20/7/2011: Katie Fitzgeralds Acoustic Brew

Here's a turn up for the books: I'm writing up a gig literally a day after I've done it, rather than the usual 7...

So I think it was last Tuesday I was emergency-booked for Katies again, and as I had band practice with Aki Maera that night I had to ask for the late slot. Turns out I needn't have worried as they were running late anyway but I got to play a show to the few remaining people left in the bar...

I began with Get Out Of My Head. Even though I'm playing that well now, and tonight was no exception, I ended up making mistakes with the chords in the most stupid places in the world. I reckon it's because I wasn't concentrating, which isn't surprising as I usually open with this song so if there's anywhere in the set that I'm 'going through the motions' it's here. Nonetheless, I don't think it went down too badly at all.

I then went on to Girl's Names. I really didn't feel like following it up with Bitterness, so I changed the set around a little bit. I've started putting a little country-style lick in the intro, which I noticed one person in the audience nodding along to so this was probably one of my better ideas. I played it well, I've never thought this is my most inspiring song but it usually does go down well here, once again tonight was no exception. So far, so good...

Storm From The North was next. Apart from one fluff of the chords at one point, I played this very well indeed, it's getting better and better... I started off by revealing that the song was actually inspired by Emma who used to be in Crashpoint, who I understand now plays a few acoustic shows on her own in and around the town, including Katies. I speculated to the audience afterwards whether Sam would put me on the same night as Emma and wonder if I'd play it. Hell, I don't know the answer to that question at this point; ask me again if it comes up.

Mark had his graduation on Tuesday, and the moment where a young and recently disabled man walked - with some assistance - from one side of the stage to the other to get his degree and shake hands with the Chancellor was truly inspiring. I wanted to dedicate a song to the guy, and the only song I could think of that was in the slightest bit appropriate was Trail Of Broken Hearts by DragonForce. It was actually quite nice how people who were preparing to leave stayed to watch for this one, then left. I played it OK, I could have done without fluffing up so many of the lyrics but it hardly matters with DragonForce as they're all near enough the same anyway; it was an impromptu decision to play it and it seemed to work.

Things were going a bit quiet now so I followed suit with Right Where It Belongs by Nine Inch Nails. This went down with passive indifference but I wasn't exactly trying to change the world with it if I'm perfectly honest, it did what I needed it to do which was basically a musical interlude with vocals.

I then had a go at asking what little of the audience remained (which ironically enough was a larger number of people than I'm used to playing to) what they wanted to hear, a fast song? A slow song? Somebody at the bar shouted 'Reggae!' and I ended up playing 7 Nation Army with Ska chords... I actually do this with some of the bands and it works really well with the 82s, less so with The Fakes. It worked for a while with the acoustic guitar but I found out too late I haven't really got the stamina to make it all the way through. My acoustic guitar isn't the easiest in the world to play and my fingers were excruciating by the time I'd finished. I also need to play that chorus a lot more accurately. But the crowd seemed to like it and I saw a few people dancing to it which for an acoustic gig is mega!

I finished up with a super-quick adrenaline inspired rendition of Bitterness! I played it well and those fast strums are getting ever more accurate, but I ought to know better than to let myself get carried away like that.

So, while not the best I've ever played, this was one of the most enjoyable gigs I've played so far this year. Bring on the next one!

13/7/2011 Katie's Jam Sessions

Just a quick one...

Dale turned round and said to me last time I was at Katie's that the Jam Sessions that run on Wednesday needs some more bass players, so I decided to take my bass down tonight and have a go. What tends to happen is that a band is booked to play a 'featured set' and whoever else is there jams around the slot; not quite the concept of a Jam Night you'd pick up from the Maverick but that's how LC is making it work so there you go.

I got up with LC on guitar and Rob on the drums, and started off with some disco-funk, and it worked once we'd found a key we were happy with (the guitar-friendly E.) Moved on to some classic rock style, er, rock, which worked really well as well. I've jammed with these guys a couple of times before and sometimes in can feel like we're a band already because of the ease at which we communicate! I tried some ill-advised riffs on the bass that didn't work too well, plus some slow jamming which worked but wasn't very exciting, before LC turned up the metal, drop-tuned his guitar and played some really heavy riffs to jam along too. I didn't follow this one so well as this sort of thing tends to break away from the trends of where I would expect to have to go with a bass guitar, then again I don't play this style of music very much so perhaps this isn't surprising. But, I kept up, and the guys waiting to go on seemed to like it!

Whew, that's all my blogging done for the day. It'll be a while before my next one as I'm not sure when my next gig will be, though I do need to get down the Yardbird again before too long. See you soon!

11/7/2011 Natasha and the 82's at Boney Hay Working Men's Club

Just realised I haven't blogged anything about my new band at all...

OK Natasha and the 82's came about as an idea from a former Crashpoint member Richard Shepherd. He's known Natasha, a popular pop/soul/motown singer, for some time, and wanted to try putting a band together for her to perform with. The 82's are therefore Rich on the bass guitar and musical director, myself on guitar and Jarvo on the drums. Over the last couple of months we've been rehearsing a lot of pop songs over the last few decades. The songs we play and the instrumentation of the band allows me to inject our own style into the covers - we can't accurately produce a horn sound with bass, drums and guitar, but we can play the relevant parts as guitar solos instead, or turn up the effects on the bass to fill out the sound if need be. Last Monday we tried them on a stage and in front of a modest audience to see what we sound like on a stage (which is invariably significantly different from how it sounds in a studio, and we know it!)

Being in the band has improved my guitar playing a lot, for a couple of reasons: First, I've had to learn a hell of a lot of songs very quickly, which always does wonders for your playing. And also, this is the first band I've been in for a long time where the members are better than me. Rich and Jarvo are far better at bass and drums respectively than I am at playing guitar, which means I've got to deal with them differently and up my game in order to keep up with them. I'm saying this mainly by comparison to Cj from Aki Maera - granted, he's better on the drums than I will ever be, but there's not much we can take from each other any more. Not being funny, but we were in Crashpoint together for two and a half years; by the time it broke up either we'd learned everything we're going to learn from each other or we'd learned nothing. Playing in the band with Jarvo, who is quite possibly the best drummer I've ever worked with, and Rich, who's one of the better bass players and also has a very clear idea of what he wants his band to sound like, has forced me to be far more disciplined in my playing.

In spite of all this, I didn't honestly feel up to the 'mock gig' we did last Monday. Granted, I practice a lot less than I should, but the fact that we've not been a band for very long at all means that I don't think we're quite there yet with band cohesion. We're still looking at each other far too often for cues, and sometimes in my case chords if I don't know the song too well. The term 'set-list' was severely misapplied to what eventually happened, which was basically we played the songs in whatever order we felt like. There were some mistakes with setting up the sound, which it took some feedback from the audience to rectify.

That being said, kudos to Rich for setting up an environment where we could get away with it, and we did manage to play most of the songs we'd planned to do without stopping and wondering how it goes. (In actual fact this only happened once as I tried to remember how to do Ain't Nobody!) We did receive some very positive feedback from people who were genuinely enjoying themselves as we played. The point of tonight, I feel, was to see how it sounded live and come up with some development points for the band. Probably the most significant ones are:

1. Reduce the volume; there's no need to blow the roof off with this sort of music,
2. Top and tail the songs so that we know where all the endings are without having to look at each other,
3. Come up with a workable set list that will stand the test of a few gigs.

That last one I think will come with gigging experience as much as anything else, because we won't know what works and what doesn't until we've done it; that's part of the reason I keep this blog. But it does tend to get changed around a lot and that needs to calm down before we hit the road properly. We are what we are - a developing band that's still finding it's feet; we're not quite there yet but I'm sure we'll get there soon.

I'll keep you posted!

6/7/2011: Open Mic at the Hartley Arms

I'm behind again! Good lord...

I actually came to the Hartley Arms tonight because I needed to talk to Sam about something, but while I was there I figured I might actually play some guitar as well. This not being a conventional gig, nor one that I was taking too seriously, I decided to break out from my usual conventions...

I sound-checked - and thereafter played - my rendition of an old Dastards song Shoot From The Hip. What Wake would think of me playing his songs I don't know, and it seems strange to play a song from a relatively unknown band I haven't actually been in for nearly 4 years, but do you know what, I like playing it, and it stuck a very poignant chord with me that to be honest resonates with me to this very day. Plus it's simple, enjoyable, and judging by the reaction I got, people like to hear it. I don't know whether they necessarily wanted to know that it wasn't my song, but I wasn't going to play this song without giving the writer some credit.

I followed that up with Dear Mr Manager, which I haven't played for ages because it doesn't really have much  of a place in the gigs I've been doing over the last couple of months. I had to concentrate because the guitar work, while easy as pie to any halfway-decent fingerpicker, is still unexplored territory for me. However, it was I think at this point that I realised how attentive my audience actually was. They weren't being loud and giving me standing oviations at the end of every song, no. They were paying me the far more appreciated compliment of being absolutely silent for the time I was playing and showing a real intensity in their listening. I might attribute some of this to the fact that a few people there had seen me play before and to start playing quiet songs all of a sudden was a new experience for them...

Next came One More Show, I've been waiting to do this for a while because of Sam's off-hand comment about me looking like Boyzone when I play guitar sat on a stool and writing a song in what I consider to be in the style of the aforementioned boy-band of the 90's. Laugh if you will, I grew up in the 1990's, and if you listened to the radio or TV at all during that time at some point you'll have heard No Matter What, which is where I got the idea for the key-change from. I don't think it's one of my best songs, and I rarely get more than polite applause from it, but I definitely wanted to play this one for Sam. Inspiration can come from the strangest of places!

I wrapped it up with something a little more familiar to the venue which was Storm From The North. Not much to say about this, other than I avoided putting in the 'Nothing Else Matters' bit in at the end. I've said before that I'd need a somewhat familiar audience to make it work, and I stand by that. But I also believe that said familiar audience will only find it funny once. I may do it again at some point but not for a while!

All in all I think the gig was a little more interesting for me in that I changed the set list around from what has now become the norm. And I'm fortunate to be in a position where I can go and change things like that in a venue like The Hartley Arms where I can get away with it. It wouldn't necessarily work around the so-called 'big' venues, because the stakes are higher and I need to be on form. But I think tonight, I couldn't have done it better. Cheers Sam, and well done for passing your driving test, see you again soon!

3/7/2011: The Copcut Elm Music Competition

Well, I'd asked Ben Vickers if I could do the competition at Copcut a few weeks before, but as I've never been to the place before (their open night usually falls on the night I have Aki Maera practice) I had no idea what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised as Ben appeared to be running a very tight operation. He'd asked everybody to get there for 7.30, and everybody was there for 7.30. The show was scheduled to start at 8.30, and by all the Gods, it started at 8.30. The changeovers were slick, all the acts were consistently good, and the sound quality was absolutely brilliant for a venue this size. Compare that to, say, one or two places I've played in Walsall, where they ask us to get there at 6.30 and absolutely nothing happens whatsoever until 9.00 at the very earliest, and I've ended up walking out halfway through the show at the time it was supposed to have ended - even though the last two bands had yet to go on because they'd taken far too long faffing around with the sound - and you'll appreciate how significant I find all of this. Not only that but there were some serious and professional judges for the event, one of which was Kiki O'Connel I'd seen at Katies a while back, and at the Sence Bar in Birmingham as well now that I think about it.

So, how did I get on? Well, one thing I didn't know until about 10 minutes before I was supposed to go on was how many songs I was going to get, and when it turned out to be 2, I had to pick and choose carefully. I was always going to play Bitterness, however. I always do if it's a new gig to exploit the "Rock Star With An Acoustic Guitar" thing I have going on and since nobody there had ever seen me play before, this seemed the ideal choice. This actually went down very well indeed, I saw quite a few people in the audience (which, by the way, numbered in their hundreds,) dancing to this and I was told later that it struck a chord with at least one member of the audience who had recently split up from his wife. I decided to do the thing where I talk to the audience in the 'quiet' bit, this was a bit of a mistake in retrospect. It works when the crowd know me, but as Kiki pointed out to me afterwards, it looked like I was completely lost in the song up until that point and so was everybody else until I'd started talking, and it lost momentum. In front of a more familiar crowd it would probably have worked a little better but in this sort of environment I'd have been better off letting the song itself do the talking. Other than that, I played it very well, with the blood-curdling shriek I've been putting at the end of it feeling less and less welcome - and therefore more likely to occur - every time I do it.

My other song was We Will Survive. 'What?' you say, 'you played Bitterness without following it up with Get Out Of My Head?' Actually yes I did, and there was a reason for that - I've been trying to develop an awareness of what works better in front of certain audiences. There's a lot of factors in this and I still haven't got it down to a precise art, but quite a good thing for me to keep in mind is this: The younger audience tend to prefer my fast rock songs, and the older audiences tend to prefer my slower, arty songs. Most of the time both the audience and my set include a mix of the two split straight down the middle, however tonight there seemed to be quite a lot of younger people in the audience who I thought would appreciate We Will Survive better. I wasn't wrong in that respect as I could visibly see a lot of them enjoying themselves. It didn't do me much good in terms of the competition though, as I'd put my two pounding rock songs right next to each other and the lack of variety cost me; I would have done better with Get Out Of My Head or Storm From The North. That being said, this is probably the first time I've ever got through a set without making any mistakes at all, which shouldn't have taken a year and a half to achieve but I got there in the end!

I didn't get through to the final in the end, but honestly I don't mind. I have no doubt that the judging was done on the quality of the music, which was the first time this has ever happened as far as I'm aware.* The other acts on - and there were 8 - were all very good; obviously some better than others but none of them were rubbish, and there wasn't a single act among them who I didn't think had a chance. The guys and girls who did get through thoroughly deserved it and best of luck to all of them in the next round; I don't envy the responsibility of the judges for having to pick between those guys! Best of luck to all of you and I'm sure we'll see you again...

*Every other substantial competition I've played that hasn't been judged by a drunk has come down to how many tickets each individual band has sold. The organisers can say what they like about it being about the music but at the end of the day the venue has to make money so they'll invite back the people who draw the larger crowds. The Copcut competition was a refreshing change from this!

22/6/2011 Katy Fitzgeralds Acoustic Brew

And there I was thinking I wouldn't get a gig in this week when I get emergency booked to play Katies once again, and Amy came with me as well which was fantastic. Here's how it went:

I opened up by saying I wanted to make this one really good, and kicked off with So Long Astoria by The Ataris. There was a very specific reason for this - if you listen to the lyrics it's all about remembering a place that is special to you, I think it is anyway, and with Amy about to move from the house we'd pretty much been sharing and having a wealth of memories there which I'm sure we'll share for a long time, I thought this appropriate. I didn't play it too well as it has been literally years since I last tried and it showed, but it was good fun to play it once again.

I followed it up with the Get Out Of My Head and Bitterness combo, in that order. If it's a new gig I'll do it the other way round but I'm no stranger to Katies! Also, because I play them at every gig I do, I've practiced them to the point where they'll very rarely go wrong now, and Mitch who was on before me loved Bitterness so that went down very well indeed, I was pleased with that!

One More Show was next, and I was hoping for a warmer response than I got the last time I'd played at Katies. It didn't go down badly, but my better songs seem to be remembered for their quirks and attitudes, and apart from the key change and the naughty words, One More Show doesn't have much of either. I'll keep playing it for a while and if I find an audience that likes it then great, but it won't surprise me if I have to retire this one in the future.

Again for Amy I played Home for Summer by Feeder. It's funny, I heard this song for the first time five days after Jack's Legacy broke up. I've waxed lyrical many many times about how hard I took that, but this song is special to me because rather than the bitter, spiteful fury that I feel with most music that reminds me of my former band, this one actually mellows me out a little bit. The message seems to be that you did what you did, and however well it worked out, it's all over now... and what you've got left is significantly different to what you had when it all began. The relective lyrics will always strike a chord with me, and the title was suspiciously appropriate, given the subsequent vacation of Amy's student house. It seemed to go down very well, and I can't thank Katies enough for that!

Storm from the North is fast becoming a live favourite of mine, despite what the audience may think. It's made all the more interesting by the way I play it slightly differently each time, though I may settle on a 'best' way to play it in the future. Tonight it seemed to go down with passive indifference, but putting it ahead of the previous song might make playing a loud, aggressive one like this seem a little out of place. Always fun to play though!

A bit cheeky here where I asked how many songs I had left knowing it should only really have been one. Sam was good enough to let me play two though, the first of which was Girl's Names, which as I've said before I kind of feel obliged to play when I play Katies now. Not necessarily always a great move, but I played it quite well to polite applause so I can't complain!

I ended with We Will Survive, no surprises there but apart from Bitterness that's the chorus that everybody sings on their way home in a drunken mess. Actually I'm lying, that doesn't happen at all as far as I know. But it's a nice sing-along chorus that people can enjoy, energetic enough to feel like I mean it which is crucial at the end of a show, and for those reasons can certainly feel like the more memorable part of the show if I get it right! This time, I appeared to get it right, and I left the stage feeling confident that I'd done a good show.

Well done to Mitch who was on before me, and Josh who was on after, who also played very well!