Tyneside Sheringham Carnival

We decided to get over early so we could park for the gig before the carnival. I had a good run over in generally sunny and hot, humid weather conditions arriving at 5pm to see Dave and Martin already there. Got the gear in OK then Nige arrived. It was pretty crowded in the club car park with everyone setting up seats to watch the carnival so we moved our vehicles round the back – tricky parking, but we did it after a many point turn! I had installed a Behringer line mixer into the FX rack to allow me to control cross feeds between the Bose units. Although we took care with the wiring I could not get it to work and in the end I gave up and returned to the Plan B wiring of the last gig. That was OK and we were eventually able to say it was all working. In the end we decided not to bother with a sound check and we started a bit earlier than normal to entertain some of the passing carnival trade. Set 1 went well enough, but I was a bit distracted with very little room to operate the foot pedals. Also Nige and I had noticed a peak in sound resonance around a low G on the guitar which was messing things up, so I reduced the bass settings on my Bose to try and lose it. It was very persistent and so must be an artefact of the room. Nige wasn’t feeling too well and finding the heat and humidity and resonance difficult to deal with and I had lost my temper by forgetting the running order. Anyway we ploughed on with Set 2, making a good start with a good rendition of “How Long”. It got a good round of applause which we didn’t expect. Rest of the set went generally to plan. One of Nige’s muso mates Martyn had arrived and said how much he liked the sound of the band which was re-assuring. Opened up set 3 with “Travel Lodge” which got a good round of applause despite a light cock up of mine in the solo! I had cut down the song lengths for dancy bit of set 3 and that went much better with Dave keeping playing through the transitions. We played “All Right Now” and that got a good reception and then we did “Unchained and “Trilogy” which also went very well. Then, for once, we had time to do the little Spencer Davis sequence “Somebody Help Me” and “Keep On Running”; they were a bit fast but still went down well. Then we were into the final couple, saying goodbye in “Wonderful Tonight” and encoring with “Great Balls of Fire” to a rousing, drunken reception. Took a while to get packed up and Nige and I travelled in convoy to Swaffham; I got in about 2:30am. PS I checked the Behringer mixer the next day and it was faulty – I wasn’t going mad!