Well, that was some night!!
Returning to the Macclesfield Beer Festival stage for the first time since 2013, was always going to set the old butterflies going - would we remember the notes/words, would the crowd still be on our side, would we even survive the 90 minute set at our advanced ages?? So many questions.......
As it turned out, we had little, if anything, to worry about; the whole evening went like clockwork - our old friend and ex-bandmate Matt Johnson was there with his sound engineer partner, Rob, to set us up and sound check at 5:30 (which was a first, in our experience - normally we're sound checking when the punters are coming through the tent flaps!). Monkey Harris set us up well, with a great opening set, and we went on stage bang on time. We'd pulled our start time forward by 15 minutes, so that the plug didn't get pulled at 11:30 just as we were building to the proverbial climax, and the first chords were struck at just after 9:45pm. From then on, it was non-stop good time music!!
The crowd were crammed in at the front from the start and, by the time we got to the "business end" of the set, and the strains of "Teenage Kicks", "I Predict A Riot" and "Fire" were ringing round the old marquee, it was just bedlam!! We finished bang on time at 11:30 (having even had time for a quick encore of "Johnny B Goode"), and it was fantastic to hear people wanting even more!
We've had some great feedback since Friday, and we're incredibly grateful to everyone who came and had such a great time. We'll be spending some time in a darkened room to recover - except for Mon, who has gone off to Canada for 3 weeks to celebrate his birthday (now that's what I call a celebration!).
We hope to see everyone again soon, and will keep you posted on where and when we're playing. In the meantime, here's some photos from Friday, courtesy of Simon Brown from Travelling Simon Photography. More examples of Simon's work can be found on his webpage (www.travellingsimon.com/) or his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1492868234145232.1073741977.164711743627561&type=3)
