Post Mortem of a Gig, and deliberations on New Ink

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So, I played my first gig in over two years on Friday evening, and now everyone wants to know how it went. So here you have it, my breakdown of the event… :

Upon arrival, I was struck by two things, a) how small the venue was (a capacity of 80), and b) how laid back everyone seemed to be. I assumed that the latter was caused by my own apprehension at the approaching performance, but it turns out it was actually just everyone being very relaxed about everything. Even during sound check when both my acoustic pickups, and my electro-acoustic guitar decided that they didn’t want to work, there was a very palpable air of ‘Oh well’. The headline act lent me one of their guitars which seemed to be working, and away we went (upon reflection, the problem seems to have been caused by my passive pickups, and a lack of phantom power on the channels of the mixer. But enough tech jargon!)

I only had six songs prepared (although I actually ended up playing seven), which filled the thirty-minutes that I was aiming to be on stage for. It only just filled it, but it did. The set list was as follows:

• New Song
• Sinking
• Dead Men’s Shoes
• Coronary
• Leaving on a Jetplane
• See It Through

Obviously ‘Leaving on a Jetplane’ is a cover of the amazing John Denver song, an  dedicated that to my darlin’ Aimee, even though she couldn’t be there to see it. As it was, I ended up playing a seventh song, before ‘See It Through’, as Goon had suggested I might have the time. He was right, and I actually needed an extra song, since there had been significantly smaller gaps between songs than I’d expected. So I played a slowed-down version of the Oasis track ‘Wonderwall’, which is something that I haven’t played on stage in a long, long time!

All the tracks were very well received, and I performed much better than I thought I would, in spite of a few little hiccups – I got some cos ’round the wrong way during the last chorus of ‘Wonderwall’, and missed out the first half of the last verse in ‘Leaving…’, but apparently I covered them well enough that nobody noticed – even Goon and Larter, who have seen me play, and played alongside me for years.

Des the promoter, was chuffed with my performance, and has offered to book me again during the summer, which I was delighted to hear, and overall I think it was a great first step back on the road to becoming a superstar!

Oh, and Goon recorded he whole gig on his camcorder, so I’ll be posting highlights of the gig in a future blog!

Now, onto the next topic for consideration… Tattoos!

My birthday is approaching (29h May), and I want to get a new tattoo, I think. However, I’m having a little trouble deciding what to get. Here’s what I’ve already got:

For those of you wondering, it’s an Imperial Aquila, from Warhammer 40,000, and it’s on my left forearm.

So far I’ve toyed with getting something like ‘Live Forever’, or ‘Rock and Roll’ in small lettering around my left nipple (a la Pete and Carl from the Libertines, with their ‘Libertines’ tats), and also with getting the quote “Only the insane have strength enough to prosper. On those who prosper may truly judge what is sane“, which is also taken from Warhammer 40,000. Or perhaps a purity seal:

I don’t know… damn, it took me two bloody years to decide what I wanted last time – I hope it doesn’t take me as long this time!

TTFN

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Filed under Gigs, Life

Tags: aquilla, Friday, Gig, ink, John Denver, purity seal, song, Tattoo, Tin Soldier