East Tuddenham Jubilee Hall Divorced and Separated Club Dance.

In theory it was an easy drive over to this gig. Only trouble was there are extensive roadworks on the A47 approaching the village and, what looked like a fine approach road on the map turned out to be a one track lane. It was windy and raining as I rolled up to the hall. I found the caretaker and he pointed me in the direction of easy access fire doors. I was unloaded by the time Dave and Jen arrived (also coming down the one track Church Lane), so I gave them a bit of a lift in and we started to set up on a nice wooden stage in what is a fairly big hall. I set up at the middle back of the stage thinking the sound would get out diagonally past the side walls better. Nige arrived and did similar and we did a bit of a sound check with “I Feel Fine” Nige walked out front as far as he could and reported that the volume was low, so we shifted the Bose towers and the drums all forward about 3 feet. That seemed to do the trick, so we set off to do meeting, greeting and having a beer. The organisers asked me to set up their radio mic into our PA. Access to the reverb mixer was a bit tricky as it was all wired up so I plugged the radio receiver it into one of the line inputs on my Bose T1 digital mixer. This gave an adequate performance, but the mic was not the best and I struggled to get volume out of it without feedback. In the end it was just good enough for announcements so I settled for that. My white shirt wasn’t washed so we agreed to wear black with our Armistice Day poppies and white ties. We got underway about 8:40pm, with about 30 attending. We played through set 1 picking and mixing as we went. Most of the audience liked to dance and we got a bunch of ladies doing an enthusiastic Shadows Walk with the rubber guitars. The banter was going pretty well I thought, we were giving each other space to say things clearly and I was ‘ad libbing’ some appropriate lines for the venue and event. Also, occasionally the band worked well together generating a tighter beat than usual. Another positive thing was that the vocal quality was good despite our gigging the night before and, learning from the night before, I switched to 6 string for the Beatles which I played a lot better (not perfect, I still had a bit of finger trouble with “All My Lovin” but I did get a good 6 string guitar sound on “I Feel Fine”). Playing 6 string also made for a much smoother guitar change point because the boys could get into the Beatle wig banter while I wrestled with the guitar change. We extended the rock’n’roll again with “Be Bop” and finished in good order with the “I Believe”. In the break we all did a bit of glad handing. People were very enthusiastic about the band and apologetic for the low attendance. There were now about 40 attending and that was as good as it got. The weather had worsened and you could hear the rain beating on the roof at times. We opened up set 2 (minus ties and Dave wearing white) with the Searchers medley. That went very well, the band was strangely tight and together – it must be finally sinking in after several months playing it! Sticking on 12 string we played through the Eagles and Beachboys, when we bantered the audience into helping us sing “Alice”. The rest of the set went well and we wrapped up with a couple of slowies “Just Can’t Help” and “Love is all Around”. The governor came up to do the raffle. He was well pleased with the band, loved the professionalism and was also apologetic for the low turnout. Jenny managed to win a raffle prize again! We gave out plenty of cards and info sheets for people who were interested in booking the band. It was quite cold by the time we got underway for set 3. We played a reduced party dance sequence and populated the rest of the set with some slowies as requested. Finished off about 11:50pm with “Wonderful Tonight”. We got packed up and the rain had abated for the load up. Trouble was we had to load the cars standing in puddles. Nige had come out in just his slippers so he was a contender for trench foot! Got away about 1am and I was home for 2:30am on a wild and windy night. Had a quite Sunday, visited mum and in the evening I fell asleep in a chair only to be woken by Dave who phoned with the good news he had secured a Xmas Eve gig.