8/10/2011: The Brierly Hill Project at Stourbridge Cricket Club

I’d got started on this one through Hannah who I used to be in Perception with. The band may be gone, but the spirit still remains…

We began with Scars by Papa Roach, which we played quite well in spite of the fact that I was in mortal terror that Hannah would put some Dudley colloquialisms into the lyrics and give me the giggles. Thankfully this didn’t happen, and we played it very well. Hannah seems to regard this as her signature tune, and I think she could pick far worse songs than this.

We thought we were only going to get two songs for this one so we played another song we did in Perception; Because The Night by Patti Smith. I’m really starting to enjoy this one and it might find its way in to my set in the not too distant future. I think this was the best one we played in terms of accuracy, and there were plenty of people in the audience who knew the song. (And if you choose to interpret that remark as ‘Plenty of people in the audience old enough to remember when that song was released, well, that’s up to you I suppose.) It’s a good one!

And then we discovered we were allowed 3 songs after all, so we played the other one that we’d rehearsed, which was Love Me Tender, the Norah Jones version (or at least as near as I could get to that, having not really heard that or any version of the song enough times to feel justified in emulating it.) The song actually fits Hannah’s voice quite well and it sounded really good; I had a very positive feeling about our performance when we had finished it.

I had the same... not a problem, but a little niggle all the way through the show – Hannah was reading from her words on a music stand. I don’t know what that meant for her performance, but what it meant for me is that I kept looking over to it, and reading the version of the chords that Hannah had got written down, which if I’m honest weren’t all that accurate. So because of that I played the wrong chord a couple of times. But hey, if that’s the worst mistake I ever make at a gig I think I’ll have done quite well, and none of it spoiled the night; it was really good fun and I’m looking forward to the next one.