Bearing in mind that as we can't do weather in Britain, driving out to Tipton to pick my mate Dave up and then driving to Stourbridge in snow and ice for the sake of doing 3 songs might seem quite a strange thing to do. It's actually an ethic that I picked up when I worked for Games Workshop in Merry Hill. Call me pedantic but in the winter months when we opened until 10 and later midnight, I always held a small quiet pride in the fact that in the middle of Christmas where everything was going mad and loads of people are stressed, snow falls an gridlocks the entire town, you could still come and have a game of Warhammer. And it was a similar thing that drove me to come down to the open night tonight. Even though we're being bombarded with severe weather warnings and the breakdown workload is rising ever higher, I would still like people to be able to go out and see a show. And I'm the one to provide it. Plus the fact that I wanted to sell some CDs for the charity album that I did, more on that later.
I needn't have worried, because there were quite a few people there, and lower than the usual proportion of people wanted to play so we all got longer sets as well, it was good!
I kicked off with Girls Names, which surprised me as much as anybody else (I would normally open with Get Out Of My Head,) but at that point I still thought it would be a matter of 3 songs and I wanted to make them count. With this one, it's hardly my most exciting song, I don't think so anyway, but I have seen people who have seen me before at Katies (the bar staff, mainly) singing along to the chorus, and that's always a nice feeling. I couldn't see much of that going on tonight, but the pub was full of people (which was strange) that I'd never seen before (which, for Katies, was even stranger,) so I guess it went down as well as any unfamiliar song would. Passive indifference, mainly.
I then revealed that I was collecting for the Reach charity and announced The First Footprint, which was my contribution to an album full of original Christmas songs. Oddly enough, the song that's basically sentimental gush seemed to go down very well, some of the older guys sitting at the front really liked it! I'm playing it so much better than I recorded it now that I've played it live a few times, and I think I need to keep that in mind in case I ever decide to record anything else.
Another interesting choice to close was We Will Survive. On Dave's advice, I didn't play Bitterness, (he thought it was the wrong sort of crowd,) and it occured to me that before Bitterness became an integral part of my set, I would usually close with We Will Survive anyway. I played it a lot better than I did the last time I was at Katies, not least because I got through the whole song without breaking a string or a plectrum. How did it go? Well by this time Dante had turned up and he's seen me before so he looked like he recognised it and enjoyed it, with everybody else it was basically polite applause.
LC then told me I could play another one, cheers LC, so I was thinking 'what to play? what to play?' Well by then I'd already decided I wouldn't play Get Out Of My Head or Bitterness, so that left Believe, Grey and Prisoner of my Mind. I didn't particularly feel like playing any one of them if I'm honest, so I launched instead into a cover of Wide Open Space by Mansun, going with the Bleak Mid-Winter feel, after announcing that it was the first time I've ever played it live. Not a wise move as I made far too many mistakes with the guitar chords, and also as it is now no longer 1997 what passes for an alterative crowd these days would be unlikely to know the song, but Dave liked it.
Overall, I've gone down better than that, but rarely worse, and it was interesting to see what would happen if I left my two best songs out of my set. I've no future plans to play Katies at this point but I'm usually there at least once a month these days so we'll see what happens.
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