It’s been a couple of weeks since our gig at the Ritzy in Brixton. As we have been redesigning the website (and it’s not quite finished yet) it’s not been possible to add new posts.
But it was a great gig, with a lively and enthusiastic audience. Chris even brought his mum.
We had fun playing the Ritzy in Brixton last week.
So did the audience from the amount of dancing that went on.
We played our version of Chariots of Fire – which of course is now Chariots of Ska – for the first time – and revived our version of Dr Who which we haven’t played for ages.
This is what I think we played. And there are some photos below.
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.)
The cool thing about about playing at the Ritzy is that you get your name up on the big sign outside where they normally put all the films. Its not quite having your name in lights, but it’s pretty close.
It’s been very quiet for us lately. We’d like to say that being musicians we live the kind of lifestyle when unexplained absences mean that we have all been rushed to rehab, but are now in recovery.
But that wouldn’t be true. We have just not had any gigs for some time.
We have still been rehearsing and that means there will be some new songs in our set soon.
But we now have a couple of public gigs to add to the private function gigs in our book (which are always more common in the summer.)
This is our first post in the new Skamonics blog. Here is where you can expect gig updates; news about the band and its members; and perhaps the odd thought about music.
Our first gig in 2010 is on Friday Jan 8th, and it’s upstairs at the Ritzy in Brixton. We expect to play our first set at about 8:30.
This will be our first gig playing with a slimmed down six person format. We’ll have two horns and a bit more emphasis on vocal numbers.
This isn’t a change in our line-up as we will still do gigs with a full nine piece wall of ska sound, but it’s not always practical or economic to field the full team. We can’t even fit on some stages.
The Evening Standard describes us as a ska collective – which is just about right.
They also say that we will be performing songs from our repertoire.
This is puzzling as it’s a bit obvious. After all it would be quite hard to perform songs that weren’t in our repertoire, and simply by performing them we’d be adding them to our repertoire.
But there will be at least a couple of new numbers, and the return of some that we have rarely played. Both pedants and ordinary people are very welcome.
