Firstly, a massive thankyou to everybody who lent us their support last night, we had enormous fun playing, we made some new friends and we made a lot of people dance! The Greater Betika is now seven strong again with the arrival of Martin, so the stage at Consortium was pretty crowded and the ad-hoc percussion section (the "Specials" as they've become known) that assembled had to create a sort of orchestra / mosh pit at the foot of the stage. We got off to an inauspicious start when our first attempt at "Bob Hope" descended into chaos in the first few seconds and had to be aborted, but second time around it went off without a hitch, which was pretty amazing as we'd only played it at one rehearsal beforehand. It was really good to be opening a set with a song other than "Jeremy Bentham", which we've played ay every single gig for the past twelve months and I'm getting a bit sick of. The rest of the set was mostly uptempo stuff from the first two Betikassettes (Martin has breathed (or blown?) new life into "Dormitor" with his horn part). We also did "Volkespiotr" (another set staple maybe due for a rest?), "Thunderstorm" which dates right back to "Your soul against the weekend" and is ironically probably the best thing in the set, "Girlshaped" which we've just recorded a killer version of, and "Love, let me not hunger", which is another new addition to the set, and our token effort at playing anything slow or quiet. As owners of "Heads smashed in..." will know, we've got a sizeable collection of slow, quiet songs, but I don't think they really work very well as part of a live set alongside the louder, faster songs. It always seemed to kill our momentum when we slipped "Let these things forget themselves" into the set throughout last year, especially once we'd learnt the secret of making people dance. (To be honest, I don't know what we did to make them start dancing, they just did, and for that I will be eternally grateful). I think that if we're going to play some of the downtempo stuff we're going to have to come up with a completely different set and present it in a different way, possibly seated and wearing cardigans and serious expressions on our faces.
The last couple of shows we've done have really brought it home to me that we're really only ever as good as the sum of the people who come to see us. If you saw us last night please come again!
When we returned from the gig to Betika Towers last night we listened to John Coltrane and drank cup-a-soups (could we get any more rock and roll?), and I played Chris a track from my 22-track collection of offcuts (see previous post), which he reckoned sounded like "the history of dance music in reverse". You can download it HERE to see if you can work out what he meant. The tune dates from 2000 or 2001, doesn't have a title and features some "rustic" keyboard playing on my part. If you can think of a suitable name for it, mail me. Also newly available for download is a quicktime version of the SK5 film "Utility Soul Shambles", the huge file size and poor picture quality of which I apologise for in advance. Enjoy, or don't.
Dave
