Day 304

Saturday May 4

Oh damn, where to start? I’m kinda coming right up to date at the beginning here because it’s now the beginning of July 2024 and we’ve written nothing in here since April 30, meaning we missed the landmark Camden day of 300. The simplest catch-all reason for this is that for the better part of two months, life has just got in the way a little. Well, not a little at all. We’ve really been thrown right off any kind of track and have had to spend quite a lot of time dealing with things way outside of music and private enough that they really don’t belong in these pages. That may yet change, but for now we’ll keep all that where it is. But we’ve been essentially good and doing well through it all and continued to have nights out here and there, just nothing particularly to write about. Apart from the drama which we’re not. Yet. Sorry. During that time, musicwise we’ve mostly just made sure to at least keep going to the Ramshackle Collective on Tuesdays at the Ten To One bar in Tottenham, which has been our touchstone although one or two did get missed. When we first started doing this, we saw it as a gentle but solid way to get ourselves back in after another previous period of relative inactivity due to life getting in the way at that time as well. It then became a way to keep in touch with our music while everything else was falling out of touch. But apart from all that, it’s a great bar, Ramshackle is a great night which we really look forward to, and we’re just really connecting with the bar in general, a lot of the other acts that play there although we’ve not been writing much about that either, and Ant and Den in particular. That would be bar owner and Ramshackle organiser respectively. 

Also, when we first saw that Ramshackle could be a regular enough thing for us, we had a thought that it could help us stay in live performance shape while we tried to get back to the debut album which, yes, we’re aware, is dragging on a bit. But yeah. Even that plan got thrown for a whole other while. Thinking it was time to concentrate on recording also meant holding back on pursuing other venues, while remaining open to opportunities should they arise. All again to save Maja’s voice and energies so that she could concentrate on the album, while still getting the live work in to keep developing and maintaining our stage muscles, stamina and just general performance levels individually and collectively. So, relative inactivity and a massive chunk of Diary consisting of mostly just Tuesdays has been the overall result. Regarding that determination to continue to play live, in however limited a way, through all of this, I came across a great quote recently which I’m not getting quite right, but I am capturing the central point: If you rehearse a lot you’re practising rehearsing and so you get great at rehearsing. If you play live a lot you’re practising playing live and so you get great at playing live. 

Yes, we still do the rehearsing thing, especially in trying to introduce so many of the songs we have which have yet to make it to the stage. But rehearsal alone really doesn’t come close to what you get by regularly putting yourself on a stage and having to do your thing in front of an audience that needs to be entertained. 

All that said, we do have a really cool thing going on today as we’re heading off to our favourite Ten To One bar again to play a livestream on the Japanese Niconico platform. The first purpose of this is to do a full 45 minute rehearsal to see if we really can keep up the energy of our biggest smash set songs for that amount of time. This is something we’ve never attempted before and we have an imminent 45 minute show in here, for which we’re hoping to get the date confirmed today. So this is us doing our thing on stage, really going for it gig style, while taking the opportunity to livestream ourselves on stage in a venue, with the doors closed, so this is ours until opening sometime early afternoon.

This is just an enormous thing that Ant has allowed us to do. To come here, with the bar closed, to do this and really stretch out and perform on stage as though it’s for real. We’re lucky enough that we can rehearse pretty much properly at home, a real luxury for apartment living in London. But to really blast it out full throttle for this long? And bounce and hammer the floor and dance to the rhythms like you would in a real show? No. That really would be taking too much of a liberty. 

In all the time of The Diaries, we’ve played very few full sets, and for where we are, 45 minutes does constitute a full set. And those we have played, we didn’t yet have the full repertoire of up and at ‘em songs we have now so we did have opportunities to drop off the intensity. So this really is a test for us and an opportunity for us to see where we really are with our own gig stamina. Can we properly keep up our customary sprint for that long?

Answer: Yes we can. Damn this is a good workout and a truly great in-situation rehearsal. Even better, Den’s come along to the bar this morning. And with Ant having to be away until we’re almost done, she’s our sole live audience member for our first real go at playing this many big songs in the same set. We also manage an audience of around 60 to 70 online which really isn’t too bad either, especially as we’ve just up and done it and not put out any mention at all. Among those are one or two people who have seen previous livestreams, so returning spectators. Even better. And among the comments that come in – with Maja translating of course – is one saying that we should be playing The Toyko Dome, which is an actual stadium. I’m sure there’s a lot of politeness in that comment, but still. Oh, and that 60 to 70 figure. We also discover afterwards that our feed was glitching quite badly so that would have put a lot of people off. Understandably. It would certainly put me off. So without that, maybe we would have done even better regarding numbers.

After we’re all done, we have a chat with Ant and we confirm a date for our show here of Thursday June 6. It’s a full evening in which we also have to choose two acts to play before us. So yeah. Our first London headline show all booked and ready to go.

Some more may well be going up, but for now, here’s a look at one of the songs from the Japanese stream. Rock’n’Roll Tree.