2006-10-28 The Finest Worksong

Well, last week was so hectic! We finally made it to a gig - firstly we played a gig at an open mic session and secondly at a Battle of the Bands competition.

At the Leederville Hotel, we seemed to wait forever! Our slot was meant to be at 10.30, but it was close to 11pm before we got on! We had to sit through some really good performers, and some absolutely dire ones too! It almost seemed like our worst nightmare when, at 10.30 a group finished, and the stage just kept filling up with more performers - one introduced each song at length, and was a bit drunk, and wailed into the mike! When he did a version on 'Jolene', that is when I just gave up worrying. We all had a bit of a laugh, but were absolutely knackered by the time we went on. Steve brought loads of people down, Duffy brought a couple of people, and me and Kyle brought no one. We were all a bit nervous when we got on, but by Am I Close, we felt great! Closedown my guitar went completely out of tune, and I ended up not even playing it, so Steve had to cover for both guitars, which was hard work.

The Battle of the Bands was much better, albeit a fairly slim crowd of 20-30 people, most of whom we knew, which Kyle and I invited. It was great to see people come and support us, such a shame the sound engineer did an absolutely crap job of miking everyone up - he completely forgot about my acoustic, turned the wrong mike of when it was giving us feeback, making the bass guitar overpower everything apart from vocals, and made the drums sound weak - and they were the good bits! Next time, we gotta do a proper sound check, and get someone to make sure our sound is right, otherwise it did not do us justice. People said Weapon would have been our best song if the sound had been good, but I though our timing of the songs was pretty good - just a shame about the drums! Again, we relaxed towards the end, and Am I Close did sounds pretty good. We got through on votes from the crowd, with the next round, the semi-finals, based on 70% judges and 30% crowd response.

A reasonable start, and we got this picture in the paper!