This was a turn-up for the books that came to me in the middle of the day, and gave me another chance to flex my singing muscles in front of what turned out to be quite a substantial crowd at Katies tonight!
I began with something I hadn't done in a while and started the show with the Get Out Of My Head and Bitterness combo. I'd forgotten how well those two songs played together worked! The former was as good as it needed to be and my performances of Bitterness are getting ever-more visceral; all in all not a bad start.
Feeling a need for a change in mood but not wanting to reduce the pace by very much, I then went ahead and played A Little Respect. I definitely clocked some people singing along to it this time! Funny how one well-chosen 80s classic can become such an intergral part of my set-list. Nitpicking now, but the Bflat bit with the guitar solo in there could use a little tidying up, it's rare that I don't hit the A string with that so either need to play it as a barre chord or be very careful where I'm strumming.
Naturally I was exhausted by then, so I kept the opening refrain of Storm from the North going for as long as I could get away with. It's funny, thinking about it now, how the classic set seems to be coming back around on itself and I'm putting this song back in the middle once again. There was some definite attetion going through the whole show, so all I had to do was keep it up...
I more or less managed it with A Lonely Night, which is new enough not to have become part of the 'classic' set yet. However I did stop concentrating in the second verse and sang half of the first by mistake; stupid and I shouldn't have let it happen but I doubt anybody would notice. As far as I knew, it was only Dave and Sam who had heard it before!
I then played my second cover of the evening, My Girl by whoever wrote it (I'm most familiar with the Otis Redding version, believe it or not...) This turned out to be rather a poor choice of song, as rather than remain engaged, most of the people in the room disappeared out the back for a cigarrette. So I probably won't play it at Katies again, though I won't write it off comepletely; I'm sure in the right spirit and in front of the right audience it would go down as well as you would expect a song of that calibre!
I finished off, of course, with We Will Survive. Again with the classic intro ressurected! It felt really good to be playing the old set again, which is saying something because it became quite stagant towards the middle of last year.
I remember when I was in Crashpoint, and we'd lost Jay out the band, and Emma for some reason was trying to slow the whole pace of the music down to something far slower and more methodical than the raw fury we'd been making our staple sound up to that point. I reckon that if we'd ever have done We Will Survive in the band, (not entirely implausible, as I wrote it just as the band was coming together,) Emma would have gone for the slower version. It's nice to do something a bit different every now and then - but I'm not forgetting what my songs originally sounded like! Funnily enough, the fact that I rarely play to the same audience twice these days makes me think that doing slight variations in my own songs is more for my entertainment as much as anybody elses, but it worked!
It's probably also the first time I've played a full gig at Katies for, like, ever and not played Girl's Names. Probably just as well. I don't want to play a song like that just because I feel compelled to. In fact that would probably be conducive to me playing something completely different!
Might be checking out a new open night tomorrow, see you soon!
Matt
No comments:
Post a Comment