Hello all,

It’s good to be out and playing again I can tell you. This weekend saw me and the rest of The Quik driving up (or is it down? ) to Kettering to play Watercress Harry’s. Having never been to Kettering before my first impression was that it was a very quiet place then a second impression was that it’s impossible to get to the pub due to be incomprehensible one way system! I managed it in the end and managed to park pretty much outside the venue for the duration.

Things are going very well with The Quik and my Hammond is getting a good bashing on a regular basis. One bonus feature of this band is that I get to use my excellent Korg stage vintage (SV-1) electric piano. I’ve always been an organist and have never been, like so many others, trained initially on piano. What I do I have had to learn myself. Hopefully that makes me more of a purist on the organ, who knows.

Playing organ in a rock band is not about covering all of the bases sonically so you don’t need to use bass pedals you don’t *have* to use the left hand because you’re not a one man band and you have a bass player and the guitar player and the drummer etc. There are a couple of reasons why you might want to playing left hand on an overdriven Hammond organ and this is mainly because of the ways affects the sound of the right hand – but more on that another time. The same goes in many ways for piano in a band situation, although there is often need for a proper piece of piano playing usually for intros or middle eights – let’s face in a louder band environment no one is going to thank you for playing across the baseline or high up in the vocalists range.

But on Saturday the piano came out, set pretty rigidly to Rhodes and stun it did an excellent job and I was pleased to get it out and on the road again. I have used it before with green head man but I was always able to blag the gig with just the organ if I had to but with The Quik you just can’t play the zombies she’s not there on the Hammond! In my last Band I felt that the piano was frowned upon as a bit of an intruder (or certainly an over the top expense) as they only really wanted Hammond so it’s good to get the purchase appreciated fully in my eyes.

The venue was very nice, the get in was a dream and the sound check was over by a 810. A quick stroll round the town and a bit of tea and I was ready for anything.

After 930 the venue filled up quite nicely and I was pleased to see people of all ages and hair types getting off on the music. A lot of what we playe is not only modernist and scooter music but is also appeared in film soundtracks and adverts and so this gets a very good response. We were pretty tight considering we’ve only had five rehearsals and an audition together something that was much commented on by individual members of the audience afterwards – which is nice.

Its probably no coincidence that I have been playing the entire set in my studio at home seven days a week since the week before the audition – there is only one way to have this kind of thing – practice.

The gig went well and an encore occurred, we would have done a second encore but we had run out of songs as I have only been in the band since January! Note to self – learn more songs.

The get down was quite sweet with the lovely exit door and ramp situated at the back of the staging area. That said we didn’t leave Kettering until 12.20 which put me tucked up in bed just after 2.00.

It’s good to be playing live again. I’m playing in Bromsgrove next week, Saturday, the 4th of February, at the hop pole maybe I’ll see some of you there…..

See you next time/week

Nick