We had a great time. Here are some pictures. There should be some video to come too.
Nigel stood in a dark corner all night. Bass players are like that. So there are none of him.
A special thanks to our guest alto player Ian.
If you missed this gig, our next public one is on Friday August 3rd at Round Midnight in Islington.
UPDATE: Some feedback from the bride “Thanks so much for the music it was great. Lots of people came and told me how much they enjoyed the band”.
We had a great gig yesterday, playing for a wedding in the heart of the City.
The venue was the Stationers’ Hall. This dates back to 1673, and is the home for the Livery Company for printers and stationers.
We rather doubt if it’s very splendid hall has ever reverberated to the sound of ska before, but we had a lot of fun -and the number of people dancing suggested the guests did too.
We were followed by the London School of Samba who certainly kept the energy levels high.
There wasn’t much chance to take photos, but here’s a few that give some flavour of the hall.
We had a terrific gig at the Ritzy last night. It’s a great place to play as it’s a smallish room with a good sound system and an engineer who knows how to use it.
And we got a good crowd – friends of the band, friends of support act the Tootones (great set, guys) and quite a few Brixton locals who just fancied an evening of ska.
It’s always fun to be be able to play two sets too. That means we can vary what we play a lot more and give our soloists a chance to play out a bit more. We were lucky enough to have ace tenor player Dan Berry guesting with us last night as Leah was involved in preparing for her sister’s wedding. He and Steve made for a fantastic partnership as they play a lot together.
So we had a great time, and the energy most of the audience put into dancing suggests they did too.
The only bad thing about Upstairs at the Ritzy is that it is upstairs – and carrying amps up three flights of stairs is a bit of a pain.
But if it wasn’t a big old cinema, then they wouldn’t be able to our name up outside along with the films. (You can click on these for the full picture.)
We had a fun gig at Streatham’s White Lion last night – a really good warm-up for our longer gig at Brixton’s Upstairs at the Ritzy tonight.
As Nick had a gig in Harlow, we were lucky to get Annie to guest on trombone.
We took a few pictures at the sound check and while we grabbed some food before playing.
We are all just back from a fabulous function gig in the middle of some woods on the Hampshire/Dorset border.
As it was half-way between two villages – one in Dorset and the other in Hampshire we are not exactly sure in which county we actually played the gig.
This was an elaborate affair. It lasted all-night, and the logistics of putting a big event in a clearing genuinely in the middle of some woods accessible only by farm track were colossal.
And did I say it was fancy dress – with a Regency theme. So most of the men were in huge wigs (the audience – not the band.)
Mark ready to play
We got to play one long set starting about 1:15 in the morning in a huge marquee – with an extremely professional sound company doing the PA. It’s not that often we get our own monitor engineer and individual monitor mixes for each band member. Quite often we don’t have any engineers at all.
I’m not sure that ska is very Regency, but that did not stop the audience dancing continuously. We have no idea where they got the energy.
We were looked after very well too – and came off stage to a cooked breakfast at 3am.
our post gig breakfast
And then after a few hours sleep at the village pub, we got up for another fry-up before a somewhat weary return to London.
We now have a fantastic set of new band photos.
We’ve updated the website with them so the best way to see them is to go to the photo page for the band shots and the members page to see some new moody pix of individual members.
Those who like detective work may like to work out which band member was late for the shoot and who forgot to bring their instrument.
We have have also added a new promoters page to the website where band logos and hi-res versions of six of the photos can be downloaded.
Thanks again to David for some great work.
We’ve just spent Sunday lunchtime have some proper professional band photos done by the very talented David Charlwood.
You can see some of his work here on Flickr.
It’s been many years since we had a band photo session. The superstitious risk is that as soon as you have proper pix the band line-up changes and the photos become out of date.
But we have now had the longest ever stable membership so we expect it can survive some photos.
Rightly we assumed that we could find somewhere quiet in the City, but not so quiet we didn’t get a parking ticket.
I expect we will be able to post some photos in the next few days.
Thanks to Annie for taking these pictures on Saturday.
If you click on an image it will get a bit bigger.
And one mystery image is enormous.
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Pictures from Upstairs at the Ritzy, Brixton, Janury 8th 2010
