KevB

In one of the bands I'm in the guitarists wife is due a baby in May, I'd be mortified if I thought I might be a silent carrier and pass it on. We've knocked all band activity on the head until further notice.

I see Magnum have postponed their May tour as well now😟

My next 2 gigs (partly due to one band having an upcoming planned hiatus as gtr takes paternity leave) are late April and early June so I'm not expecting to be majorly out of pocket😂 It will be annoying if the April one gets canned as we are trying to work up new material for it and there are so few bookings for that band currently the future of the band might take a knock.

Yes have pulled out if this year's Cruise to the Edge. End of the world is nigh...

Usually money or availability. Have to give credit to the lads in one of the 2 bands I play in. We did a decent gig for a small introductory fee a fair drive away last year and made it clear we would be asking for more next time. Sure enough they've asked us to play at the intro price again and despite not gigging often we all unanimously stuck to our principle and turned it down.

I agree, though it helps if you actually get the money from the jar😂 In my case it has become clear (as I suspected, hence me making positive remarks about it in my report) that the venue had nothing to do with what happened and the birthday boy has been contacted by a band member about it, he says he 'just forgot' to consult the band before donating it all to one of his favourite biker charities.

Yep, almost certainly the same pub.

Its not common to me either and as Id never played this pub before I dont know if they do it for every band (to offset low fees up front) or if it was a one off because of it being a birthday bash. I actually quite liked the venue, LL seemed very nice and set the PA up herself and gave us feedback on what needed tweaking at soundcheck which was quite helpful, though we are all experienced players.

Last night? In a word - awkward (on a couple of fronts). Decent drive away but the venue had its own PA so we could just cram all the band's gear into gtr/vox's mpv. Great stuff, cant recall last time I didnt have to drive to a gig myself. The remit was that it was the birthday of an old acquaintance of the drummer so he had basically booked us via the pub for not very much money. He's not in good health at all but desperate to join us on stage for a couple,this is what we were told and the assumption was hed practice some of our songs. He hadnt arrived after we soundchecked so we nipped out for food and got back to find him pouring over our set list and cross reffing it with a book full of chord sheets. Oooh I thought, hes well organised. However we play quite a few in different keys to original. Then he set up his gear which sounded pretty awful and then it became clear he was going to sit on a stool about 6 inches from me (and this is a big bloke, 20+ stone) and just drop in and out of our entire set at will. However most of the time either wrong key or just plain wrong chords anyway irrespective. Constant fiddling with his amp as we were playing, necessitating him to try to turn round on his stool which made his gtr headstock (suitably pointy) to keep catching me in the back/midriff. Then the drummer tarted losing it, missing fills and getting generally lost. Sounded like a bad jam night to me. Landlady comes up at interval and says she will hand a jar round (quite a lot of people were there) as she knows we are not on much money. Later a bloke approached me as we finished and said he was going to personally double what was in the jar as hed enjoyed it so much. End of the gig (couldnt wait for it to end frankly) I was on my way to the gents and saw the LL and birthday boy counting up the jar takings. I only glanced over but it looked a decent amount of money, also got some good feedback from a few punters (presumably deaf to the racket going on for 2 sets). So we load the car and hang round waiting for the extra tips only to be told that birthday boy (an ex biker) has decided to donate the jar takings to a disabled biker's charity. No consultation with us at all. I dont want to seem the bad guy here but that wasnt his decision to make and I'm sure the bloke promising to double the tips didnt expect it to go anywhere other than the band either. final straw, he wants us to go back and do it all again next year....

Yes, same here. People see midi pedals and just go - Oh, you're prog. The versatility of the 12 step in particular means that if you are in a band without a keys player and have a decent palette of patches to draw on then with a bit of practice you can add a little extra to many songs that have nothing overtly proggy about them.

I had a phase when I'd go to these things and pick up obscure live bootlegs of bands on cassette!

I keep thinking that about my PK5 pedals, I had a flight case custom made for them as well, it's been sitting in my music box room for over a year completely unplayed. I'm just using the 12 step at the moment.

Exactly my point, when TZ gets to the repetitive middle bit we switched back into the final vs/ch of RL. To do either song justice we couldnt get it under 7 mins though which was a bit of a stretch for the attention span of most pub crowds.

An early band I was in did it but we fused it to their lesser known (but still good) later hit Twilight Zone. Basically we'd do RL until it got to the dreary middle bit, go into TZ for a couple of verse/choruses then back to RL for final verse/chorus. Ended up at about seven and a half minutes long but it gave the punters a toilet break before we did something they'd know again. We even recorded it on a promo CD.

On Fenders I find with nearly all manufacturers I have to trim the E and A strings, too long to fit all of it. Can often get all D and Gs on though. Never had any problems with trimming back a bit.

Just picked up a ticket for a couple of female fronted prog bands in Leicester on Monday. Like both bands most recent albums and well done to artists, promoter and venue for keeping it down to £11 per ticket. So I'm looking forward to seeing The Dame and The Far Meadows.

Van Der Valk featuring the late great Barry Foster

And 'Hot Hits' iirc😄

We didnt have a lot of disposable income when I was little so it was a small selection of quite eclectic singles and then a bit later full blown LP's of film soundtracks like Dr Doolittle (the Rex Harrison one naturally). After that came the cheap compilations that featured 'soundalike' artists doing the hits of the time. No wonder I ended up in covers bands😀

It's Ok folks, Ive realised the problem. He's been listening to this version

Me too, though I'd heard a ton of artists on the radio and seen them on TOTP by the time I started really listening to music 'properly' by the mid 70's they were probably the band I focussed on most as 'my' band. I think the first albums I bought with my own money was the blue box set containing the On The Third Day, Eldorado and Face The Music albums though that was a bit of a backtracking exercise as I'd already heard New World Record by then.

That headstock's had a fag smouldering away jammed in at the end for some years on and off by the look of it, classic jazz mojo😃 Probably enough ingrained carcinogens to require its own risk assessment form...

That bass is uglier than most turds.

Thats a lovely looking organ.😉 Best of luck with the gigs.

I've had a bit of that recently. Gtr/vox at recent rehearsal when not well (neither was I but I still showed up) 'I wouldnt have come out but I wanted you to be comfortable about the songs' when I've spent the last 3 or 4 rehearsals continually pulling both gtr and drummer up when they havent got the song structure right.