So this is by far the busiest I have ever been with gigging. I count it 10 in 11 days, and to be perfectly honest blogging up a track-by-track review of all of them would be far more work than it would be fun, even if I could remember what we played! So what I'm going to do instead is give a brief run-down of what they were, where they were, and how it all went down...
26/8/2011
It all started on what I can only describe as a soggy afternoon at the Pulse Festival, just North of Coven, with Natasha and the 82s. This was a relatively short set for us, only 10 songs. I was suffering from having not long changed my guitar strings, and it kept going out of tune in the weeks running up to it and had only just began to settle; not helped by the fact that I hit the thing rather hard! The highlights of the set were definitely Word Up and Sound of the Underground, where I pump up the gain and really let loose on the guitar. The mistakes were there and we knew it, but it was our first gig so we weren't going to be too hard on ourselves.
27/8/2011
The following day I was at The Malt Shovel in Great Barr, playing a Summer Jam festival organised by the Kiesters Brown who I'd met in Stafford a few months before. Lots of summer festivals! There was a distinctly 'British' feel to this one, i.e. it was pouring it down with rain. The festival also suffered from a few pull-outs, so there was quite a bit of time between bands which meant I didn't get to see them all and unfortunately I missed the Kiesters. My set went OK, not the most inspired I've ever felt while playing a gig but my song order was by then becoming quite predictable. That being said, it's the best feeling in the world to see your own lyrics being sung back to you while you're playing, and as a lot of the guys with the Kiesters had seen the video of me that we did in Stafford Uni, a lot of the guys knew my songs already! On the downside, I've really got to stop tapping my foot while I'm doing A Little Respect. It hurts after a while!
28/8/2011
After band practice with Aki Maera we went down to Katies to play their summer festival, and despite it happening in the upstairs bar because the downstairs area was flooded, I actually had a really good time with this one. I almost reversed my setlist, instead opening with Girl's Names (I can play it well enough now to put on a far more convincing performance) and enjoyed it a lot more for all that. Also Dale recorded me singing Wide Open Space, and Amy recorded me singing Girl's Names, so there might be a couple of you-tube videos and a duet with Dale in the runnings before too long...
31/8/2011
That was supposed to be it until Friday but it turns out Emma wanted to book me for the Sunflower Lounge again due to another pull-out. I remember feeling very morose for this one because my mouth was in searing pain, and I adjusted my setlist to put all my miserable songs in there. It actually worked quite well because there was some semblance of consistency in my set, and it was nice to play Dear Mr Manager again; I don't often play it but it fit the bill for tonight. I asked the audience at the end whether they wanted a fast song or a slow song to finish off, somebody said 'fast' and I brought it to a close with Bitterness, a good decision because it always goes down well, Mitch liked it and so did the other guy who played that night!
2/9/2011
Another 82s gig, this one was at the Sneyd Inn and was pretty much our first full gig. It went OK, we were playing the songs better than we did the Friday before. There were booking agents there who were giving us some very useful feedback, for which I am grateful, but there are other things to sort out. For a start, if Rich and Sue are going to do a Name That Tune thing before we start the song, it would really help if they tell me and Jarv first, because if your own band doesn't know what you're playing it doesn't bode well for anybody else. But there were a few people there who really enjoyed what we were doing so if nothing else, I know we're playing the right songs very well. Hopefully there'll be a keyboard player pretty soon as well...
3/9/2011
A quick note about Open Mic UK: I was scheduled to audition, and if I pretend that the reason I didn't was for anything other than I didn't get up early enough I'd just be kidding myself. But, given that I had a slot booked at Codfest for 3.20pm, I'd parked my car at completely the wrong end of the NEC and I didn't really owe those guys anything (quite the other way round in fact, given that I had to pay to enter,) I ended up walking out.
So, Codfest. Easily the best of the summer festivals I played for all these two weeks. Sam and his friends had really done a good job getting it all sorted out, and the festival was the most enjoyable day I'd had for a long long time. My set was good; no one is going to go mental for an acoustic set but it was easily the largest number of people I'd ever played to in one gig, and the amount of them who came up to me afterwards and said they'd really enjoyed it was astounding; something I'm really not used to on that scale! I also did a couple of slots at the 'Busk Stop,' singing Disney songs of all things and getting other people up to sing with me, which was a very nice feeling indeed. At the end of the day it had all been one massive party; all the artists were good, everyone knew each other and got on reasonably well so there was no trouble, it was a whole music scene inside one field and one very large group of people that appreciated it. Long may it continue, and well done to everybody involved.
4/9/2011
This gig I was supporting Gwyn Ashton at The Foundry in Dudley. Nice to do a home-town show at last! For me at least there was a feeling of What Goes Around Comes Around, as Gwyn had jammed on bass with Jack's Legacy years ago at The Broadway while they were waiting for me to turn up, and five years later I'm supporting him. I'm also seeing a lot of Emma in In Between Seas, which is hardly surprising as we know the same promoters. It was a good gig all in all, I was probably the least technically able of all the guitarists who played that night but none of them deliver their songs with quite as much venom as I do with Bitterness, once I'd played that the gig was mine for the 20 minutes or so I had left. Only drawback really was the fact that I'd shouted myself hoarse at Codfest the previous day, and it came across in my singing. Oh, and by the way, if you get a chance to go and see Gwyn Ashton play, for God's sake do it. He is incredible.
5/9/2011
I wrapped it up with a trip to Katies with the intention of doing Wide Open Space with Dale. He wasn't there, but it's surprising how much of the Katies crowd I have a friendly familiarity with now. All things considered singing Man That You Fear by Marilyn Manson wasn't one of my better moves as it really hurt my throat, but I also gave them Bitterness and We Will Survive, and the guys I spoke to afterwards reckon it sounded pretty good.
So there you have it. Busy busy, but let's be honest, this is what I wanted all along, being able to gig every night. It'll probably slow down a bit now the summer is behind us, but hey, I'll keep doing gigs every week, and there's talk of a recording coming up soon as well so we'll see how that goes, it's about time I got a CD out!
Showing posts with label Natasha. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Natasha. Show all posts
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Thursday, 14 July 2011
11/7/2011 Natasha and the 82's at Boney Hay Working Men's Club
Just realised I haven't blogged anything about my new band at all...
OK Natasha and the 82's came about as an idea from a former Crashpoint member Richard Shepherd. He's known Natasha, a popular pop/soul/motown singer, for some time, and wanted to try putting a band together for her to perform with. The 82's are therefore Rich on the bass guitar and musical director, myself on guitar and Jarvo on the drums. Over the last couple of months we've been rehearsing a lot of pop songs over the last few decades. The songs we play and the instrumentation of the band allows me to inject our own style into the covers - we can't accurately produce a horn sound with bass, drums and guitar, but we can play the relevant parts as guitar solos instead, or turn up the effects on the bass to fill out the sound if need be. Last Monday we tried them on a stage and in front of a modest audience to see what we sound like on a stage (which is invariably significantly different from how it sounds in a studio, and we know it!)
Being in the band has improved my guitar playing a lot, for a couple of reasons: First, I've had to learn a hell of a lot of songs very quickly, which always does wonders for your playing. And also, this is the first band I've been in for a long time where the members are better than me. Rich and Jarvo are far better at bass and drums respectively than I am at playing guitar, which means I've got to deal with them differently and up my game in order to keep up with them. I'm saying this mainly by comparison to Cj from Aki Maera - granted, he's better on the drums than I will ever be, but there's not much we can take from each other any more. Not being funny, but we were in Crashpoint together for two and a half years; by the time it broke up either we'd learned everything we're going to learn from each other or we'd learned nothing. Playing in the band with Jarvo, who is quite possibly the best drummer I've ever worked with, and Rich, who's one of the better bass players and also has a very clear idea of what he wants his band to sound like, has forced me to be far more disciplined in my playing.
In spite of all this, I didn't honestly feel up to the 'mock gig' we did last Monday. Granted, I practice a lot less than I should, but the fact that we've not been a band for very long at all means that I don't think we're quite there yet with band cohesion. We're still looking at each other far too often for cues, and sometimes in my case chords if I don't know the song too well. The term 'set-list' was severely misapplied to what eventually happened, which was basically we played the songs in whatever order we felt like. There were some mistakes with setting up the sound, which it took some feedback from the audience to rectify.
That being said, kudos to Rich for setting up an environment where we could get away with it, and we did manage to play most of the songs we'd planned to do without stopping and wondering how it goes. (In actual fact this only happened once as I tried to remember how to do Ain't Nobody!) We did receive some very positive feedback from people who were genuinely enjoying themselves as we played. The point of tonight, I feel, was to see how it sounded live and come up with some development points for the band. Probably the most significant ones are:
OK Natasha and the 82's came about as an idea from a former Crashpoint member Richard Shepherd. He's known Natasha, a popular pop/soul/motown singer, for some time, and wanted to try putting a band together for her to perform with. The 82's are therefore Rich on the bass guitar and musical director, myself on guitar and Jarvo on the drums. Over the last couple of months we've been rehearsing a lot of pop songs over the last few decades. The songs we play and the instrumentation of the band allows me to inject our own style into the covers - we can't accurately produce a horn sound with bass, drums and guitar, but we can play the relevant parts as guitar solos instead, or turn up the effects on the bass to fill out the sound if need be. Last Monday we tried them on a stage and in front of a modest audience to see what we sound like on a stage (which is invariably significantly different from how it sounds in a studio, and we know it!)
Being in the band has improved my guitar playing a lot, for a couple of reasons: First, I've had to learn a hell of a lot of songs very quickly, which always does wonders for your playing. And also, this is the first band I've been in for a long time where the members are better than me. Rich and Jarvo are far better at bass and drums respectively than I am at playing guitar, which means I've got to deal with them differently and up my game in order to keep up with them. I'm saying this mainly by comparison to Cj from Aki Maera - granted, he's better on the drums than I will ever be, but there's not much we can take from each other any more. Not being funny, but we were in Crashpoint together for two and a half years; by the time it broke up either we'd learned everything we're going to learn from each other or we'd learned nothing. Playing in the band with Jarvo, who is quite possibly the best drummer I've ever worked with, and Rich, who's one of the better bass players and also has a very clear idea of what he wants his band to sound like, has forced me to be far more disciplined in my playing.
In spite of all this, I didn't honestly feel up to the 'mock gig' we did last Monday. Granted, I practice a lot less than I should, but the fact that we've not been a band for very long at all means that I don't think we're quite there yet with band cohesion. We're still looking at each other far too often for cues, and sometimes in my case chords if I don't know the song too well. The term 'set-list' was severely misapplied to what eventually happened, which was basically we played the songs in whatever order we felt like. There were some mistakes with setting up the sound, which it took some feedback from the audience to rectify.
That being said, kudos to Rich for setting up an environment where we could get away with it, and we did manage to play most of the songs we'd planned to do without stopping and wondering how it goes. (In actual fact this only happened once as I tried to remember how to do Ain't Nobody!) We did receive some very positive feedback from people who were genuinely enjoying themselves as we played. The point of tonight, I feel, was to see how it sounded live and come up with some development points for the band. Probably the most significant ones are:
- Reduce the volume; there's no need to blow the roof off with this sort of music,
- Top and tail the songs so that we know where all the endings are without having to look at each other,
- Come up with a workable set list that will stand the test of a few gigs.
That last one I think will come with gigging experience as much as anything else, because we won't know what works and what doesn't until we've done it; that's part of the reason I keep this blog. But it does tend to get changed around a lot and that needs to calm down before we hit the road properly. We are what we are - a developing band that's still finding it's feet; we're not quite there yet but I'm sure we'll get there soon.
I'll keep you posted!
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