Alan and Jill Golden Wedding Wymondham Ex Services

It was cool, still and foggy on the way over, but I made good enough time getting to the gig just before 6:30pm. The club is hard to find and you get to the load in doors by driving down a narrow path to the back. Once in I was pleased to see it is quite big ex cinema type hall with a great vintage red décor. Had my gear in by the time Nige and Alex (depping) arrived, having also experienced some bad patches of fog. The sound limiter at this gig has quite a reputation - it is set too low and we had been advised by the Peppermint Men to look at alternative power. I surveyed the possibility but thought it would be a long run and hard to hide the lead so we decided to give it a go with the limiter. Actually it sound checked well enough and our celebrating clients, Alan and Jill, had told us they preferred it quiet. They kindly gave us 2 beer tokens each. At 8pm we got off to a quiet start but once again Alex surprised me with his abrupt end to “Foot Tapper”. But there was little reaction from the few people near to the band so we carried on with a fairly lightweight set 1. The only thing that got a reaction was some rock'n'roll later in the set so we extended that a bit running “Blue Suede Shoes” into “Whole Lotta Shakin” quite successfully. We didn't experience any limiter problems in the first set and took a break at 8:45pm as discussed to allow a long break for the buffet. We were invited to partake and I had a couple of things which were very tasty; Alex had a good helping! (noticed a leak from the roof near the buffet) We resumed set 2 with a background instrumental loosely based on “Albatross” before resuming normal operations. By the time we got to the Shadows walk we had a bit more interest in the band and we got 2 young girls to come up and play the tennis rackets and do the dance. This got a lot of attention and the massive applause at the end cut the power off. It took about 2 minutes to power up again. Took another short break and then we got on with Set 3 which was a lot more dancey. Nige did a lot of improvised singing as we extended rock'n'roll to include things like: “Great Balls, Lets Dance, Good Golly Miss Molly, Jailhouse Rock” Unfortunately the band volume and applause started to bring the limiter in which shut off the power momentarily. Alex could keep the rhythm going and we could shout and then we'd resume as things powered up again. We wrapped up to a warm reception with “Wonderful Tonight”. Our clients were very happy with show and we had a sense of achievement for the way we dealt with the limiter so, all in all, a good feeling at the end of the night. It was still a bit foggy on the way home but I wasn't delayed too much getting in just after 1am.