Phil the landlord had liked our last appearance and
stretched his budget to book us in for New Year so we were keen to give a good
show. We arrived from about 6pm. Bit of trouble getting parked in the
yard, but we shuffled cars around until
we got sorted. It had been raining hard and
getting the gear in though the back we had to negotiate a big puddle which
inevitably led to wet foot. The 2
Chris's were largely set up by the time I got my gear in and although they had
left me a lot of room, Chris the bass was tight to his wall and forced to set
up in front of the Xmas tree angling the band a little. I only intended to use
one Bose so that was no problem, but I
had brought my Marshall acoustic amp thinking I might set that up for PA on
Chris's side to give a bit more monitoring over there. Clearly there was no
room and negotiating the puddle put me off going back to the car to get it anyway
- this decision would prove to haunt me later.
Set up went well and I had quite a bit of room to work in. It is a relatively small pub but it has been
made kind of open plan with a bit of a divide between the lounge and the
bar. This divide would work to block
some of the sound penetrating through to the bar which I thought would be a
good thing for taking drinks orders. I dished out some Xmas kazoos and, although we didn't use them, we sound checked
with a messy ska mix to try out: "A Message to You Rudy and One Step
Beyond" and immediately ran into
feedback with quite low PA volume. It
was weird, you could hear the mixer
feedback suppression kicking in and out as resonances changed. I set the whole PA gate a bit higher and the
graphic EQ down in the top end to try and get a bit more control, but it was not brilliant - as you spoke you'd
still get a little burst of toppy feedback then it would be suppressed into a
muddy sound. Chris the drum's mic was
particularly badly affected. It wasn't a
great environment to work on the sound and in the end I made the judgement it
would be good enough for this small venue. I got the musak going. Despite fixing the little Creative players, I
was so impressed with the sound from the iPhone, I had set up the first half of our musak
playlist on Spotify and set that to run - nice sound! Being local and a long night I was gonna pace
myself with drink and treat myself to a limit of 3 pints instead of my usual 2
and I was soon quenching my thirst.
Line 6 Mixer on top of Behringer DEQ Graphic
Trudy had arrived with Chris the drum and about 8pm Jacqui
and Bridget arrived, having walked down the hill between rain showers. I had set out 3 sets of 45 to take us to
11:30 pm with breaks and then we would do an hour last set. The pub was still filling up at 8:30 so we
took to the stage slowly and got underway with Flingel Bunt at about
8:40pm. I actually had a time warp
moment and was all set to start with "Foot Tapper" till I looked
round and remembered where I was,
stopped counting and left it to Chris to start "Flingel Bunt". The guitar was a bit low in the mix initially
because I had brought down the overall PA level to cope with feedback, but I soon had that sorted and we played the
next few songs in reasonably good order with added banter about how some
'strange' parts of East Anglia celebrate Old Years Night rather than New Years
Eve but I was having to sing and announce quite loud to cut through. I had peppered the running order with 'other
/ reserve' songs to gain playing time.
The first departure from norm was to put Chris the bass on the spot to
do his vocal debut with a Ringo version of "Act Naturally". We had rehearsed it a few times and he was up
for it. I thought we played it pretty
well for a first time out, hanging back
on guitar a little to allow his vocal to cut through. Like the Beatles I worked a harmony vocal in
over most of it and he got a good reception from relatives, friends and some locals for this debut. By and large the crowd was a bit younger that
we were used to, but we had a good turnout
of supporters who led the response. An off the cuff "Folsom Prison"
and improvised "Thats All Right Mama" went so well I quipped to the
band we should 'do more numbers we don't play!'
At the end of set 1 Jacqui reported good balance with the band coming
across as experienced at playing together.
A report filtering through from Phil the landlord was mixed: the band is
good but vocals could do with being louder.
I fiddled a bit more with the PA but couldn't get much more without
feedback - the Bose was well placed out of line with all the mics so it must have
been some peculiar reflections and the lowish ceiling at the gig that causes
the problem. Can't rebuild the place so we downed another beer and took off for
set 2.
The pub had filled up but there was a bit of floor space in front of us for a handful of dancers so, as we opened with "Apache", I did venture out front. Mainly to have a listen but also did a bit of a 'walk' while I was there. The bass and drum sound was good but the guitar was a bit less bright than normal (due to the PA adjustments). We got a good round of applause for it and I brightened the guitar on my return to play the follow up "Do You Wanna Dance". Then we played through to 10:15 with a mainly 60's vibe that went down quite well. We took another break and Phil came over to ask me to make an announcement about the bar arrangements - the bar would shut for 15 minutes from 11:50 so folks would need to get their New Year drinks in by 11:45. No problem I said. He reiterated that the vocals needed to come up a bit but did acknowledge that it was only in the bar they were having trouble hearing announcements etc. Mind you there were a lot of people in there so It would be difficult to penetrate even if we could get more power on.
I had added "Honky Tonk Women" as the opener because
we had played it well 'off the cuff' at the previous gig. Jacqui signalled guitar needed to come up as
we got underway and I had to take a bit of license with the words 'cos I was
distracted fiddling with the sound - but we played it well. After a few more rock n roll songs I felt I
was starting to flag a bit and we took on "American Trilogy" before
the voice started to fade. I thought we
did a good job of this and were rewarded with a lot of pub sing-a-long and a
great response as we finished. Skipping "Get Back and Don't Stop" to
keep to time, we finished with the sequence:
"Yellow River, Hot
Love, Amarillo" and then the "Wonder of You". This went the best yet, even the low pitch
vocal ending worked well and we got a good round of applause for it. Chris the bass came over in the break and
said he could hardly hear the PA. He checked with family sitting out front and
they said it was fine, so it seemed more
of a monitoring issue. This is where I
regretted not having brought the Marshall in.
We could have set it up somewhere on his side of the pub to reinforce
the PA and monitoring sound, but now the
pub was full and it would be too much disruption to start faffing around at
this late stage.
