Friday night live

I'm sure you're all wanting to know how the gig went on Friday night. Pretty damn well!

The whole day managed to go without any major, or even relatviely minor, hitches. Chris and I picked up our drum kit from Soundhaus (which is one of the most stereotypically rock venues you can get - a dingy warehouse basement) and get it back to our venue without breaking any of the kit, or having any car troubles. After shooing off some studying students in the Research Club, we got everything set up and had a sound check. The amps, mikes and mixing desk all worked fine! With everything set out there was no denying that we were going to be performing a gig. We then had our final rehearsal at which we had our most intense practice yet. This left me feeling pretty knackered, but we were confident that we had all the songs at a decent level. Our last meal was a fish supper at the University Cafe (as recommended by the New York Times!), which has become a kind of unofficial band eatery. So we'd sound checked, we'd practiced, we'd eaten, all that was left was to actually perform.

We arrived at the venue about an hour and a half before we we due to start. We quickly got our gear set up again with everything still working. People started arriving at about 8.30pm and continued arriving! By 9.30pm we'd managed to pretty much packed out the room we were playing. It's true that the vast majority of these were our friends, and friends of friends, but it was still pretty encouraging for our first gig.

Things kicked off with the Look Up for Danger set. Once we'd got started a lot of the stresses and nerves went away. Ellie was belting out the vocals, and Chris, John and I were giving it our all. The first song wen't down really well, so from then on our confidence grew. Our version of Whole lotta love went down particularly well - for good reasons the drum solo was quite a bit shorter than the one in the original song. The Corpse Full of Bees set went down equally well, with one particular person was really loving our version of (Don't Fear) The Reaper!

The closest I've got to this sort of thing in the past is giving talks at conferences (if I discount when I was part of a group of children representing the UK in a singing competition in Indonesia when I was seven - yes that's true!) Performing in front of a crowd in a band is a whole lot more satisfying that giving a talk. It was all in all a really fun night - I'll be awaiting the audiences glowing reviews ;) I'm definitely looking foward to the next gig - we just need to put a few more song's in our repertiore.

[The less said about the after party the better ;)]