Had quite a busy weekend with a couple of gigs; one with Ministry of Beaver in Northampton, at the King Billy, and on Saturday I sessioned for the Malc Evans band at Acoustic Amnesty 6.
The Beaver gig was my fourth with the band and it was the first time I felt happy playing without my cheat sheets on standby. We debuted three new songs: a rocked up version of Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf; Run To You, by Bryan Adams, and the Green Day song, Jesus of Suburbia, which is a nine minute ‘progressive punk’ (‘prunk’, as I call it) piece. The Green Day song was also the first Beaver song to feature my SPD-S drum pad sampler unit, which is more affectionately known as ‘the machine that goes ping’.
Our occasional sound engineer, Paul came along, because we decided to pull out all the stops and use the monster P.A. and did a great job of the live mix, from what I could hear and from what people said. A good, enjoyable gig, although on the way home I noticed that I was extremely tired and I was quite concerned about falling asleep at the wheel.
Saturday’s gig with the Malc Evans band was quite a contrast from the Beaver gig. Malc is one half of Coventry acoustic duo Beneva; a couple of very talented tunesmiths who I finally got to see recently, having known of them for some time. Malc got in contact at the start of the year and asked if I’d be prepared to session for Beneva and Malc in his own band he was putting together to perform his music in a band context.
I went to see Beneva with fellow former BAiTer, Chris, and had a good chat with Malc and pretty much decided on the spot that it was something I’d be happy to do. The snag was, that on top of the thirty songs I’d learnt for Beaver, I now had to learn another twenty or so. Argghh! I only hope the Homer Simpson theory about new information into the brain pushing old information out isn’t true.
So, Saturday saw the Malc Evans band play its first gig. Between us, we had Malc on vox and acoustic guitar, a cellist, keyboard player, Steve ‘Skidders’ Skidmore on bass, and me on drums and backing vox. We played about ten songs in a church hall in Allesley, Coventry, as part of the Acoustic Amnesty 6 gig. The other acts on where all excellent and then we went on last to finish the evening off. There was a certain amount of ‘winging’ going on by all of us, but it all came together pretty well. Malc, Steve, and I had only had three brief rehearsals and we’d never played with the other two at all, but it all worked out fine and there were some nice comments afterwards.
More Malc Evans and Beneva gigs are in the pipeline, so I need to brush up on learning the material.
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