Left early and kept up a good pace to arrive on the California Sands road at 5pm. Missed the club on the left and drove down to the end to ask directions. After a look round the wrong club I finally found it, but had difficulty actually getting to the club to park up (You have to take the first left before you get to the shops). But I eventually parked up round the back and arranged to bring the gear in through the kitchen. Nigel showed up at this point and Dave and Martin were not long after. Then Jenny and Laura arrived. It is a big venue, so we had brought the bass bins. Couldn’t use the poles because the way the stage was built with a valance round the top, but in the end we simply placed the EV’s on top of the DB Bins on the (purpose built) PA shelves. Then it was a bout of very hard work to connect it all up, mic up the drums, send monitor signals to Nigel’s Bose and receive his bass and my guitar direct injections signals. Started to balance up a mix but, needless to say we ran out of time, because they wanted to start bingo at 7pm. All we had time for was a very quick sound check. That left us feeling nervous about the eventual performance. Then had to while away a couple of hours before set 1 at 9pm. I had originally suggested we start with set 2, but we were a bit uptight so we just drifted into doing our usual set 1. There weren’t many punters in as we started, but a few more arrived as the set progressed. We made a good enough start but the on stage sound was poor and we couldn’t hear the vocals - but they obviously could out front! Anyway, despite increasing nerves we ploughed on through most of set 1 with me doing most of the banter. Got a good response to the Shadows walk. Nigel got the Bose monitor vocals up a bit towards the end, but then it was probably too loud at that point. Despite all that we came off to a good response. I stayed behind to fiddle with the mix, but apparently Nigel and Dave had had words. Dave went to sit with one of his mates in the relatively short break before Set 2. Nigel and I had some water and a chat and then assisted Dave on quiz game machine. Then it was back on for set 2 (which was mainly set 3). The on stage sound was slightly better and we played with a lot more continuity. We did get a few people up and dancing, but generally it was still hard work. We finished with “Pretty Woman” and with a good response from the audience encored with “Wonderful Tonight”. We were pleased to be finished and with a large number of Dave’s family around we got packed up quite quickly. The band felt quite bad about the night, but Sandra (the promoter) was happy enough and seemed interested in booking us back. Plus Dave’s mate said the band was OK, so we were probably beating ourselves up too much! Made good time on the way home, getting back for 1:30am. I took three main lessons on board from this gig.
- We need a clear 2 hours to do the big set up with bass bins etc.
- We would benefit from sorting out a higher energy 2 x one hour sets for these types of venue
- We need to organise the sets and Dave’s book so we can maintain continuity whilst varying the running order; e.g organise sets in runs of 3-6 numbers and have some popular tactical “drop in” songs in alphabetical order at the back of the book.
