Day 293

Tuesday April 23

Mark:

I’m going to blast through this Tuesday night as we have our now regular outing to The Ramshackle Collective night at the Ten To One Cocktail bar in Tottenham. It’s amazing we’ve found a regular place to play and have been getting such brilliant receptions. That continues tonight although we begin a little slower than usual, opting for Sand Bang to get things started. Then How You Rock’n’Roll and I Like You (Better When You’re Naked). Now we’re up for this Thursday with Gabriel’s thing.

Day 295

Thursday April 25

Mark:

We have no idea what we’re walking into tonight but oh, does it turn into an amazing experience. Quite a small bar in what appears to be a high end restaurant place specialising in desserts by day and a bar by night. Gabriel’s got a few of the performers to come down from the Ramshackle Collective night, a decent extra cast of performers, and not a bad audience turnout. This is in Finsbury Park, north London, just one bus away from us, which is also the number 29, one of the most regular buses in London so not far off from getting a taxi really.

Gabriel’s welcomes as people arrive are massively effusive and it’s really nice to see that we know a few people here, especially as we’ve arrived decently early to be able to  settle in and hang out. And he very actively encourages mingling, saying that one of the aims of the evening should be that we all leave with a new friend. I think we do, as me and Maja mingle and chat with different people all night. You really can just go up to someone or sit down at a table and bang, you’re chatting like friends. We’re getting a similar feeling with Ten To One actually, and Ant’s event with Tom in Walthamstowe a few weeks ago had a similarly inclusive vibe. Seriously, more bars should be like this.

Gabriel  comperes with his own fantastically high energy, also performing a little seemingly off the cuff and frenetic stand-up between each act. And he puts us on very much towards the end when atmosphere levels in here are about at their highest. When it comes to our turn, he addresses the audience and says, ‘Guys, you have no idea what you’re about to experience.’ And then our name. Yes, a little bemusement from quite a few people, but we’re ready. Poised, Maja calls out, ‘Go!’ With that, we smash into Make Me Shine and the place just takes off. Oh, they’re into this. Even the guys behind the bar are joining in. Yes, they all seem to be thinking. Gabriel was right. They were not ready for this. When the song finishes, the eruption of cheers and applause is so loud I almost want to cover my ears. Just enormous. And we keep it right up there as we follow with Talk About The Weather, then I Like You (Better When You’re Naked) which people are still singing long after we’ve finished. What a fantastic night. 

And here’s the whole thing from that night.

Day 300

Tuesday April 30

Tonight’s a little strange for us. It’s The Ramshackle Collective again and we’re feeling like it’s time to try new things. A new song to start tonight, or at least a new song for this venue. Maybe we’re complacent, maybe we’re tired, maybe we’re just a little off. But a few too many loose moments leave us feeling not completely the best about it all afterwards. But Ant says it’s his favourite show of ours he’s seen. And similarly we get a great reaction from Rick when he sees the whole video. One of the reasons for this is the freshness and originality of our entrance. We tell Den how we’re going to start so that we can have the stage prepped and ready. With that we go to the back of the room and wait for our introduction. When it comes, we slowly walk out and through the room, getting a clap going and then beginning with the A capella Bang Bang, a song we wrote the night before our first gig at The Trap, and then performed the next day at our first gig in The Trap. It’s just kind of fallen off our radar a bit, but Maja suggested today that we bring it back, and so we do.

We’re deep in and it’s all gone off as well as we could possibly have wished with everyone joining in the clapping and the two of us making our way down the bar and singing it out. Then I get to the stage, pick up the guitar, and bang out a rhythmic snare type sound to take things up just that tiny level more. The idea here is that we finish the last chorus then I immediately bash out the intro to the next song, The Cat which has a big frenetic guitar intro. Except we finish the last chorus and I somehow manage to forget that we’ve already done the last verse, so I pull us back into that again. It’s semi trainwreck territory as Maja realises what’s going on and hesitatingly comes in again. With us going through this last verse, it also means we now have to do another chorus to re-outro the thing. In all, a very messy end to what had been such a promising beginning. 

If I can plead any mitigation it could be that I just had too many other things to remember. Once on the stage, first I had to put the capo on the guitar so that it was ready for the first song. Yes I could have put it on earlier, but that would have meant a capo just clamped to immobile strings for up to half an hour or maybe more. Not ideal. But no problem to put it on just after arriving on stage. Except I also have to plug the wireless in because the guitar won’t sit on the stand with the transmitter plugged in. To do this I have to go to the mixing desk, check where the faders are from the soundcheck we did earlier so that we could make our big entrance. So I’ve checked where the faders are, I’ve then taken them to zero, plugged the wireless in and put the faders back where they were. All this while continuing to sing at the same time. Maybe it’s no surprise I forgot we’d already done the last verse. It’s just also possible that this bubble so soon in sets the tone for the rest of the performance. Either making us uneasy, shaking the confidence a little, or doing that thing where you make a mistake and dwell on it, or make a mistake and continue to try to make up for it, so get tense, or too conscious or something and, self fulfilling prophesies and all that, another mistake or two drops in and so on and all that. It’s not really that bad, but enough that we notice and the flow just might not be quite what we would want. 

But there’s a huge but after all this. Ant is emphatic afterwards that this has been our best show yet in his place. Then Rick sees the video afterwards and without any prompting, says that this is his favourite performance of ours. And he’s seen everything. Everywhere. Wow. OK. What do we know?

There’s one more mildly strange thing that happens. We’d entered with Bang Bang, taking that as one of our three songs. So we get up, play The Cat after that, Followed by Rock’n’Roll Tree. We finish Rock’n’Roll Tree and we’re kind of starting to set our stuff down. But no-one in the venue moves. There’s no call for an encore or anything, but everyone’s just looking at us in some kind of anticipation like we’re not done. This really feels like an encore without being an encore. Or maybe Bang Bang was just seen as our way of getting to the stage and so what we’ve done only counts as two songs. I have no idea. We hadn’t planned for this but that’s OK. Into this temporary corridor of uncertainty a call comes out for I Like You (Better When You’re Naked). Well, what else can we do? If you’re privileged enough to have a song requested, there’s only one thing you can do. Here we go.

We do get video of all this, but so far we haven’t put any of it up. Only private so that it’s there for us to show people maybe, which is how Rick saw it. He knows us well, knows our songs, is a very experienced performer and writer himself so knows what he’s watching and how to listen to and watch things properly. So that’s all fine. But this one for public consumption? Not so sure. As we’ve seen, the performances are off with at least one big mistake and clear stage confusion – not good at all – and also with the way we made our entrance, we tried to film the angle down the bar as we came in, and then Maja tried to move the camera angle to the stage as she reached it, but some objects on the table got in the way and she was concentrating on singing and looking at the camera image and stage, and with a microphone in one hand, only had one hand free as it was. And of course very limited time because this was supposed to be an instant operation. So that fiddling is going on and then the framing of the stage isn’t all that good either as a result. So yeah. Probably won’t be putting this one up. But, from what we gather, the experience of the show in the room was really good. The best yet, as we heard from Ant. That can be the case at times with live performances. There are even cases of famous live albums from major bands being received really quite negatively from people who know what they’re talking about. The line of thought here often goes that it’s possible the experience in the room at the time was so good that the decision makers decided to put that show out; the experience from the stage, and the experience of those in the room can be amazing, you want to share it with the world, then the cold hard reality of hearing the recording can be something quite different. It happens. It’s also why so many of the live albums you hear are fixed after the performance in the studio, just as you would patch in and fix a mistake in an actual studio recording. Yep. For big big productions which are intended as live albums, all the instruments are tracked as though in an album recording, and then individually fixed afterwards. So if you’re in a band, the next time someone says something like, ‘Can’t you rock out and play or sing without mistakes? XXX band/ musician/ vocalist does it on their live albums/videos, go listen.’ Well guess what. XXX band/ musician/ vocalist didn’t. It just sounds like they did. Well of course sometimes they probably did to be fair, but you know where I’m coming from. But no, of course this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all practice or rehearse to minimise live mistakes. I guess it just means we should be a little kinder to ourselves and others when they do happen.