Jagerbar, Melksham

We nearly ran over a deer on the way here - spooky...
Actually part of the Bear in Melksham, this new venue was only finished the day before, and we played the opening night on Good Friday. The landlord & his family had obviously worked like trojans to get everything finished in time, with a lot of sponsorship help from Jagermeister (favourite tipple of folk-metallers Korpiklaani and good ol' Metallica, by all accounts). It tastes like a (very) alcoholic cough mixture, and comes in test-tubes at -15c. Yum.
The place itself is vast & cathedral-like, with a cavernously high ceiling & a stone floor - in other words, it's an acoustic nightmare, as rapidly becomes apparent as we try to soundcheck. Oh well, let's hope some bodies will soak up the cacophony; off to the bar we go, just to do a bit more quality testing on that Jagermeister...
In the end we needn't have worried - most of the population of Melksham have turned out to check the place out, and a fair proportion of them even stay when we start playing, so the sound ends up pretty good. We are even treated to a unique display of Traditional Dancing, which involves rolling your trousers up to the knee and scuttling about like a crab. I got an unprofessional fit of the giggles at this point, and corpsed completely in the middle of a song...
By the end of the night we were all a bit hoarse, but luckily the Landlord was on hand with more of his special cough medicine. It did make me a bit drowsy, though... on balance, think I'll stick to Guinness.