ALL DONE AND DUSTED!!

Well, that was the week that was!

The session at Canalside (got to be careful with the spelling on that!) last Wednesday was excellent fun! It was a little warm with 7 people squashed into a space that was approximately the size of 3 shoeboxes, but that just added to the enjoyment (fortunately, most of us had washed beforehand!). Matt managed to get back from London in good time, and Paul managed to get back from Sheffield - with about 8 minutes to spare!

We had rehearsed 6 songs that we thought might be OK to do "acoustically" - you will all know that that is not something we are too familiar with, so finding songs to do "quietly" was a challenge in itself (Andy was allowed to bring his amp, which helped)! We had no idea what the format would be, and were convinced we'd be done and in the pub by 9 o'clock, leaving little Matt Isaacs to do whatever else he felt like doing! However, we were there for the whole 2 hours, and Matt did a great job of "bigging" us up - he tried to interview us a bit (foolish man expecting us to be serious!), played some requests for us, and spread our tunes out throughout the whole programme. For the record, we did "Brick in the Wall", "The Chain", "Chasing Cars", "Pretty Vegas", "Fire" and "Say You Love Me" which (with the exception of Paul losing his "top end" during Pretty Vegas) all seemed to go down pretty well, and the people who heard it said it was really good! All we are waiting for now is a recording, which Matt has promised, and then maybe we can even post it on here or YouTube or Facebook or wherever. Some photos for you to look at to see how much we enjoyed the space (it may look like it, but nobody was sitting on anyone else's knee!)!

No sooner had we drawn breath after that, than we were down at Macc Town on Saturday for the big Brewery Band Bash - which was another event where no-one seemed too sure of what was going to happen! We turned, as requested, for a sound check around 6:30, to find that the sound men had only just been allowed in after the football match (Macc lost by the way!). The next surprise was finding that what was originally a 4 band gig had morphed into a FIVE band gig - all of whom had to play between 8 and 12pm! However, the Dunkirk spirit really kicked in and, although the sound check was still going on when the first band was supposed to be playing, it all turned out rather well!

The running order was Old Yellow followed by a combined Chinese Marbles/Bleatles set, both of which were excellent, and got the crowd up and dancing really early. We went on at 10pm (about half an hour earlier than planned!), and Fil Hill kindly allowed us to extend our set to an hour (which meant we quickly had to put things that we had taken out back in!), so we rocked the Moss for all of that time, and it was a pretty hot and sweaty set, I can tell you. The Hot Bananas closed the evening with their unique quirky thing - God knows what those guys are on, but you wouldn't want to take too much of it!

Many thanks to Garry the Hat for putting this on, and to the fairly sizeable crowd that turned up - maybe there will be the opportunity to do something similar again sometime?

A couple of weeks rest for us now; next gig is a wedding on 5 December, and then we close our 2009 gig list with the Christmas Party night at Porters/Prince of Wales on Saturday 19 December - which should be a brilliant night (more of that in a week or so). If you check out the info on the right of the page, you will see that gigs are already coming in for 2010 (even had an enquiry about doing one next November!), so it doesn't look like there will be any slowing down any time soon!