Practice at Skeyton

A very cold day. I made good progress to the hall and negotiated the sodden field to the door arriving bang on 4:30pm. Dave was just setting up. He had had a bit of a nightmare collecting the key, so he had only just got the heating on. I kept my fleece and scarf on as I set up; the heating didn’t lift the cold that much! Dave and I had time to run thru a request for Saturday night “Winter Wonderland” and had just started sorting out “Shine” when Nige arrived. He soon got his gear in so we could ‘shut that door’! Ran thru “Shine“ several times. Dave’s vocal range has improved since he gave up smoking so he wasn’t sure which line to sing, but eventually he settled for the lower one on the verse and chorus and the higher one in the coda. Despite it sounding straightforward, “Shine” has an unusual chord sequence that is difficult to remember. After many play throughs I still have trouble remembering the chords while I’m concentrating on the harmonies and just need it to be played through many times until it gets delegated into the fingers. Poor Nige has to sing it through everytime and because he can’t help doing the intro to Lulu’s “Shout” at the end so it is quite wearing for the boy’s throat (just hope he doesn’t do it on stage). Eventually we moved on to a bit of maintenance on the Searchers agreeing a less hasty start and a short transition into “Needles and Pins”. Then we played “Travelodge California” to exercise the solo. “Winter Wonderland” was next on the agenda and that seemed to go OK in the key of C. Had a tea break and started work on “Nowhere Man”. Although we could get harmonies going well enough, they were not the right harmonies. I think Dave and I would have settled for that last year, but thank goodness Nige makes us go that extra mile to get it right nowadays. So we tried various versions out before agreeing we needed to research it further before we take it forward. We then focussed on some maintenance improvements to the current Beatle medley. Nige and Dave reviewed timing and rhythms for “8 Days a Week” and “Can’t Buy Me Love” and then we spent quite a bit of time getting the timing of the drum entry right for “I Feel Fine”. Dave is also to remember to sing the hi-lo melody on the first word of the lead line phrases e.g. Baby becomes (hi) Bay (lo) Bee. Next we ran thru the Xmas trio “Merry Xmas Everybody” Dave takes the hi line Mog takes the lo line and Nige will be in Scotland …, “White Xmas” Dave to croon the first line on his own and “Rockin Around the Xmas Tree”, a tad slower with a swing please! We fooled around with “Girl from Ipanema”, "Wanna Make Those Eyes" and some Eagles stuff before we moved on to do a bit of maintenance on “Crazy Little Thing” Nige doing the hi lines on the answer backs. Dave playing straight under the guitar accents in the verse and we all will remember to stop on the F in the middle 8. After another couple of runs through “Shine” we closed off with a review of “Wonder of You” agreeing Nige to take the hi line on the girly answerbacks and some attention to the dynamics. Loud beginning, soft verse rising to attack the end of each verse; soft under guitar solo with a climax in volume during the final section and coda. With freezing fingers we packed up. Had an uneventful run home listening to Bob Dylan’s Theme Time. Outside temperature dropped to -1 as I got home at midnight.