Busy, busy , busy...

Well, quite a few gigs under the belt since I last got around to updating this, starting off with a little do in Bathampton, in the grounds of the school back in June... we did this one last year, and it's a very well run village/school fete which was unfortunately blighted by rain this year (as has been pretty much every outdoor event in this excuse for a summer). Unlike last time we were under what looked like a substantial solid awning over the stage, but as the rain got going we and the soundcrew discovered that the awning was designed to keep small children shaded from the sun, not keep water off them. It leaked like a sieve.
Cue much running around and swaddling of equipment in binliners... all good fun, and the folks who braved the downpour and stuck around seemed to like us, so it was worth it in the end.
End of June we were back at the Oxford in Totterdown, my favourite music pub in Bristol, and a riotous crowd gave us the best reception we've ever had in there - crowd surfing included! It's always a sign of a good gig when at the end of the night you can see footprints on the ceiling. Ruth got so carried away she tripped and fell off a bit of stage, which caused her foot to swell up and go a funny colour. Not to worry though - as Rory McLeod commented the other night, it was probably just a stage she was going through...
Further disasters and calamities abounded at our last gig, a benefit for the Small Nations Festival, held in a rather posh community hall in Myddfai in Carmarthenshire, where we were supporting Rory McLeod. The weblinks for buying tickets had broken down, so the organisers only knew of half a dozen advance tickets sold, but happily there was a reasonable turn-out on the door. First on the bill was Andy Jones, who used to play with the Boys from the Hill back in the days when we were regulars at the Pontardawe International Folk Festival, and it was great to catch up with him again. Halfway through his first song, our Simon's guitar fell off a chair behind him and went crashing down behind the stage, causing poor Andy to jump out of his skin and stop, but it didn't put him off his stride too much.
Our set was distinctly odd... for a start we didn't have Nick the drummer with us, so had to do it in an  'unplugged' style, which we swiftly concluded didn't really work... Simon's guitar took yet another nose-dive down the back of the stage (though remained miraculously undamaged) and Chris managed to completely forget the opening chords to a song we've been playing for 20 years... all in all, not one of our best, I'd have to say, though we seemed to go down well and the organisers want us to play the Small Nations Festival next year. Maybe it sounded better than we thought...
Luckily Rory McLeod seemed unaffected by all the poltergeist activity - for about 5 minutes, anyway, until he knocked his drink all over the stage... then towards the end of his set, he broke a string, and couldn't see to restring it, until a lovely little old lady in the audience gave him her reading glasses..! Rory was great though, an amazing showman, and one of the best harmonica players I've ever seen to boot. He's also a thoroughly nice bloke, which is always a relief when you meet someone of his stature. Quite a few musicians have a reputation for being, shall we say, a bit of a knob when you meet them...