Dave's Gig Guide
Newcastle Arts Centre March 23rd 1999
We picked up this gig because the other band members wanted a rehearsal in front of an audience prior to the Alfa Centauri concert. I resisted because I didn't think we needed it. I didn't think it was a good use of the available time. However, Dave and Jules insisted and we're not a dictatorship so I went along with the idea.
We had problems in the studio right from the start. The gig was on a Tuesday night. On the previous Sunday, our DAT machine died and we had no way of transferring our audio over to backing CD except by plugging it into the back of the Macintosh and recording it via the line-in sockets - not exactly hi-fi. Thankfully, I had every track but one on CD and so only "Wow!" was seriously affected. It sounded horrid but I couldn't drop it because the set would have been too short.
The evening was organised by one of the most incompetent blokes I've ever met. He really couldn't find his arse with both hands and a piece of string. How so? He wasn't able to use a telephone for a start. Jules called him on countless occasions. She left messages on his answerphone and with other people, chasing information about start times, playing fees, PA requirements etc and he didn't return one single call. Not one. I think it would have been easier to just leave a postit note under a rock in the back alleyway. There was more chance of him returning that call than through the phone.
Access to the venue was down a fearsome flight of stairs and there was no lift. Lord knows how they got disabled folk into that venue. Dave and I had to carry my synth modules - one 12U rack and one 10U rack, both fully laden - down those stairs and into the performance area and it was seriously hard going. I half expected one of us to lose our footing and then "Bang!", there's a thousand quids worth of modules smashed into pieces and one or both of us in hospital with something badly busted.
Almost as soon as we walked through the door, we were told that the headline act had pulled out - do you blame them? - and so we were asked if we could play a couple of extra tracks. That's exactly what every musician wants to hear and so I agreed.
Now, whilst we were packing up the car, we discovered that there wasn't room for my DX5, which I was still using as a master keyboard. I figured that I could drive all of the synth modules from the Kurzweil but this just wasn't practical, a fact I only discovered once we were at the venue in Newcastle. Jules and Dave ended up driving back to Sunderland to grab the keyboard whilst I got on with setting up the equipment. They got back with the keyboard just in time for me to add it to the rig but there wasn't time for Jules to change into her stage gear so she did the gig in her travelling clothes, a scruffy skirt and top that she wore to stop her best from getting covered in muck.
We started the set with just six people in the audience and two of them were behind the bar. Gradually, the numbers began to swell. In time, a crowd developed and the applause became quite loud and enthusiastic but, as we approached the end of the set, I could see Mr. Efficiency waving at us to get off. He'd obviously changed his mind about the extra tracks. I've no idea why and I didn't care. Instead, I ignored him and we blasted into the last number without hesitating.
As we came off, he made some sarcastic comment, which I ignored, all the while grinning from ear to ear. The guy is a prick. He knows it. Everyone else knows it. We never got paid for the performance. I've never been back to the venue and I doubt I ever will.
Later that same night, Jules and I were invited back to Dave Maughan's studio in Newcastle to listen to his interim mixes of the CD we planned to release at the Alfa gig. However, neither of us were in any fit state to judge what we were hearing. Dave confessed that he felt that the material sounded weak and under-developed and, with hindsight, I'd have to agree but this wasn't what we, as a band, wanted to hear two weeks before the biggest gig of our lives. I was shattered. My confidence was absolutely zero.
Jules and I ended up camping out at a Munchies Pizza bar in the city centre until around 1 am, eventually getting home at around 2 am. We were tired, exhausted and not particularly happy, and both of us had work that day.
On the whole, the gig wasn't much fun. The set showed that we were out of touch with mainstream music and whilst this isn't normally an issue for me, I think that this contributed to the feeling that the gig had been a wasted opportunity and, with the Alfa gig less than 2 weeks away, it was a portent of things to come.