Another Day, Another Gig in Garstang!

It's been our final appearance at the Garstang Arts & Music Festival for this year today.

Today was rain free I'm glad to say. The keyboard display was exhibiting some rather disturbing symptoms after Saturday's rain and I'm going to have to get it looked at.

The stored backing tracks that I've played onto the keyboard and stored on USB are not displaying properly. For instance That'll Be The Day was displaying as 'll'll'll'll'll'll Be The Day...

Now at least that is recogniseable, but the displayed name for the specially created style for Kites, which I play live on the keyboard was totally obliterated by meaningless symbols.

Despite that the sound was ok and we had a fabulous day playing non-stop from 11:30am through until 4:00pm. The circular garden before us had all seats taken throughout and the garden on the opposite side of the road remained full and there were lots of people standing to the side and even parking up in the car park with windows down to listen, whoop and wave at us! It's very gratifying when people come up to say they have travelled quite a few miles just because we were appearing! Hope to see you again next year!

From One Garstang Gig to Another

It was a busy old day yesterday! From performing for several hours at the Arts & Music Festival we took a couple of hours break and then went to a venue in the town to perform at a private birthday party.

This was at the superb Wyrebank Banqueting Suite - what a great venue!

And what a great audience too! We almost ran out of business cards, thanks to all of you for the interest and support! If we could take an audience on tour it would be you!

So a fairly full weekend. My finger ends were smarting after 7 hours of guitar playing yesterday, we are back at the festival tomorrow and we had to turn down a booking for tonight as after a week's holiday last week I didn't think I'd have enough corn on my finger tips to play 4 gigs in 3 days! I know... what a wimp!

A big thank you to friends Sandra and Gordon who came to see us in Garstang at the festival and who, when hearing we had another gig in the town without enough time to get home to eat and change, immediately offered us a meal and facilities at their home. A wonderful meal with special people.

Garstang Arts & Music Festival 2010

Yesterday afternoon we were in our usual spot at the Garstang Arts & Music Festival.

The weather had been very mixed and indeed after an hour or so we had a really heavy shower that had us dismantling and hurrying everything into the building behind us.

After an hour I'd managed to dry everything out apart from my shirt and with the sun making sporadic apprearances we set up again and played a couple of hours, attracting a decent sized audience.

Here's a video of our version of Concrete and Clay.

Morecambe FC Part 2

Yesterday we were back at the new Globe Arena in Morecambe to play for an hour and a half before the match. There were some seriously mouth-watering smells coming from food being served in the room.

Thanks to all those who gave us such wonderful feedback and comments both about yesterday and our performances on Tuesday.

BBC League Cup Show Appearance

Well, perhaps the two cameramen weren't both from Sky... We picked up a goodly 2 seconds of exposure on BBC One's League Cup Show last night with the camera zooming into the band.

It can be seen (for a week only I expect) here: BBC iPlayer

Creeping Bentgrass at the Globe Arena

Great night last night as we played at the very first home match at Morecambe Football Club's new Globe Arena.

We were filmed by a Sky Sports News crew, playing before the match.

I had a little trouble with feedback through the guitar for some reason - never happened before but the ceiling was very low where we were and there were accoustic panels next to us bouncing sound back so I suspect it may have been that. We set up in a corner during the match, coming off the stage area and it improved enough to allow us to play a decent volume with a clean guitar sound.

We had to keep away from anything requiring fuzzed guitar but we have over 6 hours of material to draw on and we played for only a couple of hours after the match.

We got some good feedback (from guests and staff rather than the unwanted sort) and picked up another booking for a wedding and are back at Morecambe FC for a pre-match spot on Saturday! Morecambe won their match against Coventry 2:0 so it was a winning night all round!

Lancaster Golf Club

A brilliant night last night out at Lancaster Golf Club.

It was meant to be an open air event with a bar-b-que but the weather was most definitely not looking conducive to sitting outside and so we set up inside the clubhouse where we treated club members to some gentle songs whilst they ate and then went into full-on 60s mode and got them singing along and dancing.

We had a break whilst the prize giving ceremonies were conducted and then wound up the night with some rock and roll and then some gentler tunes for couples to dance together.

A very enthusiastic audience - we have to say a big thank you for making us so welcome and we look forward to coming back on New Year's Eve!