Alford Gig VIII

So, there we were in the dining room area at the Alford Hotel. A pretty cool show proceeded to happen. We had them up and dancing midway through the first, quieter, set.

We bring along our own gear, including coloured lights (!), so we usually have things humming nicely in a technical sense as regards sound production on stage. The real master of this is Terry. He also owns the PA system we use, the electric heart of the band. He controls it all from his mixing desks and racked up gear, usually set up at rear of stage.
So, at Alford, there we were in the dining alcove, having done a sound check hours before to an almost empty pub, about to play a song we’d only just decided upon. And this was knowing that there were a couple people in the crowd who were representing other pubs and clubs in nearby towns, a truly tupperware kind of moment. And it worked.

Alford Gig VII

And, as we like to be on stage as much as possible, out we went to play the song we had just chosen.

New note … I’m wondering whether I should put up gig lists somewhere on the web?

The way this blog is developing might be becoming obvious by now. I will tell a long term story, in this case our first gig. That gives me something I can always write about which is interesting to myself, and I hope to you, my valued reader. Interspersed through these long topic postings will be diary style bits, a running record of our activities and events. In other words, I’ll write what I like within limits set by my devotion to you.

Alford Gig VI

As always, however, the spirit of reinventing the wheel had taken hold in our band. The first sign of this malady appeared when we had spent a while figuring out where Steve should be located on stage so that he could change from keyboard to guitar without cramping either him or the rest of the band. That had taken a while. So it shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise to find us, at 5 minutes to eight, all huddled together, as bands often do in such moments, undergoing a collective self doubt in our ability to play the first song. With a minute to go, we decided to put another song in its place.

Alford Gig V

Nancy had sorted out, through a process of trial and error and consulting with the other members of the band, five brackets of music, the last being an encore if required. We’d all sort of agreed to it at our last practice the previous Wednesday. So you’d think all would be okay for the first bracket, the first song of which was one we had been playing together in public as a six piece band for a couple of years.

Alford Gig IV

The Odd Sox is an all party five piece outfit. Nancy sings, Sox drums, Terry plays Bass, Steve plays guitar, keyboard and harmonica, and I, Mark, play rhythm guitar. We have a repertoire which varies from country rock adaptions, through classic blues, rock’n’roll, to hard rock verging on heavy. In other words, our music varies from Johnny Cash to ACDC. The interesting thing is that, as Requiem, we managed to pull this off in all sorts of venues to all sorts of crowds and we did return gigs at most places we played. Anyway, back to Alford (which, by the way, was a ‘return’ gig as we had previously played there on Easter Saturday) …

Alford Gig III

We knew there were a couple bands playing up the road at Port Broughton, a holiday oriented town many times bigger than Alford, one at least of which had a bit of a ‘name’. In other words, there was competition, and some people at least were chosing to come and hear us. Another good sign.

I’ll leave this here, see if there is any response to this blog. If there is, I will continue as the spirit takes me, hoping to document in some way the fantastic experience of being in a working rock’n’roll band. It’ll be a great story I am sure.

Alford Gig II

It was a cool gig. We were set up in the dining alcove by 5pm, when some of us observed a civil wedding ceremony in the courtyard lying at the centre of the pub. Then it was time for a quick sound check, and then time to join the other diners out in the courtyard for a barbeque. There seemed to be more people around than there had been the Easter Saturday when we had last played here.

We were due to start at 8pm, the time the publican had advertised in weeks previous (she said she’d got “lots” of phone calls making enquiries). There were a few familiar faces, but there were lots that I didn’t know. People seemed to be coming in from surrounding towns in ones and twos. This is always a good sign.

Alford Gig - 2nd Oct 2004 - I

Alford Hotel – Saturday, 2 October 2004

Odd Sox played its first ever gig last Saturday night at the Alford, a farming hamlet lying roughly midway on the Kadina-Port Broughton Road in South Australia’s lower mid North region, just beyond the copper triangle at the top of the Yorke Peninsula. Twenty dusty miles from the coast at Tikara, Alford is a spot on a straight two lane highway where is collected a bowling club, church, primary school (soon to close), fire station, war memorial, tennis courts, deli and semi-permanent garage sales. It has an advertised population of sixty people. It also has a hotel, the present building dating from the early 20th century, situated on the South Western edge of the town on one of Alford’s half dozen or so streets. You can see the highway from its shady front verandah. Here we played our first gig as Odd Sox.

We are a five piece rock band, and were all members of ‘Requiem’, the predecessor band which floated around Adelaide for a while, playing about a gig a month for the last three years. You could say it was Odd Sox playing a requiem for Requiem. The gig itself was advertised as Requiem, but we knew the truth.