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We played a showcase gig for the Larmer Tree festival a couple of days ago at o'Neill's. The night had been set up by Conrad and Paul from Solid Air with the aim of getting a couple of other bands (d'Urberville and Penny Come Quick) and ourselves to play in front of the people who run the Larmer Tree and hopefully impress them enough to get a place on the bill. It sounds a bit like a Battle of the Bands, and it felt like one too, the sense of cameraderie that normally exists between bands sharing a bill didn't seem so strong. There was a faint whiff of competitiveness in the air, though that may just have been me! Whether there was any need for this I don't know, it may well be that all three bands have made it onto the festival line-up.
I personally had an absolute disaster of a gig. For starters I've had a cold all week, which seemed to start in my voicebox and spread out to my lungs and sinuses as the gig drew nearer. I spent a couple of days effectively mute, hoping that rest might keep my voice at least functional for the night, and was drinking cough medicine from the bottle before and after we played. I sort of managed to keep it together singing-wise- being congested in the nose and ears makes pitching things properly an even greater trial than normal, and I wasn't sure if any of the high notes would come out. As it turned out, they didn't! At the end of "Dormitor" I have to go up to an F#, which is as high as I can comfortably go before breaking into falsetto, it's normally a bit hit and miss but I'm generally somewhere close. When I sang it on thursday my voice just broke up into a gravelly rasp- like Rod Stewart gargling something with quite big lumps in it- that didn't seem to have any easily-identifiable notes in it. But that was the least of my worries by that point! During the first song (Bob Hope) I managed to break a guitar string. I've gone years without breaking a string on stage but at two of our last four gigs I've managed to do it. Initially my superstitious side got the better of me and I thought perhaps that a particular audience member who was present on both occasions but not at gigs where I didn't break strings might be some kind of string-Jonah and be causing it to happen. But then logic intervened. I think that the reason is that I've been using a different guitar for the last four gigs. I've got two acoustics which I use on stage, an old Framus that dates from around 1970, and a mid-'80s Yamaha. The Framus I found in a loft in a very bad state, it had been under a heavy roll of carpet for several years and the neck was bent like a banana. Fortunately, it's construction is a bit unusual in that it has a bolt-on neck, which made it very easy for me to dismantle, put right and re-assemble it. When it was all back together it turned out to be one of the nicest playing and sounding guitars I'd ever encountered (though it looks like crap) and it's been my main, well only, live and recording guitar for the last couple of years. Unfortunately all that time has taken it's toll. There are little hollows on the top of the guitar either side of the neck where I've been playing it so hard that the my plectrum has been digging into the wood, and the bolt-on neck isn't quite as secure as it used to be, it moves around a bit now so it doesn't stay in tune very well. Consequently I've semi-retired it and only use it for "By Default" live, because that song requires a different tuning, and in its place I've been using the Yamaha, which was the guitar used to record "Heads smashed in...". The Yamaha is similarly beaten-up, having been abused quite badly before it even got to me, but it's of much sturdier construction than the Framus so I'm not so worried about beating it up further. It turns out though that another unconventional bit of design on the Framus, a metal plate on the bridge that the strings slot into, makes it much less liable to string-snappage, I guess because the angle that the strings bend through as they go over the bridge (which is where they invariably seem to snap) is much smaller than the 90-ish degrees that the strings on the Yamaha are bent through with its standard wooden-saddle and plastic-peg bridge. The snappage I suffered on thursday was particularly bad- not only did I break the string, but in doing so I managed to rip the plastic peg that secured it to the bridge out of the guitar and send it flying into the dark nether-regions of the stage. Having broken a string a few weeks back at The Villa, I had a contingency plan in mind- moving the set around so we play a song ("Love let me not hunger") that doesn't involve me playing guitar, while I change the string. I hadn't however reckoned on putting the guitar into a state where I couldn't restring it. A small panic set in and scrabbling around on the floor ensued until Carolyn found the missing string peg and the ever-reliable Hubcap very kindly replaced the string. The guitarist from d'Urberville also very kindly offered me the loan of his guitar, but it was a Takemine that looked like it cost ££££s and I didn't want to run the risk of hurting it so felt I'd better decline. The whole business probably only cost us a couple of minutes, but that seems like a lifetime when you've got a roomful of people staring at you and a load of bright lights shining in your face. Also, the loss of momentum is bad psycologically. We have a ritual where we have a quick huddle and pep-talk just before we go onstage, where someone will say a few encouraging words so we hit the stage in the right frame of mind and explode out of the starting-blocks when we begin the first song (and get carried away and break guitar strings). Unfortunately it's not possible to re-enact this ritual mid-set when everything has ground to an embarrasing halt, and on those occasions it takes real effort on my part to keep doubt, uncertainty and ultimately despondency from creeping into my head and making me play bad. I'm getting better at it with practice! The rest of the set went off relatively hitch-free, but I came offstage in a foul mood, convinced we (or more precisely I) had blown the audition, so to speak. I drowned my sorrows in Meltus (for chesty coughs and cattarh).
I guess things must have gone considerably better than I thought they had, because a few days later we'd been offered not one but two slots at The Larmer Tree, one of them on the main stage supporting Jools Holland! Needless to say we accepted PDQ.
We've confirmed a couple of other festival dates, check out the schedule page for details.
