ReTrio at The Victoria Thurston

Another pub gig!  I was still suffering from the cold I had picked up and, if anything, it was worse on the chest than the previous week.  Ms J decided to accompany me and we set off at 6:30pm arriving 10 minutes later at the pub to find Chris the drum already loaded in and setting up. A brighter pub but a bit less room than last week.  Chris the bass arrived and we left Chris the drum to get on with it while we got some beers in.  As soon as Chris finished we moved in to set up.  I was a bit squashed on the left and had to face playing slightly side on to avoid hitting the wall with my guitar head.  We sound checked with "Smilin" and got a little round of applause - so I took the view it must sound alright. We had a few of our supporters there: band wives,  Trudy's mum and Les from the previous gig. 

Soon it was 8:30 and we strode up to play.  Immediate problem! No sound from the bass amp.  We faffed around trying to fix it but in the end I plugged Chris into the bass drum input on the mixer - everything would now be through the single Bose!  A kind chap in the crowd volunteered to fetch his Yamaha combo from the village while we got underway.  Once we got started we were obviously well rattled because the first few numbers were fraught with errors;  fortunately non fatal. The bass coming out the Bose was too loud for me and I had trouble hearing vocals.  But we soldiered on getting a reasonable response to our first set considering.  In the break Chris plugged into the loaned combo.  It wasn't that powerful but had a single 15 so it was deep.  I should have brought down the Bose to compensate a bit,  but I wasn't thinking straight.  Jacqui said the sound in the first set out front was OK and I should stop fretting!

We got underway for Set 2.  The bass was a bit lost in the mix now but we were playing better and we got better response generally and a really big round of applause for "Delilah"  which I had announced as sing-a-long:  and the pub crowd certainly did!  We were still making some unforced errors but when I apologised for the ragged performance it was clear no one out front had noticed - so I stopped apologising.  We finished with "Wonder of You" but I couldn't sustain the last note on the vocal and chickened out to a short "You--" this time.

 

We played much the same 3rd set as the previous week,  but I added "Dance the Night Away" as second number.  We hadn't done this for several weeks and I messed up the solo - I sort of scrunched fingers to get through it;  but made a note to relearn it so the fingers could do the walkin' even if the brain went AWOL.  Actually, I blame a lot of my problems on the night on the cold which, apart from the sore throat,  seemed to be reducing brain activity to an even lower level than normal.  I decided to skip "Trilogy" 'cos the vocal would be too hard going.  Good job I did,  'cos when I switched in strings for "Sweet Caroline" they weren't there - another gremlin had struck!  So we stuck to rockier stuff through right though to the encore with "Born to be Wild".  This swung well enough but wasn't cooking like the previous week;  however, the ending was cleaner.  We were pleased to have got through.  Strangely, the landlord was very pleased and people were pretty complimentary on our show - so we must be covering the mistakes up well.  We got packed up and away fairly quick and I was at home with a cocoa by 12:30am. 

Next day Chris took his amp into Sounds Plus for repair,  but bought an  Ashdown ABM500 head anyway.  He says he'll keep the Harkte as a spare if it can be fixed.  I couldn't replicate the absence of strings problem so it remains 'fault not found';  I wonder if low voltage at this rural venue might have affected the synth?