To quote the Honda advert, "Isn't it nice when things just... work?"
I was opening the gig tonight and there was a very strong line-up with an appreciative audience; I felt just about the right amount of pressure to deliver the goods with this one. It might seem strange therefore that I started the gig with Believe, but there was a reason for it. I basically hadn't played guitar much at all that day and my hand wasn't warmed up; starting off with Bitterness or We Will Survive would have been a recipe for disaster and I knew it. I thought it better to start with a relatively sedate one for me, although that last chorus seems to soar and I was really feeling it tonight. I guess I haven't opened with that one before, or if I had then it hasn't been for a while, so there would have been less of a feeling of going through the motions than there may otherwise have been.
THEN I was ready to play Bitterness. I think I've got that song down to a fine art now, from the fast strums right down to the positioning of my mouth to the microphone for the quiet to loud bits. It was probably one of the more memorable moments of the set and I thoroughly enjoyed playing it.
Get Out Of My Head was next. This one is another one that I'm playing very well these days; I don't know if it went down quite as well as Bitterness - a lot of the guys in the audience were quite young - but the subtleties of that song make it a very enjoyable one to play. Thinking about it, it's also the only one I currently play that relies on a riff rather than a chord sequence to carry the verse, not often in acoustic music does that happen. Not music that I listen to anyway. It's something I'd quite like to develop, and I'm well on my way to doing so with another song that's in the pipeline which hopefully people will hear soon.
Next I tried a song by the Noisettes; not sure what it's called, it's either Never Forget You or Always Remember Me, but I play it in the 82s and I really like it. It actually went down really well, a lot of the guys in the audience recognised the song and they can't have heard it live often; I don't hear it played by many - if any - of my contemporaries. There's some bits that need ironing out, namely the strumming pattern in the second verse; I could feel myself rushing it but I couldn't do anything about it without stopping, but it didn't spoil what I would otherwise consider to be quite a convincing delivery.
For some reason whenever I do a 7-song gig these days, Storm From The North is always the 5th one. Actually I know exactly what the reason is; it's the mid-set epic and therefore needs to be in the middle of the set. I don't know if that's becoming a little predictable now that I've been playing it for a few months, and especially at Katies where I play a lot, but I honestly can't think of a better place to put it. I played it well, I think, and the audience is familiar enough not to clap too soon!
I was torn then between playing Girls Names and Chapter One. I went with Girl's Names because it's faster; I was having a really good gig by now and I wanted to keep up the pace. I'm struggling a lot less with the 12/8 bit; fewer are the times when I mess up the chords and I'm used to singing it now to the point where I can make it sound good (if you haven't heard the song, that part is quite low and I find it difficult to project my voice.) It went down as well as it ever does, it's familiar at Katies so I do play it quite a bit.
I wrapped it up with We Will Survive, and I seem to be getting far more precise with this one as well. It's come from all this gigging, I'm sure; sometimes it's the only time I play guitar these days but as the stakes are always higher on the stage than they are in my bedroom, no matter how good the gig is, I'm under a lot of pressure to get it right when I do play it. That kind of experience have really put some of these songs at another level which after all this time I am very pleased with! And fortunately so were my audience.
Well, blowing my own trumpet a little bit here but I think I set the bar quite high for what was to follow! I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards telling me how much they enjoyed the show which is always a nice feeling. I wouldn't normally do this on this blog, but big well done to Georgia and Will, who followed me, and Sam, who wrapped up the gig very well indeed with a sing-along chorus. It really was a great night and a fine reminder of why I play live.
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