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Gig @ McLeans, 25.06.09
Jun 28, 2009 Blog Leave a comment
Posted by
Isaac
I’m not used to being naked.
It’s the feeling that you’re totally exposed, and everyone can see all your little bits n bobs that are normally covered up by the blessing of clothing…
Luckily for me however, I was fully clothed for this gig, but still naked – musically that is. I’ve not done an acoustic set before, granted the gigs I do with acoustic in hand and mic in front are probably what some would call an “acoustic” set, but I’ve always had the comfort of my backing tracks to cover up any whoopsies I make.
I arrived at the Pentre club at around 7:30, after getting lost several times and having to ring my ever helpful father for help – half of queensferry & deeside explored later, and I pulled up at McLeans Pub in Pentre.
The stage area was pretty fantastic, the sound desk only mirrored this, so confident that tonights gig was going to be a goodun, I set about unpacking my equipment.
With the phone buzzing every so often with my also slightly mis-directed missus and her friends, I was still feeling confident when disaster struck. Now they say it’ll be alright on the night but as is so often the case, it wasn’t. Plugging my cable into the acoustic proved to be a little less than straight forward – the jack dissapeared inside my guitar, as did my heart dissapear into a black hole of sweat and “uh oh”s.
Luckily, one of the sound engineers had seen this a million times before, suggested I take my strings off and fish it out, lucky for me, it worked! Soundcheck continued.
I’m not too good at soundchecks if I’m honest.. when asked by said engineer to “Give me a yell”, all I could think to do was shout the word “Yell” several times down the mic… Hm.
Gig time approached, and I setup on stage, nice hot lights singeing the hairs from my fingers but by the same token drying the beads of sweat which seem to tag along whenever I get a touch nervous.
The gig itself wen’t pretty well, A nice mix of covers and my own songs seemed to go down nicely, and I’ll be honest I did quite enjoy the applause I got after covering Smashing Pumpkins epic “Disarm”.
20 minutes later, in what felt like just seconds, it was time for me to depart, exit stage right… which is just what I did, before being snapped back to reality by the promoter telling me to clear all my gear off the stage. Doh!
All in all I had a brilliant time, friends were there, the athmosphere was great and the sound quality was immense. Aside from completely forgetting the lyrics to my own song “Same”, and having to make the second verse up as I went along, I don’t think anyone noticed any of the other booboo’s I made whilst playing.
We caught a couple of the other acts who were fantastic, a great mix of young talented guitarists and singers, performing a variety of different music – seemingly much more confident than I.
So as for the nakedness, I’m looking forward to playing in my undies again, not too far in the future I hope!
Cheers to Dave Mounter the promoter for Panic Promotions for putting on a great night and the opportunity of playing!
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