I had my first gig with a full band on Saturday night. We were playing ska covers for a 40th birthday party, so I guess I was quite lucky we had a captive audience who actually wanted to hear the songs we were playing.
We arrived at the venue (The Tunnels in Aberdeen - nice little place, you should check it out if you're ever up this way) about 3pm for our third and final practice session. Yes - third. We had terrible trouble finding a drummer, and we only got that sorted a couple of weeks before the gig. Not only that, but Rich moved from bass to guitar having not played it for years. Yes, I was bricking it.
Rehearsal went OK, but it was becoming clear that being recording perfect was out of the question, and I was still simplifying songs over dinner (!)
Anyway, we got back to the venue just in time to see the first band (who we borrowed the drummer from ;) ) play - they were really good, mostly originals and they did a Specials song which wasn't on our set - fortunate as they did a right good job of it.
Can't really tell you much about the gig. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of it head down looking at my fingerboard, but I did manage to look up/move around a bit during the songs I knew best. I did have some "cheat sheets" on a music stand just off to the side, which I perused feverishly while the singer was having some banter with the crowd in between songs.
I think it went well, a few fruity moments for sure but I blustered through it and it was over real quick in the end - one of the quickest hours of my life! The adrenaline certainly kicked in and I found that the songs I most worried about seemed to melt away.
We tried to play One Step Beyond as an encore, but we hadn't really practiced it and made a right pig's ear of it :) I was trying to play as per the recording (as I remembered it), but I'm not sure everyone else was. Or maybe I got it wrong too. Anyway, it was a jumble of sounds that vaguely resembled One Step Beyond, lots of people were dancing, maybe they were all pissed by then and didn't care.
I guess I was lucky to have a favourable crowd, a captive audience if you will for my first outing on the big stage. All in all, given the limited preparation time and the rapid transition from talking the talk to walking the walk I think I did quite well. Folk were up dancing, we got cheers, we got applause, we didn't get rotten vegetable matter.
Then I got drunk :)
 Toots And The Maytals, "Monkey Man" |
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