Tyneside Sheringham

Lovely weather for a drive over to the Norfolk coast. Had a good run over, hardly any traffic and I arrived about 6:20 at the gig. It turned out the roads were quiet because England were playing Kasakstan and beat them 5-1! I had most of my gear in by the time Nigel arrived with Dave and Jen rolling up shortly after. I had integrated a Rolls RMX 603 Line mixer with the reverb to give control over what PA sounds went where. It is set up so I get a bit of Nigel and Dave’s’ vocals in my Bose and vice versa. The synth and radio mic (if we set it up) are routed into both Bose equally to centre the sound. Testing it out it all worked fine; although the nature of the Bose dispersion is so good that it doesn’t make that much difference to the on stage sound because we can hear each other’s Bose well anyway. But from an audience point of view sounds like the synth strings now appear to come from the centre back of the band. I have a final adjustment to do on the reverb to remove a small amount of dry pass through, but I thought I’d do that at home. Also I had used the Bose parametric equaliser to take a lot of the sound below 60hz off the guitar to reduce the boomyness at G that we had experienced last time at this gig. Because of all the change, we elected to do a quick sound check with a section of “Here I Go Again”. Nige took himself out front a bit and reported that it all sounded fine. Dave still has a bad throat so warned us he might need to bottle out on some songs and Nige was suffering from a bit of bloat so he wouldn’t be rushing around. We took a break for a water and lime (preceded by a beer) and we were let into the dressing room. This had been locked because it was full of bridal dresses for a display the next day. The girl who unlocked the room took one look at the band and said in no uncertain terms “no trying these dresses on boys” – as if we would! Jenny’s sister and husband Alan arrived (Alan is a great pedal steel player but currently plays guitar in his own rock and roll trio). One of Nigel’s music contacts, Clive, showed up to see the band with a view to putting some bookings our way. Also Tabby a female singer friend of Nige had arrived to support the band and get his advice on a prospective band she was going to join. We elected to wear pink and the room was filling up nicely so off we went into set 1 at about 8:20pm. Dave was a bit nervy but we got off to a generally good start with a good on-stage sound. However, by the time we got to “Heartbeat” I realised I had forgotten the words. Unbelievable after all the years I have played it – it’s probably a combination of being out with the Checkmates the week before and general brain degeneration. Somehow I fudged it through, but it rattled me a bit. Carrying on we generally followed the set list and the guitar changes OK; but this week (whilst I remembered Cliff), I forgot to call a slowey. Still we got an encouragingly good response from the Tyneside crowd for pretty much everything we did – warts and all. Highlights included an interesting bunch of people up and dancing the Shadows walk with the blow up guitars and, despite a bit of a false start, I thought “How Long” went well. We even had a few dancers going in some of the numbers. We played through to finish with “I Believe” and Dave’s voice just held up just enough to complete it. Despite my misgivings on the nerves, feedback from people was good and Clive seemed very open to using the band; in fact he elected to stay through most of set 2 which he didn’t need to! We started up set 2 in the white shirts kicking off with the Searchers medley. I was going to continue with the 12 string through the Eagles and “Do It Again”, but I wasn’t too happy with the sound on the night and switched back to 6 string. Another brain cell had gone ‘cos I couldn’t play one little riff in “Lying Eyes” right, but I thought we sang it OK. After “Alice” and “Under the Moon of Love”, Dave made a good call to miss out “Beautiful Sunday and “Yellow River” and we got into “Halfway” and “Sweet Caroline” which went well before he did the Elvis bit. That left us some time to do the “Bay City Rollers” and “Crazy Little Thing” which both went well with this audience, before we finished with “Shake Rattle and Roll” and “Love is all Around”. By the time we got on for set 3 we only had about 30 minutes to do so we opened up with a request for “Can’t Get Enough” only marred by my forgetting the solo and having to improvise a bit – but it went down well. Then we rattled through the party dance to “Locomotion” getting a bit of dance interest at times. We tried out the Spencer Davis pair a bit slower and got the best result yet in my opinion. even though Nige had to take over from Dave in “Keep On Running as his voice gave out. We finished off with “Pretty Woman” with Dave saying goodbye from the band and, due to the thunderous applause from the 20 or so left, we went back on to encore with “Wonderful Tonight”. The management seemed pleased and I thought we had had a good night overall; Nige had been very steady and made up for mine and Dave’s nervy errors and coughing fits. It was a bit chilly out as we loaded up and I ran into some fog patches on the way back, but I made good time getting in at 1:45 am; the next day we had a lovely sunny Sunday with temperatures up to 23 degrees in the afternoon, went for a walk by the river at West Stow.