Drove round to the Chris the bass's house for a 6:30 2 car convoy to the gig. Chris has recently acquired a Ford Kuga which has a lot more room than his previous gigging car - i.e. Bridget's Corsa! Nice sunny and warm evening as we pulled into the parking space in front of the Hotel. Not too bad a load in from there; a few steps lead into the Hotel front door, then it's a few yards down a corridor and left into the performance bar. Quite small really but you could squeeze 50 in I suppose. There is a much bigger function room round the back and we used that to store bags and get changed. We were well advanced on set up when Chris the drum and Trudy arrived and filled the room up with drums. He had found a car park at the back- a longer load in but no steps. We completed set up and it all worked first time! We sound checked with a couple of verses of "Smilin" as usual. The alcove we were playing in had some bassy resonances, (a bit like the Tyneside at Sheringham). Given more time I would have filtered them out on the DEQ, but there were people already in the bar enjoying a meal and I was being a bit lazy; figuring a bigger audience would absorb it or we would play at a slightly lower volume. The audience didn't materialise however. There were only about 10 in the bar as we opened up with "FBI". We got a bit of applause for that, but not much response on the next few. I thought the sound was OK and eventually I got some response to my between song banter! Jacqui had washed and combed our wigs for the Beatle duo-dley, so we could banter round that - straight out the dishwasher I quipped! It was during the follow up Searchers duo-dley that the power went off. Strange - I didn't notice a noise limiter? It turned out that our power breaker had tripped. I reset it - the PA took a minute to reboot and then we were just starting the next song when it tripped again. So I took it out and we plugged straight in the mains. That got rid of the problem and we finished off the set with "Runaround Sue". In the break one of the couples that had been enjoying the show apologised but said they had had a busy day and had to go - so we were down to 8 as we opened set 2 with "Do You Wanna Dance". Although the sound wasn't great we were playing well enough and I did make a point of engaging with the few people there when the opportunity arose - but it was fairly heavy going. One wag said he would like Johnny Cash's "Walk the Line" 'cos he was likely going to prison! We obliged with "Folsom Prison" - I effected a Telecaster sound by using the bridge / mid pickup and a short echo on the Roland FX unit. It all sounded not too bad at all considering it is not a regular in the set. The 2 Chris's are clearly at home with this railroad country rhythm. The same guy then asked for "Hotel California" but we had to decline with this band. We played a fairly long set 2 and a few more people arrived so instead of finishing with "Hot Love" at the 45 minute point I added "Wonder of You". Both of these went down very well with the 12-15 in the audience and singing "Wonder" at full voice I felt I was largely over the vocal problems of recent weeks. In the short break Chris explained that we had strict instructions to finish at 11:45; it was already 10 past so we agreed to get straight back on. We bashed out a good half an hour of the faster songs in our set 3 list then finished bang on time with "Johnny B Goode". Not a good night for the hotel - they had bar staff and 2 bouncers to pay as well as the band. Chris reported that the landlady was relieved the band on Saturday had cancelled and largely blamed the football for the poor attendance. But it seemed that none of the bands were bringing in much in the way of crowds and it was likely she would stop the live music. Shame really, it could be a nice intimate venue with about 40 people in there. From our point of view it was 'paid practice' - and we are still making too many unforced errors so we do need it! Tear down and load up went very quickly so I was on the road by 12:30am and home just before 1am.
No comments:
Post a Comment