The Negotiators rocked the Glynde last night before a relatively small but appreciative audience. Started at 9.00 pm, finished the encore around 1.15 am. Over fifty songs spread over four sets with three 15 minute breaks. The new line up finally got it together, and it worked well!
As foreshadowed in my last post, the new Negotiators line up debuted publicly last night. Sox made it through without any noticeable slackening due to injury, Barry held it together well, his bass finding its own rock idiom to work with. Terry also came along, and ran the mixing desk and light show.
Stage set up was the new improved version, with Mark and Barry on stage left, Steve on stage right. Continuing the evolution of our Glynde setup, we had less of a footprint on floorspace with the new lineup, fitting comfortable into what had once seemed a very tight space, with more gear! We had Terry projecting out further along the wall at stage right, with a light desk and mixing desk surrounding him. Tech heaven!
Sound quality on stage was excellent, with full clarity of all parts from all points on stage. This was achieved as a result of a combination of careful balancing of sound (amps and foldback) and stage set up (with all amps pointing across front stage centre due the fact we had set up on both walls of a corner with Sox at the apex). Apparently the sound in the audience was “as good if not better” than it’s ever been according to a long term follower or two. I think having Terry advise on and tweaking the sound through the evening helped with clarity also.
Probably the most we had in the audience at one time was between two dozen and thirty people (in the second set). Around sixteen people whom we knew came in three distinct groups, the earliest any of these left was at the end of the third set. For the second set we were graced with the presence of around eight young women dressed to the max for a night out after their Glynde sojourn. They loved to boogie, if they weren’t off elsewhere I reckon they would have stayed. In the third set had a group of two couples of well dressed uni student types, initially hesitant but had them all toe tapping within a song of settling down. Again, I don’t think they would have stayed (they had in fact popped in and out of the pub earlier) if they hadn’t been drawn in by the music (‘Satisfaction’, if I remember right).
There were perhaps a half dozen locals left at stumps, two sheilas that ate up each song from when they arrived during the third, several men who were individually seated and a quiet addition, and a couple who had been there since the second set and having a great time. ‘Tup’, the male half, was effusive in his compliments at the end of the night, and had partied to the music throughout. He even drew out ‘the rhthym guitarist’ (me) for particular comment later – a rare thing.
The Cort guitar continued to reveal its worth. I played maybe two thirds of the show with the pick up selection in middle position, the remainder split evenly with the selector in either top two or second bottom setting. It tended to cut through the other guitar/keyboard without overwhelming or covering them. This was good, as it allowed me to monitor and adjust what I was doing with the rhythm scape between different parts of various songs. As I am quite familiar with all that we played, I was able to concentrate a fair bit on tying up the other instruments with my guitar, as well as interacting musically with them. I’ve been bored before by other rhythm guitarists who seem to only know one way of strumming and one pattern of beats, so it was nice to add a layer of steady variation underneath the more prominent instruments and vocals. I think Tup’s comment reflected this.
Sox reminded us that he’s a good drummer with a solid performance. Although he says he ‘lost it’ a couple of times, he obvulessly hasn’t forgotten how to get back on the horse quickly because the band never lost the beat or slid into a mess of searching for sounds. He’s a very solid drummer, puts a lot of thought and concentration into what he does. Too much sometimes, as his eyes are closed and he’s off with the muse and there’s no way of getting his attention short of shouting at him (and who’d want to break that reverie?). He runs quite a rack of cymbals, which allow him a large dynamic range and numerous effects (a percussive equivalent, perhaps, of what I search for in the beat of the guitar part). It was great to play with Chris on drums, but it's very cool to have Sox back!
Steve’s leads were crisper than they’ve been before, and he seemed to have pushed his technical limits out sufficient so that nothing sounded forced. Again, this impacted upon what I do as I could concentrate more on backing him and emphasising elements of his playing, rather than providing a support for him to navigate around if all got too much. Thus, progress on many fronts.
It took us about two hours to have everything set up (of which around 15 min was spent trying to locate and sort a problem with foldback). Still too long, but getting there. And it’s a hell of a lot of equipment! Take down was down to 40 min before packed and gone, which is getting better and close to optimum.
We had A3 posters placed around the pub, but you had to look to find them. They had been placed under the TVs, and not on the walls in prominent blanks spots. Thus, they were lost in the visual clutter that often surrounds tellies. I reckon we missed a few of the Glynde’s regular punters (I know of at least one) because of this. Maybe we need to take more control of in house promotion in future?
While on the subject of promotion, we have let ourselves down during the last two shows by not having our 'Negotiators' name board up on stage. It might not seem much, but we are exposing ourselves to new punters everytime we play these days, and we need to know we've done all we can to help them remember the band's name. It's a long haul to build a following, we need to keep our name up there.
The saddest thing of the evening happened after the show, when we learnt that the pub is now under new management and that they will likely be doing bookings through an agent in future. Which tends to cut us out of the equation – agent equals someone making money out of you by telling you what to do and they tend to react badly to the fact that we don’t have the classic profile of a rock band (we’re not naïve, twenty and easily exploitable). Equally sadly, it seems that we may not have much choice about this in future, as that seems to be the way that most corporatised venues in the post pokie era tend to run.
Finally, during one of the breaks between sets Terry slipped in a few old Requiem songs amongst the other 'background music'. Gotta say, sounded good! Not only did I immediately think we should be playing our originals, but, viewing the audience, I could see that they quite liked the songs they were hearing (and some of them didn't know it was us until they worked it out). Some of the audience also told me that we should be playing our own music as well as covers. Something for our marketeers to consider. And, just to prove you learn new things all the time, we might want to put harmonica into the song "Butterflies and Fairytales" as I heard checking his harmonica out while the song was coming through during the break and it sounded just right...
No comments:
Post a Comment