Gaslight Gigs, Feb - Mar 05

On Thursday Requiem rocked up at the Gaslight Jam, a weekly jam session at the Gaslight Tavern in the suburb of Brompton. The format for these evenings has basically remained unchanged over several years. There’s a ‘house band’ which has all its gear on stage, and plays music to warm up the crowd. The band at the moment has been there a year or two, a fairly tight rock combo with a steady diet of seventies music. They’re pretty good, though they do tend to play the same songs from week to week. They’ll play a set, and then introduce the next batch of musicians. This might be a ready made band (like us), or a thrown together band composed of musicians that are present. Unless there’s a special need (such as occasionally a keyboard) the jammers will plug their instruments into the amplifiers on stage. These ad hoc combos can be pretty damn good. There’ll be from three to six songs (depending upon how many are waiting to get up and how the audience likes the music). Then the next jammers get up. This goes on until 1 am, interspersed with the house band if there’s a gap between jammers.

It all depends upon how many musicians rock up for how the night will go.

We played around 11 pm, all covers. Tight, loud, professional. Maybe too much so, as the audience didn’t cheer like they usually do when someone’s cooking on stage. That would be a bit worrying, if I didn’t see that they were watching us very intently. Adelaide audiences can be a fickle thing. I think the audience was ‘judging’ us, as most of those people hadn’t seen us as a band, but had seen Nancy sing in lots of adhoc combos over the years as she often goes to jam nights on her own. I think they like her, and were judging her band, to see if ‘they’ll’ look after her. I guess they think we’re okay because they were fairly friendly to us afterwards.

The following Saturday night we played there in a regular gig. It’s been about nine months since we last played a real gig at the Gaslight. Was nice to be back again.

The dissapointing thing was the crowd, about a dozen through the evening. I don’t think the night would have paid for the publican. I spoke to her afterwards, she thought that there were quite a few other things on which drew her regular crowd away for the night. “That’s rock’n’roll,” seemed to be her attitude and I appreciated that. As always, there were also about half a dozen of our own followers who rocked up and stayed. As always, this was inspiring to us.

Musically, it didn’t seem to work as well as it has in past. Might be because, foolishly, we put steve back centre and me front left. Wrong move, as putting Sox and Steve together seems to disrupt the flow. We did it for various reasons that seemed good enough at the time (to Steve’s doubt). We should have left it the way Steve had it. Anyway, live and learn.

I broke strings on two guitars in the evening. Made a change of strings in the third break. We were tight, but there was a lot of work holding it together. I think Nancy had a sore throat and this restricted what she could do. Still, it was a pretty neat gig.

Next Friday night we play at the Glanville Wharf hotel, and on Easter Sunday at the Cumberland (Glanville). Both of these gigs look like being well attended. We have one practice session before then, so we hope to work out a few bugs in the meantime.