A couple of nice pictures here, courtesy of Graham Brown:
The next afternoon saw us on the Bandstand stage at Keynsham Festival, our second time at this one, and great fun to play especially as we weren't in full sun this time!
It all looked a bit iffy when we turned up, mind, as the backline provided onstage was a bit sparse, and there wasn't much in the way of drumkit - it's a common thing at festivals for there to be an onstage kit already there, and the drummers just provide their own snare, pedals, cymbals etc, but I reckon this is a bit of a hangover from the days when drummers weren't considered 'proper musicians', and were expected to just play whatever was there... I mean, you wouldn't expect a guitarist to just pick up some rented guitar and give a blistering performance on it, would you? Well, not if you know anything about playing guitar, anyway. Same goes for drums - a good soundcrew can mike up and linecheck a drumkit in 5 minutes flat, while the rest of the band are still setting up. Luckily, a good soundcrew was what we had, and the gig went down a storm - we had the best crowd of the day on that stage by far, and lovely it was to see some familiar faces in there, even some who remembered us from Brew Band days! A really nice little festival, and I hope it goes from strength to strength - we're certainly looking forward to doing it again.
Nice pic by Lou Fitch-Peyton here:
A bit disconcerting to have a bloke dressed as a fluffy pink pig dancing in front of us, but on reflection that might just have been me. (Well, I wasn't driving that day...)
<< No pictures of us have surfaced yet, so here's a picture of Simon our guitarist 'relaxing' after a few ciders...
.No rest for the wicked, and the very next afternoon we were at the Nailsea Beer and Cider Festival, where a lovely shady stage awaited us, as did a couple of thousand well-refreshed punters trying to stay out of the sun. We were the only band on that were doing their own material that day, which the soundman was very pleased about, I think he was all 'covered-out'... A pretty quiet reaction, (see video below) but to be honest we weren't expecting major crowd participation on a Sunday afternoon on one of the hottest days of the year, and we enjoyed our little selves thoroughly, especially afterwards, when we were free to get stuck into the large amounts of free booze available.
Ever wary of the effects that strong cider can have on the delicate constitution of one unused to drink such as myself, I elected to stay on the ales, sipping parsimoniously from the weaker ones, so as not to inflame any ill humours or anything. I'm reasonably sure that the 'Orkney Skullsplitter' (8.4%) counts as weak, anyway. Others however, were not so circumspect in their choice of refreshment... moving swiftly on from the 'Cat's Arse' and 'Nun's Chuff' ciders, the rest of the band settled on the 7.2% 'Fanny Liquor' (d'you see what they did there?) as the cidre du jour, and the Horizontal Hold swiftly began to go awry... there's something of a pattern developing here...
To round off that hectic couple of weeks, here's a rather splendid bit of video taken by Geoff Pharoah, of one of our new songs, 'The Long Walk Home' - I suspect that for the parents of these two somewhat overheated/excited toddlers, it did indeed prove to be just that... ;)
Ever wary of the effects that strong cider can have on the delicate constitution of one unused to drink such as myself, I elected to stay on the ales, sipping parsimoniously from the weaker ones, so as not to inflame any ill humours or anything. I'm reasonably sure that the 'Orkney Skullsplitter' (8.4%) counts as weak, anyway. Others however, were not so circumspect in their choice of refreshment... moving swiftly on from the 'Cat's Arse' and 'Nun's Chuff' ciders, the rest of the band settled on the 7.2% 'Fanny Liquor' (d'you see what they did there?) as the cidre du jour, and the Horizontal Hold swiftly began to go awry... there's something of a pattern developing here...
To round off that hectic couple of weeks, here's a rather splendid bit of video taken by Geoff Pharoah, of one of our new songs, 'The Long Walk Home' - I suspect that for the parents of these two somewhat overheated/excited toddlers, it did indeed prove to be just that... ;)