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:
- Reduce the volume; there's no need to blow the roof off with this sort of music,
- Top and tail the songs so that we know where all the endings are without having to look at each other,
- 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!
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