Sunny and warm, we had been invited to stay over with Steve and Alyson so set off about 2:15pm for a 4pm arrival. Traffic was a bit dozy so this was about right. We had tea with Steve and Alyson in East Runton then Ms J and I set of for the gig about 6pm. We were a bit early so I parked up and we had a wander round Sheringham station to inspect a murder mystery train parked up there. As we came back Ray and his Jacky rolled up and I was just saying hello when Nigel arrived. So we got the gear in and set up. In the week I had acquired a Digitech Vocalist Live 3 and I spent about twenty minutes setting up my vocals on that. It seemed to harmonise well, but I set the harmony mix well down for subtlety. Nige and I had swapped sides and he was using a beer crate to isolate his bass bins, I used a bit foam acoustic tiling. It was worth it ‘cos there was no boom in the sound. We had a beer and got changed into the black and stepped onto the stage to open up with “Foot Tapper” at 8:30pm for a one hour set. Not a bad sound on stage I thought. I used the harmoniser in “Just One Look” and thought it fitted in well. Only snag was that being on the ‘wrong’ side of the stage I had set my pedals up in the wrong locations, so my FX, guitar and harmoniser changes were a bit unco-ordinated! The harmoniser was a bit less effective than I thought it would be in “Peaceful Easy Feelin” but this was down to me attempting to drop my harmony down from my usual high line and not being too sure of the lines – nothing the audience would notice though. There weren’t many in. A few came up to dance when we got Ray to do his “Living Doll” bit and I took us on into “Move It” successfully to keep them there. But it was quite warm and they never really got into dancing. About halfway through the set a ‘lively’ Jenny and Valisha arrived; didn’t recognise them at first: Jenny has gone blonde! Anyway the band played on finishing the set with “The Beatles, The Searchers and “Words”. We had a 15 minute break which I sued to re-organise pedla locations as best I could – never quite got it right however. We returned to open up with “Flingel Bunt”. I do notice that this is quite a catchy 60s rhythm, often you can see people jiggling around to it even if they don’t actually dance. We continued with “Under the Sun, Tambourine Man” and then I called for “Eyes at Me For”. I thought this went well enough but there were not enough people in the room to get an audience response session going. During “Halfway” Nige did the gruff voice routine, so he was soon blonde wigged up and asked to do ‘girly’ harmonies. Ray tried out his ‘old adverts’ routine getting a bit of response. After 45 mins we took another break. When we resumed most of our audience were outside enjoying the balmy evening so we opened up with “Uptown Girl”; Nige sang it very well and I got some of the backing vocals right with harmoniser. We still get a bit caught out by the middle section, but definitely worth persisting with this songs development on stage. We started to pick and mix through some material that is not aired that often, including: “Midnight Hour, Honkey Tonk Women, All Right Now, Shakin All Over”. “Summer of 69” went well bringing up a few to dance. My Jacqui reported later that the guitar sound in this song was just great and the band sound balance couldn’t be better. We finished off with “Wonderful Tonight” and there was a shout for more at the end, so I called for “Johnny B Good”. This was going like a train until I turned to Ray to cue a drum solo and he just stopped! With there being so few left on the room we decided not to restart. I put this down to a misunderstanding with Ray but we did express a difference of opinions on encoring as we got changed. Having slept on it I think we should let the person who ‘owns’ the gig decide how it is played; hopefully we can all get behind that in future. We were packed and loaded up by 12:20am Nige signed off with the management who thought we were brilliant and said we were not to be downhearted by the relatively poor attendance. Apparently there were quite a few in the other bar and outside who enjoyed the bands performance from afar!. Ms J and I made our way back to East Runton and had a jolly good Sunday – avoiding the England v Germany game which turned out to wise in view of their 4 – 1 thrashing.
