Sunday, October 25, 2009

Some days, you eat the bear. 

It's difficult to know what to say when you finish a set and one of your previously sane and rational friends storms the (admittedly minor) length of the venue, vaults on to the stage, embraces every member of the band within armshot and exclaims "That was fucking awesome!". It seems only fair to express gratitude, especially if he's also just bought dinner for the entire band. After sober and censorious reflection, said chum was willing to repeat his critical appraisal this mornng over a pub breakfast and so I'm going to have to trust him on this one.

It was a necessarily short set, tucked in between an extraordinarily personable percussion-looping open-tuned virtuoso guitarist and one Melanie Dekker, a wonderful Canadian singer/songwriter blissfully untroubled by any prior interaction with the ugly stick, the whole thing being introduced by BBC Radio's Sue Marchant, delightfully both free of spirit and scat of ty. 

There was a minor set list adjustment prior to the show on the grounds that it was "the wrong room" for one of the songs, but if you can't indulge the whims and fancies of one of your trusted bandmates in a cellar full of pews, when can you? She was right, of course. It was a good set, a good gig, a good show - hell, the sound guy even congratulated me on one of my jokes, that's how good we were. 

You know that bit in movies featuring bands, where the caricature singer turns up at the stage door, throws on a guitar, strides centre stage and without a soundcheck counts the band in, wows the crowd, throws off his axe, gets the girl and rides off in to the sunset on a powerful motorcycle all within the space of one anthemic number? It was like that all the way through. On the application form you have to fill in whenever you want to form a band (there's a central registry and a government department and everything- I think one of the Miliband brothers is in charge of it at the moment) there's a section at the bottom where they ask why it is that you and your friends want to be in a band. After careful consideration, on mine I wrote "We could be heroes. Just for one day".

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