'This could be the last time' - until next time...

I found out on Friday morning if I'd managed to learn 'Livin On A Prayer' well enough when I joined Glee Club U.K. supremo Richard in his Bracknell recording studio to record the guitar parts. Richard spent a fair amount of time attempting to recreate the talkbox effect that's used on the guitar during the first half of the original recording (I didn't have one handy!) and did a very good job; I used my Relic Stratocaster as I needed a guitar with a tremelo arm for one section of the song (in case you're wondering, it's the 'divebomb' effect halfway through the second verse - I very rarely use one, to the extent that when I came to practice that part I couldn't find it!) and even though I say so myself, it all turned out rather well. Mind you I wouldn't be writing about it here if I'd played terribly...

Saturday evening I went to The Old Fox in Ickenham to see Awaken, and a very odd evening it was too - when I arrived they were halfway through their first set, with a young man slumped unconscious in his seat near the front door and beery builder blokes alternating between ignoring the music completely and slapping each other around the face roaring 'you're my best mate you are' before dancing with each other. The band played a good set but not a great one, seeming a bit out of sorts and committing a setlist faux pas of monumental proportions when they switched from playing material like 'Brown Sugar' and 'I Saw Her Standing There' to a version of 'I Predict A Riot' that cleared the dancefloor in seconds, an incident that somehow summed the evening up for me. So down was I when I got home that I had to watch the Henry Rollins interview from the 'Punk: Attitude' DVD to get my spirits back up - it worked, but that's punk rock for you...

...which brings me to The Price. Malcolm called me mid-afternoon to say that he was halfway to the venue and had forgotten his microphones - as he put it during the show, 'it wouldn't be a Price gig if something didn't go wrong' - and there were the almost inevitable 'sorry I can't make it' messages from various people throughout the day but from the opening of 'Memory' (we hadn't played that one this century!) to the last unrehearsed encores of 'Too Many People' and 'Turning Japanese' it was one of the best and most enjoyable reunion shows that we've done. We were bit scrappy here and there (we had just one 3 hour rehearsal for a 1 1/2 hour show! Mind you that doesn't explain my appallingly out of tune solo at the end of 'The Price You Pay'...) but overall we played well, even including a new song (so new that it doesn't have a title yet!) put together in about 20 minutes from an idea that Malcolm bought in to the rehearsal - you could argue that we'd have used our limited time better by learning the old songs properly, but The Price always did things like that! Plenty of old faces gave us a rousing reception, and it was great to see a few people that hadn't been along for ages; sadly with band members ever more committed to other things it seems that events like this will get more and more difficult to organize which is a shame - still there's always the Sunday nearest to East's birthday next year... talking of whom, I left the man himself outside a kebab shop bemoaning the fact that they weren't serving anymore. I think he'd been drinking...

And The Flying Squad return to show business this coming Saturday (26th) when we support the ever-wondrous Eddie And The Hot Rods at Tropic At Ruislip - we're rehearsing at 4 in the afternoon and on at 8 in the evening!!

Dubai? Us?

As I sit here typing this, my latest missive to the masses (I wish!) I'm very aware that I shouldn't be sitting here at all. This is not an admission that I've finally realised that I could be doing something more worthwhile with my time than ranting in Cyberspace (as if!?!) but that I shouldn't actually be here - I should be in Dubai... Pete, Mike and myself (along with a band made up of local musicians) were booked to play at a festival in said far-off land this coming Friday, but sometime on Monday afternoon Pete finally pulled the plug on the whole increasingly dubious affair. It had been shaky for a while, with arrangements changing all the time and all too ominously - first we were flying out on Wednesday, rehearsing Thursday, gigging on Friday then home on Saturday, then we were leaving on Tuesday to rehearse Wednesday with a possible extra show on Thursday although no flight details were available for either of the options. Suspicions were further raised when Pete Googled our hotel and found that it wasn't due to open for several weeks; I spoke to him Friday and we had a 'cut-off point is Monday' discussion, although with hindsight I think cut-off point had already come and gone - when we spoke Monday afternoon he sounded at best jaded and at worst furious with the whole thing. I've never been there so speaking personally I'd like to have gone, not least to see what the place is like - you hear so many conflicting reports don't you? - but strange as it may sound I don't feel too bad about it not happening. Maybe it's a case of 'what you never had, you never miss'?

Still there was a bit of time away from home last week - having not had anything approaching a holiday in what feels like ages myself and the long-suffering Shirley managed a few days away in Dorset, and very enjoyable it was too - we managed a return visit to The Town Mill Cheesemonger and bought far too much of their wares (always a good thing methinks!) as well as visiting Monkey World which we'd not managed to get to on previous holidays. Excellent. It stayed dry for most of our time there although the last day saw rain like something out of The Bible; that doesn't necessarily explain how I ended up at the excellent Nevada Music in Portsmouth (it was 'kind-of-on-the-way-home', honest!) trying out Blackstar amplifiers so I'll attempt an explanation another time, although it might have something to do with last month's 'rock classics rehearsal'...

Saturday night it was time for something a bit different - appearing with Awaken at The Old Fox in Ickenham. Pete (guitar) and Martin (vocals) played a few songs with The Upper Cut at our Uxbridge gig back in August, and they invited your humble narrator to reciprocate by joining them alongside Ken (bass) and Russell (drums) for 'a couple of numbers' at this show. Never being one to turn down a chance to show off with a guitar in public I of course said yes, and I'm glad that I did since it turned out to be a highly enjoyable evening - I ended up playing rather more than a 'couple' of songs, including a few with a friend of theirs who they described as 'tiny Tina Turner' (guess who she sounded like?!?) and any number of songs with Martin at the helm. Great stuff. And I spent a fair bit of time talking to ex-Lurkers guitarist Pete Stride who I'd not seen for a while, not least about GLM - check out their latest song 'Chemical Landslide' in the Downloads section of their website - it's brilliant!

Sunday saw the first Sunday night gig at Tropic At Ruislip since, well the last one that I played there (!) back in June; that one was with The Flying Squad (it's about time they reappeared don't you think?!?) and this one featured The Ali Mac Band in the extended line-up that Ali refers to as The AMT Band. ('Ali-Mac-with-a-twist') They'd rehearsed in my absence while we were away and I'd done some work on my own with the songs while we were away - sometime in the course of our holiday I made what for me is the radical decision of playing slide guitar in open E tuning for some of the songs. I'm not sure this was the best decision that I've ever made as I don't think I did it particularly well (maybe a bit more practice is in order?!?) but it was a good gig with Ali in fine voice and the band playing well throughout. And it was good to be back at The Tropic - there are some great gigs coming up there, not least Pat McManus on the 17th of this month which I must do my best to get along to. And talking of gigs The CBB's are in Norwich next Thursday, I'm in Croydon with T.V. Smith next Friday, and The Upper Cut have their first gig for a while next Saturday in Bethnal Green so that's something to look forward to - but in the meantime we're here instead of there and as a result I've got no gigs this weekend. Bah!