So there I was minding my own business when Sam put out a call to arms for everybody he knows to come down to the Robin 2 once again for his open mic night. Well, I can't turn down an offer like that...
I got four songs this time, rather than three, so I began with Get Out Of My Head. This didn't go too badly at all, I made one daft mistake with the chords playing Em when it should have been E, but if that's the worst thing I did all gig then I'm not doing too badly at all. The rest of it was note perfect, and I'm beginning to appreciate the value of this song as a 'warm-up' piece, if I haven't been playing any substantial amount of guitar all day it's useful to play this one before all the fast strumming of my other songs kick in.
Sam had earlier told me that he'd compiled a CD of songs that he'd recorded from the sessions he'd done, and that the song he'd used from my session was Storm from the North, so naturally I felt compelled to play it! One of the regulars from the Woodman who hadn't seen me for a while said that it was the first time he'd actually been able to listen to the lyrics, and that he thought it was really good and that was the best he'd ever seen me. Well, as far as compliments go, that's about as good as it gets, so thanks! I do enjoy playing that one actually, the different verse structures makes it a bit different from my usual songs and feels less like I'm going through the motions. Impossible to think that about a song when you write it, but I think I struck gold with that one!
Then I had a go at Because The Night by Patti Smith, preceded by an explaination to having to drop £800 on reparing my car over the last few weeks which was loosely relevant to Bruce Springsteen, who sings about cars, and also did a version of Because The Night so it's a long way round but I did move in the direction of relevance in the end. I'm playing this a lot better these days, though I still have to concentrate. It's another of the songs I do that's popular but not covered all that often, so when people hear it they think 'Wow, I haven't heard this for ages!' and if they grew up with that style of music - which in many cases they did - then so much the better. This one's a keeper!
I ended of course with Bitterness, expecting and in fact fully intending to break my G-string along the way, much to the amusement of the crowd. It's always the G string for some reason. What's actually happening is that the brass winding around the string is coming off at around about the second fret of my guitar. Any day now... The string survived, and I put the ever-increasing amount of venom into that song to make the required amount of impact.
All in all, I think I did quite well here! A really good night and I enjoyed it, tired though I was!
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