A gig best forgotten

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Yesterday evening’s (or rather this morning’s) gig at the Colosseum, Coventry will definitely be best forgotten as soon as possible. What could go wrong went wrong.

We were supposed to be headlining the gig and were initally told to turn up at 20:00. Between the guy who booked us quitting his job and the new guy taking over, this changed to 18:00, with the consequence that the second band (from London) had set up and were having an extensive sound check by the time we arrived. We were told that we’d get a soundcheck later on, but this failed to materialise – it was already getting quite late (after midnight) by the time we got onto stage.

All this would’ve been fine, except that we had the monitor mix from hell on stage, with the upshot that we couldn’t hear a damn thing to pitch to – just a wall of noise. Poor Ash (the guy flying the sound desk) did his best to make the best out of a bad situation, but was doomed to failure without the full soundcheck. Our music contains rather extensive harmonies, and we really need to hear each other (or at least a pure note from an instrument) in order to be able to pitch correctly.

And then… during the fourth song (around then anyway) a string broke on Chris’ Variax guitar. No problem he thought, as he reached for his spare Variax, until it transpired that his spare one has developed a fault and simply wouldn’t play, so we had to stop the set mid-way through so that he could restring his guitar.

So, at this stage, we’re probably not singing in tune with each other, key harmonies are being missed out because we can’t hear well enough, and technical faults are starting to plague us. Whilst Chris restrung his guitar, I asked Ash to knock out all instruments in our monitor mix, which improved things very slightly for the last three or four songs.

I got home at 02:00 and by the time I’d had a shower, dried off and got into bed it was close to 03:00.

A gig best forgotten as quickly as possible.