Constitutional Club Bury St Edmunds Ben’s Birthday Party.

The weather reports from the steppes of Norfolk were bad but Dave set off in plenty of time to get to my house for 5:30ish as planned. In the event he was slowed by a blizzard on the A11 and arrived about 15 minutes after Nige who had had a good snow free journey down from Necton. We got the boys tea and biscuited up and I arranged a convoy to venture to downtown Bury St Edmunds in zero temperature (but no snow thank goodness). We successfully navigated the one way system to be outside the club at 6:30ish as planned. I directed Nige into the last free on street parking slot and Dave and I parked on the pavement to unload. We got the gear quickly in through the fire doors as some of the party guests arrived. Dave and I then drove off to the market square to park and by the time we walked back, Ben had arrived and we were able to organise running order for the night. The main thing was that speeches would be after set 1. I had printed out our set lists to include Juke Box requests made by Ben in a red font. So as we set up, I plugged my spare Shure SM58 into the new stagebox to deliver centred sound for speeches. So far so good. It was as I came to test out the reverb that we ran into technical trouble. It just wasn’t happening through Nige’s Bose. It was too noisy and dark for any serious diagnostics, so I quickly reset the reverb to allow 10% of the dry signal to flow through and that seemed to work in a fashion so I settled for that. Tuning the guitars was also problematic as they had chilled right down during the spell in the car. As we were running out of time, I set up my Sony MP3 to deliver background music through just my Bose rather than the stage box into both. The place had filled up with a youngish crowd. We were using the kitchen as a dressing room and we got changed into the red with white ties whilst various guests popped to drop off cakes cards and presseys. Ben had bought us a beer already and the bar guy gave us 3 pint glasses to fill up on tap water from the kitchen, so we were all set for a cheap night. As we emerged, Jacqui, Claire and Jen arrived looking thirsty and just in time for the buffet. It was about 8:20 when we got on stage, the main lights dimmed and on came the mirror ball casting a seasonal, snowy sensation across the band and dance floor - it was show time! As we started up with “Foot Tapper” I thought the sound was OK, but as we moved into the vocal numbers it got increasingly muddy with a harsh middley slap back from wooden surfaces. We progressed on to “Good Luck Charm” in good enough order when I announced the first of Ben’s requests – “Peggy Sue”. This went well, we followed Nige’s arrangement without any error and we got some audience reaction despite their continued concentration on tucking into drinks and grub. After a short “Young Ones”, Dave then persuaded Ben and his mate Tom to come up and do the Shadows walk with me; and that went very well. Despite the poor on stage sound we resumed with a fair performance of “Seasons of Gold” which had some of the audience bopping in their chairs. Then we got Trevor and some of the girls up to play enthusiastic tambourines in “Mr Tambourine Man” before swinging on with the ‘sixties’ theme by playing the Hollies and Beatle medleys. It was after an OK ish version of “How Long” we did the next request for Ben with “Jailhouse Rock” which started to generate some hip action; and we even had a few up and dancing as we traversed through “Rock around the Clock” into “Summertime Blues”. Dave made a good call to finish with “3 Times a Lady” which got the dance floor busy with romantic couples – they may even have taken our announcement that it was a bum clutcher seriously! We stopped for about half an hour while some very amusing speeches were done, the cake was presented and a rousing Happy Birthday was sung! In the break the ladies told Dave to tell me and Nigel to turn up our mics. Dave translated this to turn up the guitars boys. We opened up set 2 with “Hotel California” which I was pleased to get largely right and I was happy enough with the solo guitar sound – maybe needs to be a tad louder. We played through the Searchers, Eagles and Beach Boys before pausing to announce “Shine” as another request. This is a complex song and we got through it, but I was all over the place trying to remember the chords. Still it got a few up and dancing. Carried on with Ben’s request for “Crazy Little Thing” and then “Alice” complete with audience reaction. I judged that some of the girls were getting well oiled by their hearty answer backs! We picked and mixed the next few songs and skipped the Elvis routine so we could finish with a request sequence of “Sweet Caroline – Midnight Hour – Love is All Around”. Nige had made a good call to avoid the ‘Bay City Roll’ at this gig so we finished set 2 to a good reception despite a worsening on stage sound. In the break Dave did a bit of selling the band to the club and we changed into the white. Claire had returned with her chum Sarah to see the last set. Nige was looking a bit unwell with his cold but, good trouper that he is, we strode out menfully to do set 3. Starting with “500 Miles” we played non-stop through to “All Right Now”. We had had an increasingly wild audience dancing perilously close to the band, joining in lustily on the sing-a-long bits in “Hey Baby” and “Hi Ho” and getting a long conga train going in “Locomotion”. The band was particularly amused by one of the girls putting up a courageous performance to keep her modesty by holding up her strapless dress through some mad gyrations that really should have brought it down! We continued the high energy sound with ”Can’t Get Enough” (I got the solo right! and requests for “Rockin All Over the World” and “Jumping Jack Flash” before calming things down with a long version of “Unchained”. It was approaching midnight so we wrapped up with “Pretty Woman” doing our band goodbye’s towards the end. But there was enough audience reaction to warrant an encore, so we ended the night with “Wonderful Tonight”. We packed up steadily but it still took ‘til about 1 am before Dave and I brought the vehicles around for load up. It was sub-zero as we loaded up and I was glad to be on a short run home. I led the boys out to the Thetford Road and they continued on as I went home. I think Dave got in about 2:45am after negotiating some treacherous roads in the Norwich area. We had displayed great versatility on the night, this gig was in complete contrast to the previous outing. Next day we got an email from Ben to say how much all had enjoyed it!