Sheringham Tyneside

Ms J has gone to Bristol for a family celebration so I was on the ‘sausage in a bun’ at lunch. Decided to use the S-Max ‘cos the Galaxy was all set up to take over to Bristol on the Sunday. Uneventful drive over to park up next to Nige who was already loaded in. In fact when I got in the club everyone (Nige included) was watching Norwich beating Reading 3-1 in real time on Sky. A wag said “Shut that door” and from that moment all seemed to go wrong for Norwich who were suddenly a man down, the manager was sent from the touchline and Norwich were heading for a 3-3 draw! I quietly got set up hoping I wouldn’t get the blame. Nige and I used our bits of acoustic tiling to successfully reduce the resonant corner. Greg arrived with a bit of a sniffy cold and almost had a JD and coke to relieve the symptoms - but settled for iced water instead. As we completed set up I gave the boys a demo of the sounds available on the guitar synth - I made a mental note to set up an organ patch an octave higher so I can play organ parts low on the neck. There were probably 25 in the concert room and adjacent bar as we kicked off in our black’n’whites with the usual start. The on stage sound wasn’t that great and there wasn’t much reaction as we finished “Foot Tapper”. We carried on with a slightly low key set not getting much response from what I would describe as a world weary audience. Some supporters did arrive in the shape of some people Nige knew, and that livened things up a tad. After the break we resumed with “Take It Easy” but still not much reaction. We continued with “Under the Sun and Tambourine Man” and surprisingly we started to get some warm applause – maybe the drink was taking effect? We continued to play a typical set 2 to a reasonable response and even a bit of dancing to “Move It and Lets Dance”, but they faded away exhausted in “Mony Mony”. So I called for a slowey in the shape of “Wonderful Tonight”: this filled the floor and they looked so cuddly I asked Nige to continue with “My Girl”. We did a pretty good job of that but I need to tighten up the guitar on the stop beats at the end of the verses: e.g verse 1: dit dit - da da da da. As we were in sight of the finishing line I took us into the “Halfway to Paradise, Wonder of You, Sweet Caroline” ending sequence to wrap up a fair second set. After the members draw the crowd had halved to an uninspiring 15-20. We opened the third set with “Flingel Bunt” and I had a walk out front. As always I was surprised by the quality of the sound out there; much better than on stage! Without much in the way of audience reaction we went through the motions for the last 50 minutes. I quite enjoyed doing our “Spencer Davis” mini medley for a change, but the final half of the set became a bit of a chore and we were all glad to finish with Johnny B Goode at 11:30pm There were only a few left in the room and I was quite surprised to hear a couple grumbling about ‘an early finish’! But Nige put the muzak on and we set about changing and packing up. It was chilly out and I was glad to get on the road for the trip back. Despite a bit of fog I made it back in about 90 minutes via Swaffham; getting to bed about 2am. Next day I was up early to drive to Bristol in the Galaxy for my nieces big 30 lunch.