“I’m really sorry guys, I can’t make it” reads
the email from Ant, bass player and part of the vocal quintet who make up Helen
and The Neighbourhood Dogs - shortly to make our second appearance, at Ipswich
Music Day, the largest free festival in the UK with an estimated forty thousand
folks’ footfall expected over the course of the day. The rain is teeming down
and social media reflects gloomily on the prospects for the afternoon. La
Mulley, Mr Wendell, Turny Winn and I have gathered at Kirk Towers to have a
quick run through the set in advance of our performance but complications and
prevarication mean that we’re essentially just biding time until one of us can
make a decision about what to do next. Helen takes another look out of the
window and goes to put a jumper on. “I won’t feel the benefit otherwise” she
explains. Wendell and I confer on appropriate headgear. “Not that one” he says.
“Too Maverick”.
By the time we’ve loaded up into Tony’s people
carrier for the short journey into town the sun has emerged from behind the
clouds and Helen has taken off her scarf. The Grapevine Stage is a tented
arena in front of the historic Christchurch Mansion and having based our hopes
of a good attendance for our sophomore set on the weather reports which
predicted showers at around four o’clock we are instead greeted by a stream of
people escaping the stifling heat and humidity within, lured by the big stages
and the open blue skies across the rest of the park. We announce our arrival to
the appropriate authorities, unpack, and fall upon the free water backstage.
A quick line check and we’re good to go. The
prospect of there being a bass player in the audience who knows our set and has
rehearsed the appropriate harmonies seems remote but we enquire anyway. In the
absence of volunteers we embark on our first song. Everyone comes in at the
right, same time, and Helen is in fine, strong voice. Wendell steps up to
contribute to the chorus and then veers away from the microphone. He looks over
his shoulder, concerned. “I can’t pitch!” he hisses. As we will confirm later
in conversation with Ray out of The Black Feathers, rehearsing acoustically in
a nice, warm, woody environment is a whole different ball game to that of
approaching a microphone which will amplify and project your sounds before
feeding back the results through wires and boxes on the stage (if you’re
lucky). Wendell and I are a long way from the Picturehouse days when we used to
rock up at a pub, plug everything in, grab a drink from the bar and then
nonchalantly kick into The Bends with
nary a second thought.
We manage to recover the measure of singing
into microphones before too long though, and by the time we are half way
through the set everyone is palpably more relaxed about proceedings and we are
actually starting to enjoy ourselves. Judging by the reception the songs are
getting, so are the audience and one feeds continually off the other until at
set’s close we are buzzing. Snappers have taken the opportunity throughout the
set to capture various moments (mainly involving our photogenic frontwoman, to
be honest) for posterity and we are invited to pose in front of the sponsors’
backdrop for a souvenir of the day. “And maybe one without shades?” suggests
the photographer.
Over post-match cocktails back at the ranch later
that evening I receive a text from Helen It contains a picture of Ant's hospital wristband. “He really was ill” she writes.
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