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| 31st Dec 2005 | Cross Keys | New Year's Eve and
a really good gig. Got off to a scary start though when we switched on our new powered speakers and ... nothing. After a while we speculated that there might be a problem with condensation so we waited and they eventually started working again. The landlady thought we'd look better in matching T-shirts so here we all are, sporting our 'Nite on the Tiles' shirts, courtesy of Ann. The landlord, however, preferred the name 'NightShift' and billed us as such on the poster on the door! The landlord was going to provide a disco but he got a better offer and so left us with his other deck. We hooked this into the PA using the handy auxilliary input on the PA speakers and got our lighting man, Mark, to become a DJ for the night as well. Steve gave some new Zildjian cymbals their first outing. |
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| 17th Dec 2005 | Cross Keys | More changes to the
PA with the addition of 3 new vocal mikes, drum mikes and an automatic
feedback eliminator (see pics, right). We fed the drums through the old
PA amp and I also
added a bit of bass in to give a bit more
bottom end :-). The gig went well with things picking up a lot better in the second half. Not many cock-ups but my bass line in Slade's 'Merry Christmas' suffered from the real-time transposing I had to do as we changed the key after I'd learnt it. The band's name is still in flux - we were billed as 'A Night on the Tiles' on the door and 'Nightshift' in the local paper. |
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| 11th Nov 2005 | Foley Arms | We purchased a new PA on the previous Saturday with the
aim
of trying it out at the practice 2 days before this gig and
get
all the wrinkles ironed out. Unfortunately it didn't turn up in time
for the practice and we agreed it would be silly to try it out for the
very first time at a gig. It turned up the day before the gig so guess
what - we used it for the first time at the gig. The good news is it worked beautifuly. We now have the same power in one of the monitors that we used to have from the whole PA. :D For some reason (maybe our mind was on the PA) there were quite a few mistakes - spotted by 'regulars' like lighting man Mark but hopefully not by the audience. For me the bigggest slip up was to retune the bottom E on the bass to drop-D tune it for 'Boulevade of Broken Dreams' only to realise as soon as I hit the first note that I was thinking of the wrong song. :0 With the bottom E now a tone too low I had to do some on the fly transposing until a suitable break came to quickly re-tune it to approximately the right place and then bend the note as I played it to fine-tune it. |
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| 17th Sep 2005 | Madresfield club | This gig was a
wedding evening bash and it came with a health
warning as the groom had something of a reputation but in the
end it turned out to be fairly uneventful. Les, our singer, was actually at the wedding so we couldn't do a proper sound check and I think it showed a bit in the first half. Also our amp's were forward of Steve, the drummer, so he was having difficulty in hearing what we were playing. We need to make sure the 'back line' is actually at the back in future. We played Nickleback's How you remind me' and Lynyrd Skynyrd's 'Sweet Home Alabama' for the first time and a one-off verion of Eleanor Rigby that was requested for this gig. |
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| 3rd Sep 2005 | Cross Keys | A return to the Cross Keys and another good night. A few minor cock-ups but most went un-noticed. We had the running order agreed beforehand this time so the gaps between songs were a lot shorter than the last gig. This was just as well as we only had time to do one encore instead of the usual fourteen before the landlady put the house lights back on. Still we didn't mind as we all had an after-gig party to attend.... |
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| 20th Aug 2005 | Private residence, Malvern | Played at an
after-wedding party
in a marquee. This is the first time we've planned three sets and
played four! Admittedly the final set was a repeat of one of
the
previus sets but it did give us the opportunity to show, given a couple
of shots at it, we can get a lot of the songs right :) The first set was OK musically but the gaps between the songs was too long due mainly to last minute changes to the running order. The final set went very well with the audience having a singalong and at one point our manager Nick formed his own backing group - see right. |
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| 16th July 2005 | The Cross Keys Inn, Malvern | Back
at The Cross Keys again,
this time replacing another act who cancelled. You never know what to
expect at this sort of gig - was the other act crap and no-one will
turn up, or are they great and you get an audience who's
expecting someone else? Well it worked out fine as we got another great crowd and a splendid time was had by all. Thanks once again to MARK - our lighting man who did another great job. |
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| 27th June 2005 | The Cross Keys Inn, Malvern | A
return to the Cross Keys and
one of our best gigs so far. Apart from a few false starts when the
lighting rig tripped the earth leakage trips everything went very
smoothly. A crowd of around 200 meant for a good atmosphere. The sound balance wasn't quite right with Les (the singer) a bit low in the mix. The small stage area meant that the PA speakers ended up close to the singer's mike and we had a few feedback problems. Need to sort this out in future. One annoyance was the patch I use in the bass effects unit to simulate the electric guitar at the beginning of Pinball Wizard seems to get in tself in the habit of dropping its volume by about 10dB even though I checked it before we started. Afterwards we retired to the singer's house for a late night/early morning barbeque. |
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| 6th May 2005 | The Express Inn, Malver | Back
at the Express again
although with a slightly smaller crowd this time - looks like our
reputation is already spreading! The were some members of the audience (& a band member) that were under the influence of alcohol. Normally I don't mind this but it is off-putting when they lumber in front of you and kick the guitar leads out. One guy commandered my mike for the last number but as we were playing the song in 'A' and he was singing in 'H' I pulled the mike lead out from the PA - he didn't notice. |
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| 1st April 2005 | The Cross Keys Inn, Malvern | We added two more songs
to the set - "Whiskey in the Jar"
(Thin Lizzie) and "Hey Jude", the latter got included after the
positive reception it got after Les's impromptu performance
at
The Express Inn. On both these numbers I played acoustic
guitar
for the first time live in the band. The only noticeable cock-up was in "Let it be" which resulted in us aborting the attempt and starting all over again - a tactic Windows users will be familiar with. What probably went unnoticed was the bit in Pinball Wizard where the electric guitar comes in. I usually approximate this with a patch on the bass effects unit but I seemed to have a 'Senior moment' and temporarily forgot how to operate it! With seconds to go I just wacked up the guitar volume enough for the amp's compressor to kick in and approximate the effect. We had to finish at 11:00pm so several songs got jettisoned including "Dancing in the Moonlight", "All right now" and "Beds are burning". In summary, another successful gig with sufficient attendance for the landlord to book us for a further 3 dates this year. |
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| 4th Feb 2005 | The Express Inn, Malvern | The
second gig for the band, now sporting the name Tiler.
The gig was
also attended by wifey (Sue) , daughter Lizzie and mates and son Pete. The Express is a very compact venue but it made for an intimate gig. A good first half with the only cock-up being when Ed forgot to flip back the transpose function on the Roland so played the whole of 'Venus' in the wrong key. Took me a while to find out what key he was in because I couln't use the trick of looking at the chords he was playing as they were being transposed by the Roland. Whilst the above probably went un-noticed that was not the case when Ed broke a string. This is not that unusual except this was the A string - the second thickest on the guitar! So the crowd had a short respite from us (punctuated with a few bass classics such as 'Another one bites the dust' ) while he re-strung. The second half went well with the crowd dancing in the room available. There was a bunch of girls dancing by me and singing their heads off. I motioned them to come over and use my mike but they misunderstood and one of them grabbed me by my waist and started singing alongside me. I wasn't sure where to put my instrument! The lack of any evidence of an audience in the photo's belies the fact that the place was packed - they took more behind the bar than on new year's eve! Song of the evening: Are you going to be my girl |
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| 27th
Nov
2004 |
RSRE
Club Malvern |
The
first gig for the new band: Les Thomas - Vocals & tambourine Ed Hoare - Lead Guitar & backing vocals Steve Benson - Drums and backing vocals Andy Prior - bass & backing vocals Considering this was Les's first time fronting a band he did really well. |
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