Right about now there is a burglar alarm going off outside my house and it is driving me INSANE...
I heard that the Yardbird did an open night on Tuesdays so as I was staying in Birmingham last week I decided to go down and have a look. What I didn't know was that there were featured artists on beforehand and the actual open part of the night didn't start until 10pm, so Amy and I ended up going for a Cantonese first which was very nice. Unusually for open nights most of the guys I saw were only doing one or maybe two songs, I told the guy Jason that I had four, took the stage and got on with it...
Regular readers will have heard about my last visit to the Yardbird and while I was there I did a quick mental assessment of the sort of music the guys there would appreciate. As a lot of my songs are quite agressive I was a bit funny about playing some of them, however I was always going to play Get Out Of My Head. I started this one off somewhat slower than usual, I'm not sure whether I like that or not yet but it lends a certain subtlety to it, and the crowd really seemed to like it!
Bitterness was one of the songs I was umming and arring about, but I played it anyway two songs in and I needn't have worried, I got some very appreciative applause for that and it was about this time that I realised that the crowd at the Yardbird is actually really really good, and I'm really looking forward to my next one there.
It was all looking so good... until I did Storm from the North. It began well enough, apart from the previously-described problems with the vocal range being a little too low for me. The problem came when I was belting out the second chorus to have my D string snap on me. Thankfully I knew what had happened straight away, didn't panic and carried on right to the end of the chorus, yanked what remained of the string off and followed it up with the quiet bit. The guitar was obviously a bit out of tune by then, and possibly owing to the stress of breaking the string I also forgot the words to the last bit which I covered up by noodling around on the E string for a bit, but I got to the end of the song to a great applause from the crowd.
Given the circumstances, I decided to call it a night at that point, the other song would have been Walking on the Sun and I can't really do that without the D string. It was unfortunate, but it happens, and I think I made my point. I'll definitely be going to the Yardbird again!
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