Hello all, how the devil are you? My second gig with The Quik was just as much fun as my first to be honest and I was really looking forward to it as it was in my old stomping ground of Bromsgrove. In fact it was on February 14, 2008 that I came out of “retirement” as it were with a full band project (Greenheadman) with much enjoyment of success. And so I always associate this venue with good times; the landlord is a musician himself and puts live music on as often as he can, he provides the PA and the monitors and is an overall good egg.
Then I saw the weather forecast. It was not good, in fact it was bad. Snow snow snow was forecast and it did indeed come. Now as a musician who plays a lot of gigs I’ve already got my winter tyres on but it still makes you worry about having all the equipment in the back of the car and having to leave it on a roadside somewhere because you get stuck. As it turned out we got there okay, I was doing somewhere between 20 and 30 miles an hour on the dual carriageway to the venue and it was only until I saw that all cars were slipping and sliding and maybe doing 1 to 3 miles an hour that I realised that my winter tyres were doing a good job. Still it took me over an hour to drive a miles 🙁
Anyway as usual the band were all there before me, and I say as usual that is as usual with this band. With my last band it was entirely reversed and I was always their first. Ed the drummer drove over at 3 PM just to be on the safe side .
So it was to be a good night and a good gig, we were not sure considering the amount of snow whether the pub would fill up or not and indeed as the start of the first set there were properly only about 50 people in the audience. But good solid drinkers that the people Bromsgrove are we were pleased to see that the place was full by the time we finished our second set.
From a technical point of view what I’m enjoying about this band is my ability to make use of some of the extra functions on the Hammond organ that I was not previously able to use because they were too subtle for the band I was in. I’m enjoying using the Hammond chorus and vibrato settings, with Leslie switched off, the more subtle percussion and key click settings and I’ve even managed to un-wedge the B-3 tone wheel setting (using the 50’s greasy wheels individual tone wheels that I got from Jim – more on that later) and select a very bright Vox Continental style sound for a couple of The Animals songs that we do.
The gig went well, I didn’t make too many mistakes, and in fact started to embellish a lot of the stuff that I had to learn in such a short space of time.
Looking forward to the next gig which is on 25 February at the pillar of salt in Droitwich,
See you there
Nick