Yet again I find myself with a backlog of blogs for the various bits and pieces that I've been doing. I have been a busy boy!
This one, I've got to be honest, didn't feel so good for me. This is unusual for Katies, usually I quite enjoy it, but either I wasn't feeling it, or my confidence was knocked by the people who were walking out while I was playing (I'm sure there were good reasons for it, in fact I spoke to two people afterwards who had perfectly good reasons I'd have to be a cruel man indeed to begrudge them,) or maybe even with the various bank holidays this week people's minds aren't in the right place at the moment. Whatever the reason, tonight wasn't my night.
As it was less than 2 weeks since I last played Katies, I decided to turn my set list on it's head. Not one of my best-timed decisions, if I'm honest; most of the people in the room had never seen me before so it was only Sam and Stefan who would have noticed. Why deviate from what I know works? But I did, and started off with Get Out Of My Head. I managed to intrigue the audience by playing the first verse and chorus without any chords and a backbeat played by banging on my guitar, and I played the rest of the song well enough to polite applause.
I've not written a set list for an acoustic gig for a while now, I tend to only do it if I'm in a band and need everybody else to know what's going on! Acoustic gigs, I generally pick four or five songs I definitely want to play and fill in the gaps with whatever I can think of at the time. I placed We Will Survive next, and I think that was probably not the right time for this song, given I start it with an a'capello chorus - which I'd basically just done with Get Out Of My Head. The idea would have got old after two songs, so it probably didn't do so much damage as I'm suggesting here, but it's one to keep in mind for the future not to put those two songs together.
Girl's Names was next. Apart from the fact that I'm playing the transition to 12/8 a lot more smoothly now than I have been, this song was faily unremarkable. It usually goes down well and for that reason I play it every time I play Katies - but, perhaps as a result, I didn't notice much of a reaction tonight.
I announced a new song and started playing Amy's Song. For those of you who listen to Switchfoot, this is a very different song that I wrote about my girlfriend. This was the first time I'd ever played it live and it's a dramatic change from my usual melancholic style; whether it's a particularly good idea to do it in a set this short is debatable at this point. It's going to take a few more goes before I figure it out. However I noted that it was this point that a significant number of people were walking out, which didn't do much to raise my confidence in playing the song live...
I think at all my gigs I'll always do either Believe or Prisoner of my Mind, and tonight I elected to do Prisoner. I didn't get much of a reaction out of this either, but then again by now there weren't all that many people left to react! Not a good sign for what was once (OK, 3 years ago) considered my best song.
I had at least remembered to put a couple of heavyweights at the end, and even though it was a little too late to pull it back by then there is such a thing as going down fighting. Few of my songs are better for that than Bitterness! Still, I think I'll have to stick with opening with this one. If I'm going to inject the correct amount of bile into the chorus I either need to use it to get the adrenaline going and surprising the audience, or the entire gig has to have gone well, neither of which were the case tonight. But other than that I played it OK.
I ended with Storm from the North, which I think was the first time in a while I made it all the way through the song without forgetting any of the words, kudos to me for that! I think this one will end the greater majority of the shows now, but it's like driving up a hill when it's snowing - I need to have a certain amount of momentum when I hit it, otherwise I'll get stuck half way up. I think that's a reasonable metaphor for, OK it's a good song, but if the gig hasn't been good then it's not going to change anybody's minds.
I doubt that those few people who did watch me all the way though would tell me that it was as bad as all that, and I have been quite harsh on myself this time. But that isn't the sort of gig that I want to make a habit of doing. I've got the Wharf Bar again tonight, and the fact that audiences there generally are quite unresponsive makes that gig very hard work, I don't need to be making it any harder for myself! The mistake was, I think, switching the set around. Bitterness and Get Out Of My Head are the attention grabbers, We Will Survive and Storm from the North are the set-closing epics, everything else is filler though there are some that are good enough to play them at most shows. Let's see what happens tonight...
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