November shows

We played two shows this week. The first was at Joules Yard in Market Harborough on Sunday lunchtime. It was a cold foggy day and the town was busy with a historic car rally. The venue is down a passage betwen the main shopping street and a car park and is full of little shops. I've played there as a solo act on a couple of occasions and we arrived in good time and began carrying our instruments into the venue. It took a short while to set up and get everything working.
As well as the four of us, our good friends Steve and Carol Poole also came along. Steve had his squeezebox and tenor banjo with him, so we made use of his fine playing on a couple of songs during the set.
We've had to learn a load of songs in a short while in order to play for 90-100 minutes, and this show was a chance to try the songs out. Most of the songs we played were fine. We just have a couple of tweaks to fix the others.
The time flew by. We played over 30 songs and tunes to a small but receptive crowd and I chatted to a few of them afterwards. They'll be recommending the band to their local hostelries. We could do with a few more bookings. One a week would do just fine.

Then on Wednesday we played our first pub gig as a band. The Wayfarers is a pub to the south of the town centre and we arrived in good time and loaded in. We soon set up and were ready to play.
We had competition from the football on the TV at the other end of the pub, plus a pool match, but as we played I could see people taking notice and singing along- always a good sign. We planned to play 13 songs in each set (and I hoped that we had enough material).
I needn't have worried. The first set over-ran by ten minutes and we had to cut three songs from the second set, so no worries about dearth of songs then.
I really enjoyed it. Dave the bass player told me there were a number of fellow musicians in the pub and he spoke with them and could only report positive comments.

Me? I spent my time chatting to friends and acquaintances (some of whom were on Facebook.) It's nice to meet a Facebook friend in the flesh so to speak, and I hope they'll do a good job in spreading the word.

The band is good. The audiences like what we play. All we have to do is get a few more bookings. I'm not too fussed about travelling far at the moment, after my health problems following on from the Nicki Gillis tour when I was in hospital twice and off work for two months, but I'm happy to play in the Kettering/Corby and surrounding area. We do have a couple of shows booked next year that will take us up to Whitby, but we can stay overnight on those.

Good times. My friend Rachel has taken some photos and I hope to post some soon.