start the next set with Set 3 stuff to try and liven things up. We started off with Amarillo and apart for a break for a birthday boy, we played through to “All Right Now” getting some response on the dance floor (particularly the twist). Then we did “Unchained Melody” which filled the floor with slow dancers. We followed up with a quick “Bad Moon” before going into the closing sequence. I announced “Pretty Woman” as our last song and Dave did a bit of a sign off from the band towards the end. This evoked a reasonable crowd response for more, so we encored with “Wonderful Tonight” which filled the floor nicely. Then it was over to the disco – which also had trouble getting the floor filled. We managed to clear the gear whilst the disco was working away and we took great note of an instruction to the dancers to remember to keep their thongs on when they change for part of the show! Got away about midnight and home for 1:30am after a night I have mixed feelings about. I think we all felt we could have done much better on a night of highish expectations, but on the other hand we seemed to have done the job well enough and satisfied the audience and people in charge. We now have to dust ourselves off and rebuild confidence!