Sunday, March 07, 2010

'This is the coastal town, that they forgot to close down...'

...and a very good rehearsal it was too, at the excellent Ivy Arch Studios cunningly concealed in the back streets of Worthing. With all those involved in good spirits we ploughed through an inordinate amount of material - did we really write all those songs?!?- much of which tested even the most well stocked memory banks of the band members. Malcolm bought along sandwiches for everyone (good man!) and East filmed most of our efforts, some of which has already found it's way onto the modestly-named ETV alongside various archive clips which have come to light over the past few weeks as we've been looking for old recordings to re-learn some of the songs from. Even though I say so myself we weren't a bad little band in those far-off days - let's hope we are these days as well!

You'll be able to find out in less than 2 weeks time; our website has all the details, we're intending to play a different set on each night (hence us trying to remember all those songs - we never did make things easy for ourselves!) so you'll have to come to both shows to see everything! Excellent!

Last night saw The Chicago Blues Brothers return to The Pizza Express in Maidstone for the first time this year. It's always a good gig for us, and this one was no exception being one of the more boisterous (for want of a better word!) shows we've done for quite a while. Myself and the long-suffering Shirley arrive just as everything was more-or-less set up and ready to go - Ian's in for Richard on saxophone and Pete's in the hat'n'glasses instead of Mike but other than that everybody is where they should be. I was just setting up my gear when Kris Dollimore arrived - we'd arranged to meet as I had a DVD of his Uxbridge gig from just before Christmas as well as some Dr. Feelgood footage for him (click here and here for clips from the shows.) Sadly he couldn't stay for our show 'though I don't mind admitting that it would have been very strange for me to play guitar in front of him rather than the other way round!
After a quick soundcheck it was time for a pizza (of course!) before getting ready for an 8 o'clock kick-off. It's our second sold out Saturday in a row, and with 2 birthday parties in the house there's a lively atmosphere from the word go - by halfway though our second set there's more dancing than eating going on and we encore to much mayhem all round. After the show Pete asks Squirrel what was going on in 'My Girl' - his reply of 'well, I played something different once so I thought I'd do it again so that it sounded deliberate' could almost have applied to my antics during 'Rawhide' when I completely messed up the opening guitar line, then made the same mistake when it came around again. Mind you nobody said anything to me so perhaps I shouldn't be mentioning it here? And at least I didn't cut my hand this time...

Must go - I've got 30-odd Price songs to learn. Or is that re-learn?

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