Seacroft - East Runton

Had a tough week at work, but the weather was sunny and warm and I set off in reasonable spirits allowing 2 hours for the Friday night run. I made the right decision to take the Swaffham route ‘cos I heard on the radio that the A140 was closed by a serious crash near Alby and ‘A shed load of offal had closed the Thickthorn roundabout!’ With the temperature over 30 degrees you can imagine the whiff. Although it was a slow run I was well on time at the gig arriving at 6:20pm; I had all my gear in by the time Nige and Ray arrived. Set up went well, but to reduce complexity so I could give more attention to audience interaction, I elected not to use the harmoniser on this gig. While it was quiet Nige and I took the opportunity to check arrangements on “Lets Have a Party” and “My Girl”. We had a welcome cold beer and changed into the white shirts and took to the stage at 8:15pm opening with “Foot Tapper”. We had set volumes down a bit but the on-stage sound was plenty loud enough. The room was pretty full and we got a really good round of applause as we finished it so I think the sound and balance out in the room was spot on. We took a bit of time over the intro and we got a good reception from this attentive audience. So we carried on with the usual bantery type show. Lots of applause, some good ad libs and the band going down really well. I tried out “All Shook Up” to some success – we did a funny intro based on me shaking which I called practicing the Watusi and we got good audience response on the “All Shook Ups”. Ray did his millionaire joke to some appreciation and then we rattled out “Living Doll and Apache” to which I did a demo of the Shads walk! This got a great response and so did the Beatles wigging up following. Despite a slight sea breeze, the humid hot conditions caused a couple of problems; Nige and I both had trouble with constricted throats which made singing tricky at times and my guitar needed a lot of attention to keep in tune. I’m sure it was fiddling with guitar tuning that caused me to lose track of the time and we ended up doing an hour rather than the 45 minutes planned. We finished off with a good “Ferry Cross the Mersey” in which I called for an extension ‘cos I thought we were slightly short of the 45 minutes (when we were actually slightly short of the hour!). Nige and I tried pints of water in the break to loosen up voices and we went back on to open set 2 with “How Long” by Ace. Apart from voices still a bit stiff this went well and got a good round of applause. We carried on with the Searchers, which I got Nige and myself wigged up for as a joke. Unfortunately this distracted me form setting the guitar so I was caught short on the start! With it being hot we hadn’t expected any dancing, but some ladies came up to dance to the Searchers so we concentrated on more dancey stuff for a while – “Do You Wanna Dance, Do It Again, Crazy Little Thing, Beautiful Sunday, Moon of Love, Hi Ho, and Lets Dance - Mony Mony.. I got in muddle with Beautiful Sunday ‘cos Nige picked key of C and threw in a solo – so I need to brush up on that. In fact I think we are better to run them as a permanent glued together 70’s medley with shortish versions of: Moon of Love, Beaut Sunday, Yellow River. The dancers looked bit hot after that so I slowed it down for “Halfway and Sweet Caroline then we rounded off with “Hippy Hippy Shake”. Set 3 would only be about 25 minutes ‘cos I’d run over time earlier. We opened up with “Dance the Night Away” followed by “Flingel Bunt” where I took a trip out front again. There were a few up and dancing so we kept it going with: “Amarillo, Hey Baby, Twist Again” and filled the dance floor. I took us into the closing sequence with “Johnny B Goode” (we must tidy up the solos in that) and then Nige did a great “Walk Alone” to finish at bang on 11pm. The audience gave us a rousing reception and several came up at the end to say how much they had enjoyed it. One chap said he was a Shadows fan and he was really impressed by our versions which sounded just great and really full without a rhythm guitar – nice to hear that! So, despite our own reservations on quality, we had got the ‘holy grail’ band outcome here: with an attentive audience who we entertained successfully and who filled the dance floor. We were packed, loaded and on the road by just before midnight and I was home for 1:30am tired and strangely a bit out of sorts?