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Jul. 15th, 2005 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaI like the Six String. It doesn't matter how much of a bloody shambles a gig is, people have fun anyway.
It all started to go wrong on the train. Brain in unthinking autopilot to Acton rehearsals; when the train was about to leave Clapham Junction it occurred to me that I was supposed to have changed at East Croydon. Correcting for that (including explaining to the nice conductor on the East Grinstead service why I had the wrong ticket) got me into New Cross half an hour late. I then found that the bar had run out of all the ale, all the cider, and most of the lager and was pretty much down to Fosters or Guinness. They were even out of lime.
In the soundcheck, the headliner's bassist broke a string. When we soundchecked, I had to shift the whole drumkit away from the wall because it had been set up by a shortarse. The gig was actually going okay until Learning Curve, the high point of the set at the minute, when Jodie's old guitar shed a string. It's not been used much apart from gigs of late because she has a shiny new Fender Jaguar, but it was only after she'd bought it she found out why someone invented the Jagstang - a Jaguar with a replacment bridge that *doesn't* keep dropping screws and spontaneously exploding. Woo. It would have looked dead professional, the way we all carried on regardless, if she hadn't started singing in tune with the bust guitar and not the intact bass. Borrowing someone else's guitar for the rest of the set was probably the distraction that lead to other mistakes.. but the audience were all in a splendid mood, despite the beer shortage and sweltering heat, and cheered us along anyway.
The headliners would like to be The Futureheads, JSBX, a fifties surf band, and something a little artier than all that. Song titles like Was My Husband A Doctor Or Patient Here?, busy off-kilter drums, lots of twangy bass and shrill harmonies. The very British aspect well suited by the name, Shock Defeat, gets a surprising sideways kick in the last song, though. A bespectacled, unremarkable, engineering student kind of guitarist in a plaid shirt breaks out into a rap that may be good enough not to be embarrasing. Take a closer look at the plaid shirt; it's shot through with shiny silver thread. In short, there's more going on here than you'd think and it's kind of good.
(Just to carry on the disaster theme, of course, the bassist's amp blew so they had to put him straight through the PA, after much faffing to work out if it was the lead or bass or what, only that kept dropping him too. And the bass pedal on the kit fell to bits in the second song, which took long enough to repair that the rest of the band broke into a cover of Summer Lovin'. Yur. But apart from all that, it was a great night, honest.)
On the way home, a flat on London Road had the windows wide open and the stereo on loud. At half one in the morning with no traffic I could hear the Rob Zombie cover of Supernaut for most of the way to Preston Circus. Splendid.
It all started to go wrong on the train. Brain in unthinking autopilot to Acton rehearsals; when the train was about to leave Clapham Junction it occurred to me that I was supposed to have changed at East Croydon. Correcting for that (including explaining to the nice conductor on the East Grinstead service why I had the wrong ticket) got me into New Cross half an hour late. I then found that the bar had run out of all the ale, all the cider, and most of the lager and was pretty much down to Fosters or Guinness. They were even out of lime.
In the soundcheck, the headliner's bassist broke a string. When we soundchecked, I had to shift the whole drumkit away from the wall because it had been set up by a shortarse. The gig was actually going okay until Learning Curve, the high point of the set at the minute, when Jodie's old guitar shed a string. It's not been used much apart from gigs of late because she has a shiny new Fender Jaguar, but it was only after she'd bought it she found out why someone invented the Jagstang - a Jaguar with a replacment bridge that *doesn't* keep dropping screws and spontaneously exploding. Woo. It would have looked dead professional, the way we all carried on regardless, if she hadn't started singing in tune with the bust guitar and not the intact bass. Borrowing someone else's guitar for the rest of the set was probably the distraction that lead to other mistakes.. but the audience were all in a splendid mood, despite the beer shortage and sweltering heat, and cheered us along anyway.
The headliners would like to be The Futureheads, JSBX, a fifties surf band, and something a little artier than all that. Song titles like Was My Husband A Doctor Or Patient Here?, busy off-kilter drums, lots of twangy bass and shrill harmonies. The very British aspect well suited by the name, Shock Defeat, gets a surprising sideways kick in the last song, though. A bespectacled, unremarkable, engineering student kind of guitarist in a plaid shirt breaks out into a rap that may be good enough not to be embarrasing. Take a closer look at the plaid shirt; it's shot through with shiny silver thread. In short, there's more going on here than you'd think and it's kind of good.
(Just to carry on the disaster theme, of course, the bassist's amp blew so they had to put him straight through the PA, after much faffing to work out if it was the lead or bass or what, only that kept dropping him too. And the bass pedal on the kit fell to bits in the second song, which took long enough to repair that the rest of the band broke into a cover of Summer Lovin'. Yur. But apart from all that, it was a great night, honest.)
On the way home, a flat on London Road had the windows wide open and the stereo on loud. At half one in the morning with no traffic I could hear the Rob Zombie cover of Supernaut for most of the way to Preston Circus. Splendid.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-15 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 08:26 pm (UTC)Just to say: tell your guitarist to get a Mustang bridge - it fits into the same place as the Jag one and is slightly less prone to exploding. I also know a shop in London that will lock the bridge so it doesn't "float" (something I've also done) if she's interested.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-18 11:09 pm (UTC)