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| The Old Crown, with one of the I think 20 people I know called Dave sticking his head round the corner. |
I had a couple of new gigs: The first was at The Old Crown
in Digbeth. I don’t know what it is about playing in Birmingham, or maybe it
was because I had some friends coming who hadn’t seen me before, but it made me
feel like the stakes were slightly higher that night. I pulled out all the
stops and I think I played very well, I certainly made enough of an impression
for a re-booking in June. I did take one piece of advice from one of the
friends who had come to see me: I’d played Yesterday Went Too Soon by Feeder,
because Feeder are the best band in the world and everybody should listen to
them. My friend told me that I was really struggling to hit the high notes on
that one, and I had to admit she was right. Since then, I’ve played it with the
capo on the second fret rather than the third, and it does feel better. (By the
way, I know it’s actually on the fifth fret with the guitar tuned down to D,
but as it the capo makes the tuning irrelevant anyway I decided long ago that I
couldn’t be arsed to re-tune.)
The other one was The Fox and Anchor in Coven. After driving
straight past it and checking my phone for the location, I found it to be a pleasant
and friendly place to play, and it does food as well. I wasn’t feeling my best
that night but I was glad I was able to come out and perform as it always puts
me in a good mood when I do well at a gig. I didn’t do anything I hadn’t done
before – it was only arranged that afternoon – but I enjoyed it and it was a
good ending to what was for me not a very good weekend.
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| If we're going to go out, it might as well be to a Hen party. Wait... |
No Questions Asked played what will almost certainly be our
last gig at The New Wellington in Brierley Hill, with Rich Sadler on vocals, guitar
and bass. It was a good night, we played well and had a really good time. I
think I timed my view from the stage picture well, as at one point we were
joined by a hen party. Another song later and they’d all have disappeared! I’m
still technically with the band but all we’re doing at the moment is a jam
night on the last Tuesday of every month. Fred, Luke and Dave are keeping busy
with various other projects, and Rich is playing in his band The Rollers.
It’s not very often that The Fakes do anything that I’ll
shout about on this blog, but I’m actually quite liking the way the band is
developing at the moment. There are certain songs that we would like to do, but
because of the limits of the instruments and the capability of the band, we can’t
actually do them anything like how they sound on the record. For example, we
went through several Kasabian songs before we started doing Fire, and that
quickly became one of our favourite songs to play. I play the keyboard melodies
on my guitar using as many effects as possible, and we capture the essence of
the song while injecting it with the attitude of the band. Given that many
covers bands won’t touch Kasabian because they haven’t got a keyboard player, I
think we can count that as an achievement.
This time, we’ve managed to re-imagine The Chain by
Fleetwood Mac. This didn’t start out too well, and I added the peculiar tuning
and finger-picking lick at the start to the ever-growing list of things I can’t
be arsed with. But when the rest of the band went out for a cigarette, I tried
it again using what I thought was a Rage Against The Machine-style single-note
riff, but Steve reckons sounds more bluesey than anything else. This worked,
and gave the song a new lease of life. We’re still working through the backing
vocals, but it’s done the band a lot of favours, as we’re working through a lot
more new songs now than we have done for years. We might not always be able to
replicate the records, but we now have the confidence to work around it. Let’s
hope we get to play them live soon!
I’ve got a few things coming up next month including depping
on the bass for The Revisited Covers Band, and playing a show with my old
friend Ellie Hawthorne. Always looking forward to it!
