Gressenhall Social Club

It was a dark, foggy, cold night as I set off, but the fog cleared as I got to Thetford. I decided to carry on to Swaffham and pick up the A47 to Dereham and all went smoothly until I got to Dereham. The combination of lack of road signs and poor lighting led me to make the wrong choice of road North, I was heading to Holt rather than Fakenham! I had a feeling things weren’t right so I pulled in after a couple of miles and checked the map. Luckily I had pulled into a by road heading towards the Fakenham road, so I was soon back on track. It seemed increasingly dark as I got to Gressenhall but I saw a sign saying ‘Live Music’ and I was soon parked up at the back of the club where there is access to the small concert room through the fire doors. By the time I got unloaded Nige arrived and we were well on the way to set up by the time Dave and Jen arrived also having got lost (Dave had to phone relatives for directions!). Nige remembered this room as having poor acoustics bit it seemed fine as we powered things up. A short reverb, maybe a tad light on low frequency projection but no nasty harsh echos to deal with. During the week I had checked out the reverb / mixer unit and found a dirty jack socket switch on the FX return socket. Rather than take it apart I had simply worked round it by plugging the MPX1 return into spare normal mono input 10. Testing it out I was pleased to hear it all worked as it should, but there was an appreciable hum that I initially put down to rural electricity. However, I remembered we sometimes had similar problems with hum on the old PA so I made a mental note to check this out further; ‘cos it could be an earth loop between Nige’s Bose, FX Rack and my Bose. Anyway, I set levels to minimise it and we had a quiet run thru “Merry Xmas, Rocking Around the Xmas Tree and White Xmas”. The audience started to arrive and Dave knew several people from the off, and there were a couple of muso’s there who were happy to talk at us a lot! Nige got the beers in while I put my background music on and Dave glad handed a bit. We elected to change in the kitchen near the stage rather than the office in the other bar. We donned our red shirts and white ties and set off at 8:30 to do an hour for the first set. Not a bad sound on stage as we worked through to the Everly’s. I would say there were about 40 people in the room by then. So it was about half full, but they gave us a good response to the banter and lots of warm applause for the music. Dave got the muso’s up for the Shadows walk and it brought the house down. But being out front I thought the guitar sound was a bit muddy; it was only when I returned to the stage I realised I had set the GT-10 to 12 string by mistake (and that has a 3dB of bass boost on it!) From then on we were very confident in our bantering and we played pretty well as well. Dave took his time through the guitar changes and we had some dancers up in the slowies and rock’n’roll (which I supplemented with “Be Bop a Lula”). We skipped “How Long” to stick to the 60’s theme and soon ended the hour announcing “I Believe” as the ‘boy band‘ closer and that went really well with this audience. In the break we had some prolonged chats with the muso’s and others and I was asked if we could turn out for a charity gig in January. I said I was away but Dave might be able to fix them up with a band. Got back on to play set 2 starting with a good rendition of the Searchers – with no significant mistakes. There were a few up and dancing so Dave made a good call to go straight into “Do It Again” and then on into the Eagles. I fluffed a couple of notes in “Take It Easy” and things got a bit raggier after that. But we were going down exceptionally well so I think we must have been putting more effort into feel than precision. We played through to Neil Diamond which got a great reception and then Dave called for “Shang a Lang” which continued the dancing well. I stopped it going on into “Bye Bye Baby” because a hard looking rocker had come up while we were playing and asked for some rock’n’roll – so I called “Jailhouse Rock” (I meant to do Blue Suede but couldn’t bring it to mind) and then we followed up with a bit of a ragged “Crazy little Thing” before finishing with “Love is all Around” to another great reception. For set 3 we were in the white and Dave and I started off 500 miles. without Nige because he was busy changing into the kilt. When he made his entrance I did a couple of verses of “Nigel Where’s Your Trousers” as he danced round the room and the audience and the band were howling with laughter. Played on through the party dance sequence to “All Right Now” keeping the small crowd dancing all the way. Then we did a good version of “Can’t Get Enough” that I think was a bit too modern for them. But it quietened them down enough for us to do “Unchained” and “American Trilogy” both of which brought the house down. Amongst the applause there were shouts for a Xmas song. By then we were into to closing phase so we swang into “Merry Xmas” with Nige doing a great job leading us through it, and then we signed off with “Pretty Woman”. Bernie the guvnor came up and asked if they would like one more - “YES” they said, so we wrapped up with “Great Balls” to an enthusiastic ovation. We packed and loaded up steadily and were ready to go by about 12:45am when Dave stopped me and pointed out one of my headlights was out - that explained why it seemed such a dark night on the road getting there! Had an uneventful trip back via Watton and was home for 2am.