Day 176
Sunday December 31
OK. Reconnect time. Again. Let’s start with New Years Eve, because it is. Our names are down for the private, regulars only night at The Marquis, one of our most regular central bars. A recap about this place which is just by Trafalgar Square. I played there every month for over three years with Dan in The Insiders and me and Maja have played there a few times now and been quite a few more. When we walk in tonight, it’s already packed and there’s a live cover duo playing. Our friends Nathan and Tony. They all but stop playing to announce over the microphone, ‘Oh look who it is.’ As entrances go for New Years, not bad.
After that, what an amazing night and just the best way to bring in 2024.
Day 190
Sunday January 14
The last time we played anything at all was back towards the end of September when we did the Japanese live stream. Damn. Just did a count and disbelieved it so much I had to do a recount. That’s 16 weeks ago. Essentially four full months. Longer than we had to wait to begin when we first arrived in London. As for actual live performances, you’re going back to August 6 and Edinburgh, a further seven weeks. So as of today, you’re looking at 22 weeks since we last played live. Oh damn. Even between Ireland and London, the times between our last and first performances were December 19 and March 9 respectively. Just 11 weeks. Oh dear. Exactly half the time of where we are now.
OK. But we’re on it. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know we’re getting back to this now. It begins today.
Without any forethought, as morning turns to afternoon, we’re just like, let’s get back into it with a Youtube livestream. We have no expectations of audience. Nothing is being announced. Hell, we’ve only just announced it to ourselves. Really, we’re seeing it as a reconnect rehearsal, but with songs we’re very familiar with so we should still be in sight of a performance so yeah, put it out, and why not live? And even if just one person shows up, we still have a new video.
Well first, we totally double our expectations. Two people show up. Which is actually a good thing because our performance is so far below where we thought we would be at. We weren’t expecting fully stellar, but we thought this material would be familiar enough that we’d be able to slot right back into it, but no. You still need to build that stuff up again before going public and this has been a bit of a wake up call. We were planning on tentatively starting our hustle again this Tuesday. That ain’t happening now. Time to strip ourselves back and get ourselves back in the rehearsal room so to speak. And privately.
Day 191
Monday January 15
Matt gets in touch to ask how the stream went and we’re honest about it. He was one of the two so now we just have to find out who the other person was. He reckons we’re being a bit hard on ourselves. Apparently, from viewer perspective it really wasn’t that bad. OK. Maybe a lot of it was in our heads, but we were making mistakes we wouldn’t expect to make and that meant that the overall assuredness just wasn’t there so we never really felt relaxed into it. Which made it feel all, wrong. From which you can project a whole memory of performance. Maybe that’s it, I don’t know. Also, with so much live experience, we do automatically just plough through when things go wrong so mistakes and slips can very quickly get swallowed up and they’re gone before the audience even knew they were there. But we felt it and when you’re assuredness isn’t totally clicking, that translates to actual physical performance which gets held back, and you know something just isn’t right because it simply doesn’t feel right. But yeah, stuff like that might not get picked up on at all by a casual observer, or even by a musician as experienced as Matt. We tell him we’re holding back on live just a little while we knock off the rust and he says we should come and play a few songs at his show this Friday. He has a duo with our mutual friend Herman, who actually made the invitation to us through Matt. They have a semi regular gig at a bar in Leyton, east London. This sounds like a perfect place to soft relaunch ourselves. Yep. We’ll be there. Thankyou very much. It also gives us a target to aim at.
We were already on it, but having a gig to be ready for in a few days’ time means we won’t slacken off with a ‘we’ll be ready when we’re ready’ attitude. We have to be ready. We have a deadline. Even before Matt had got in touch, we had done our first lunchtime rehearsal. That happened earlier today when we gently reconnected with the material.
Day 192
Tuesday January 19
I won’t itemise each rehearsal but it’s worth commenting on our thoughts today. Which is that we’re aiming at having six songs totally consolidated and ready to choose from for Friday. We really expect to play two, possibly one more, or three then possibly one more. Beyond those six we’re consolidating for now, once we get past the weekend and into more rehearsal, we expect a lot of songs to come back quite quickly. Then there are a whole bunch of new songs, some of which we’ve already messed about with, and others that we know quite well but just haven’t fully played too much together yet. That lot can wait. Now is not the time to be road testing them or throwing them out live when we barely know them ourselves. Stick to what we know and stick to what we know works.
Day 195
Friday January 19
Here we go. Back into it. At The Coach And Horses, Leyton High Street, east London. This is a few stops south on the tube’s Northern Line towards the centre to Tottenham Court Road station, then change to travel out east on the Central Line to Leyton. The plan for tonight is for Matt and Herman to play two sets of around 45 minutes each with us fitting more or less into the break.
I actually saw them, and in this venue, just a few days before Christmas. Not only do they play a very crowd pleasing covers set but they are technically absolutely fantastic with great vocal harmonies. A brilliant cover duo with two acoustic guitars. To be expected really. Matt is a total pro on guitar with a huge amount of experience fronting bands as a guitarist/ vocalist while Herman is a virtuoso violinist and multi-instrumentalist. I’d never seen him play guitar until last week, but it seemed like the most natural thing in the world and I never questioned it. When I played with them both in a jazz band way way back, they would often burst into spontaneous Beatles songs. Just vocally, but harmonising was right there and effortless. We never explored that territory in our project. It was talked about but we just never got round to it. But here they are now. Fully formed and sounding every bit as amazing as I thought they would.
This is what we settle into as showtime arrives at 8pm and they take to the stage and do their thing. The bar is nicely busy and the guys get steadily applauded throughout the set. It’s a slightly strange set up though. The stage is just floor space really, on floor level. That’s usual enough at these types of gigs. What’s strange is that it’s kind of off to the side so the performers are sideways facing to most of the bar to their left. To their right is the restaurant area but there’s a wall between that and the stage part, and they’re a little apart from things anyway. The sound is fantastic though. One of the best I’ve seen in a small to mid size cover venue with speakers everywhere carrying the show to all corners. Although they are at the side, they do still have an audience to play to as many of their friends have come giving them their own private audience of eight people. Quite handy moral support.
Then it’s our turn. We’re given two songs. Great. That totally works. We plug in our wireless and now we’re not bound by the stage at all. We’re just all over this place and just a few bars into our opener, I Like You (Better When You’re Naked), it’s clear we have them. People are rocking, watching, smiling. And yes, cheering through the stops and restarts. Straight away we’re in to Make Me Shine, which is just a huge sounding song with a massive singalong chanted chorus. Out beyond left stage is the big expanse of the main bar and I sweep right through into that while Maja commands centre stage, most notably the large double table immediately to the left side of the stage. We finish that song to massive cheers, then we have one more song to play. We’d planned for this and don’t hesitate as we plunge straight into relative newie Talk About The Weather, which comes with an extended a capella section which this bar just fully embraces. We finish this one to a huge whooping reception too and feel we have made this night ours. Sorry lads but, special guests or not, we were always going to do what we do. There was to be no holding back. But you know what? Hold back with original songs in front of a chilled Friday night cover night crowd and you might as well stay held back. The only way you even get through this without being ignored is to front it, throw every hat you have into the ring then storm it like you own it. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. I’ve got to say, I felt a little edgy coming here tonight. We were putting ourselves on the line again. In London and in front of a coverband crowd baying for the hits. Play what we know. And after last Sunday. This really was get back on the horse territory. In the wild wild east. Tame the horse, ride it and own it. And we have.
As Matt and Herman thank us and start up their show again, we get down to the business of going round and handing out cards and beer mats. Hands reach out to take them and the cheers keep pouring in. As well as money. We are not hustling here and there is no hat. But that doesn’t stop someone from insisting on giving Maja a tenner. In the middle of all this, one guy tells us he feels he’s just had a night out on our three songs alone. While another says it was like experiencing an hour of live music in ten minutes.
Yes. This is about as good a return to live performance as we could possibly have hoped for and the unsuspecting and unexpecting crowd has completely embraced us. Matt and Herman, thankyou.
Day 196
Saturday January 20
This next statement might seem bizarre, but I ran it by Maja before writing it here. After initially being thrown by it, she stopped to think and then was like, ‘You know what, I agree.’
What we did last night feels like it was our first real London show; up till last night, practically everything we’d done in London had been either open mic or open mic related. Apart from maybe one show, The Reliance in Shoreditch. On the cold Now Hustle night we played, there was barely anyone there and three of them were almost performatively hostile to us. Although to be fair, we did impress the main man Mario and indeed could possibly, possibly have built something with him if he hadn’t been going on holiday almost immediately after. And you may remember that one person did come and talk to us and was massively encouraging and enthusiastic. But if anything, the most we can call that is a successful live audition that we didn’t quite follow through on, mostly due to the move to Camden.
Oh. OK. If you follow us closely and your memory is really sharp, The White Hart. But please let’s not include that one as we never stood a chance of being able to call that a show; so quiet did we have to be in a massively packed place, and so disinterested was practically the whole bar that anyone was even playing.
So yeah. Me and Maja are in agreement on this one so you have to be too. Last night was our first real London show.
