Chamber ska in Islington | The Skamonics - London ska band

By skamonic

Last night we were happy to play for Sean’s birthday upstairs in a pub in Islington.

The management had told Sean that live music was fine, but there was a limiter that would shut down the power if we went too loud.

That’s fine with us. We do not need to turn everything up to 11, particularly in a relatively small room. We can hear ourselves better at lower volumes.

But it turned out to be much stricter than that, as there was also a no drums rule for the evening as the pub had some folk in the room below.

That is not OK. You can’t play ska with no drums at all.

So we negotiated a compromise: no kick (bass) drum and brushes rather than sticks.

We dubbed this chamber ska.

But it worked surprisingly well. Sean had already told us to concentrate on our 60s material – a client of fine taste. So by concentrating on some of the jazzier numbers and ditching the most raucous we still managed a full two sets, and it certainly did not stop anyone dancing as the floor was full the whole evening.

As we chopped and changed the set around, this may not be quite what we played – but it’s mostly right if probably in the wrong order.