It’s a great small venue, and we’ve always had a brilliant time there.
And this Friday we play Upstairs at the Ritzy in Brixton again.
It’s just £5 for two full sets.
And we’re rather proud of our poster.
Yesterday we braved wind and rain to play in aid of the Royal National Hospital for Neuro-Disability on an outdoor stage at St Mary’s Church, Putney – just by the river.
While the weather was not with us, we still had fun and helped raise some money for a great cause.
This is what we played:
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Next Saturday – Feb 27 2016 – we play two full sets for free at Croydon’s Oval Tavern.
The Oval Tavern is at 131 Oval Road, CR0 6BR.
The gig will start at about 8:30.
And we have a few new tunes to try out.
When Phineas Fogg set off to get around the world in eighty days, he left from the Reform Club on Pall Mall in the heart of London’s club land.
And this is where we played a gig last night.
It is a very grand building that reeks of history, and the many distinguished people who have passed through its doors.
As it’s so grand, we had to dress up. The pre-gig refreshments was also a cut above what we sometimes get.
And this is what we played in one long set:
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People sometimes say that they like our videos but wonder whether we can play as well live, as studio trickery these days is supposed to make anything sound good.
The short answer to that is that we by and large record live in the studio. What we gain from the studio is the opportunity to record in a good acoustic, use better microphones and balance the levels of the instruments in the mix afterwards.
The long answer is that we were able to record and video a gig recently. Of course it does not sound as good as a studio recording as we simply took a feed from the PA and were unable to do any mixing after the event. And Veronica had a terrible cold.
Neither is it a very exciting video as we had just the one camera.
But we think it does give a good flavour of what we are like live – and the audience seem to be enjoying it.
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A year ago we were asked to play at the opening of a country pub near Andover.
We were delighted to asked back to play at their first birthday party.
This nearly turned into the gig from hell as the car carrying Veronica, Frank, Nigel and the PA system got stuck in in terrible traffic despite having left what should have been more than enough time to get there well in advance.
Even on the last ten miles they got stuck behind a tractor for most of the way. This does not happen on the way to gigs in Camden.
We were due to start playing at 8pm. The rest of the band were therefore more than relieved when the PA turned up at 7:20.
With a little bit of luck, a lot of organisation and a 3 minute sound check we were still able to play our first song by a few minutes past 8. It was good that we were playing in a marquee as they help prevent feedback.
And once we were playing everyone relaxed into a great party atmosphere and we played two hour long sets to much appreciation. Everyone seemed more chilled about our late arrival than we were – as we pride ourselves on a professional approach. But you can’t plan for that many accidents on the M25 and M4.
This is what we played.
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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.
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An Australian film-maker asked us if he could use our version of My Boy Lollipop for a short film he was entering in a competition.
We said yes.
And this is the result.
It may not be Halloween, but we like it.
[tube]uXrJz0WsoHA[/tube]
This is a tune we always play on gigs, so there are three chances to hear it live in the next few months.
Here is the second product from our recent recording session Tainted Love.
[tube]10KiwI5x_AU[/tube]
This is the one song that we attempted to video in the recording studio.
It is fair to say that we learnt from this that if you want a quality video you need someone else in charge of videoing. You can’t play instruments and video a recording session at the same time. It also needs a lot of time that we did not have as we were always clear that getting good recordings to showcase our playing and repertoire was the priority. And we think we have achieved that.
It is also not a good idea to think that you will get decent video without having at least some lighting when you are in a somewhat womb-like recording studio. You also need a very fast and powerful PC to edit so many tracks of video, otherwise you lose sync between the sound and picture when you edit.
It would perhaps be giving too much away to explain all the tricks we used to try to salvage the video, in addition to some miming after the recording session that we always knew that we would need. After all there is nothing wrong with a retro Top of the Pops vibe!
But while you can do that easily with vocals and the bass, it doesn’t work so well with drums where we had the worst camera failure in the studio. So the video concentrates more on the vocals and horns and rather neglects the rhythm section.
And while we planned to do it in black and white – to match our band photos – giving it a creamy film noir treatment has also helped hide some problems.
But having broken the cardinal rule of band PR to be always positive and upbeat, we think it’s come out OK.
After all the important thing is the music and we are very pleased with these recordings – the video is always a lower priority.
There are three tunes to come which we are busy mixing.
