Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Too right I called in a "ringer" for the pool!
Yes I did, Brad - YES I DID!!! my mate Madeleine is a bit of a pool hustler - very good at giving it "Well, I don’t know much about pool but I think I remember which way round to hold the stick thingie.. Oh! Did I seven-ball you? Deary me! How did that happen..?" However Michael, my finely-tuned and overly sensitive sense of karmic balance struck back almost immediately when Mads said that she only played in her local darts team "to make up numbers". Spurred on by watching the darts on TV earlier that day, and emboldened by memories of playing with my college darts team, I challenged her to a contest. Little cow beat me 2-1. Grrrr! If only she wasn't so cute and forgiveable..
But what I'm really here to talk about is playing gigs without rehearsing: The Müfsters of the Universe are at Poptoys in Reading this Sat (as a last minute call-up to the bill) and we're not going to get a full rehearsal before then through Lee the drummist being wanted all over the country until about 6pm on Sat (when he's wanted for our soundcheck!). It's been a while since we played, but I believe that a band who have been together - and playing the same songs, essentially - for over a year should have the confidence to just get up and start thrashing away without worrying about the fine details. The live performance shouldn't be about faithfully reproducing the CD, it should be about a unique interpretation of the music, a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the audience (dare I say "fan"?) to see the band do something fresh and exciting, make up endings, improvise middle bits and generally extemporise like bee-hatches. It's what makes gigging so exciting, and it's what keeps the songs fresh and artistically valid. I'm in one band that play covers, the last thing in the world that I want is to start being in my own covers band, playing dead, lifeless versions of songs that we used to fill with passion until we got bored of them and started just playing them by rote. That's my idea of hell, that is.
White Sunday are at Reading uni's Mojo's bar on Monday, and we aren’t going to get a rehearsal either - we have one new choon we want to play that we'd all prefer to rehearse before we unveiled, but life doesn’t always work that way! We are using the uni gig as a rehearsal for our Half Moon gig on Tuesday, but more importantly - and this is my whole point, really - I'm hoping that the band (this goes for Müf on Sat too) take a huge amount of confidence from playing "cold" as it were and still doing really well. I mean, both bands will rock in their own completely different ways, and I hope that everyone finishes the shows with a new sense of nonchalance about playing live. After all, playing live is brilliant, and a piece of piss once you've written, learnt and rehearsed all the songs. It shouldn't be about playing all the right notes/chords in all the right places and keeping in time: it should be about playing the song as hard/beautifully as you can with as much force/aggression/emotion/finesse/passion as you can muster up to unleash upon the audience. You can’t do that when you are worrying about what everyone else is going to do at the end of the next bar.
That said, I bet I forget the lyrics on Sat. May do some sneaky swotting before Sat - 21 South St. is an amazing venue, great sound, big stage, good attendance levels, I don’t want to look or sound like a plum when I'm up there under the bright lights taking in the smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint..
But what I'm really here to talk about is playing gigs without rehearsing: The Müfsters of the Universe are at Poptoys in Reading this Sat (as a last minute call-up to the bill) and we're not going to get a full rehearsal before then through Lee the drummist being wanted all over the country until about 6pm on Sat (when he's wanted for our soundcheck!). It's been a while since we played, but I believe that a band who have been together - and playing the same songs, essentially - for over a year should have the confidence to just get up and start thrashing away without worrying about the fine details. The live performance shouldn't be about faithfully reproducing the CD, it should be about a unique interpretation of the music, a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the audience (dare I say "fan"?) to see the band do something fresh and exciting, make up endings, improvise middle bits and generally extemporise like bee-hatches. It's what makes gigging so exciting, and it's what keeps the songs fresh and artistically valid. I'm in one band that play covers, the last thing in the world that I want is to start being in my own covers band, playing dead, lifeless versions of songs that we used to fill with passion until we got bored of them and started just playing them by rote. That's my idea of hell, that is.
White Sunday are at Reading uni's Mojo's bar on Monday, and we aren’t going to get a rehearsal either - we have one new choon we want to play that we'd all prefer to rehearse before we unveiled, but life doesn’t always work that way! We are using the uni gig as a rehearsal for our Half Moon gig on Tuesday, but more importantly - and this is my whole point, really - I'm hoping that the band (this goes for Müf on Sat too) take a huge amount of confidence from playing "cold" as it were and still doing really well. I mean, both bands will rock in their own completely different ways, and I hope that everyone finishes the shows with a new sense of nonchalance about playing live. After all, playing live is brilliant, and a piece of piss once you've written, learnt and rehearsed all the songs. It shouldn't be about playing all the right notes/chords in all the right places and keeping in time: it should be about playing the song as hard/beautifully as you can with as much force/aggression/emotion/finesse/passion as you can muster up to unleash upon the audience. You can’t do that when you are worrying about what everyone else is going to do at the end of the next bar.
That said, I bet I forget the lyrics on Sat. May do some sneaky swotting before Sat - 21 South St. is an amazing venue, great sound, big stage, good attendance levels, I don’t want to look or sound like a plum when I'm up there under the bright lights taking in the smell of the crowd and the roar of the greasepaint..
# posted by AK @ 14:01 
