By skamonic
We’re playing the Last Days of Decadence in Shoreditch tomorrow (that’s Saturday July 24th).
You can read about the gig – complete with a spectacularly out of date photo – here.
I’m not sure about the Oi! reference either. We don’t exactly do skinhead punk.
We’re due to play for an hour, so have set ourselves the challenge of fitting 15 songs in. Normally we play about 12 songs in an hour, but by having slightly shorter solos and moving slickly from one tune to the next, we will be trying for 15.
Come along with stopwatches and counters to find out how we do.
By skamonic
We had huge fun at the weekend playing a gig in a barn on a farm outside Reading.
This was no pretend theme-park kind of barn, but a real one with chickens and bales of straw.
The best thing was that we were able to get a great sound. Playing in the open air – or a marquee – can sometimes mean the sound tends to disappear into thin air, while playing a boxy space usually means you get feedback and strange sounds in the bass.
A barn turns out to be a happy medium. There’s enough structure to keep the sound from blowing away, yet we had no feedback or boxy sound issues.
That all worked to make a great two sets gig.
We had a special guest, Joe the Drummer, on drums who provided his usual rock solid groove.
And we at last got the chance to play our new ska’d up version of the Dr Who theme.
So thanks to Charlie for laying on a great gig – and for feeding us so well (something that doesn’t always happen!)
By skamonic
We are gearing up for a function gig this weekend near Reading.
It’s a private party so no more details in advance, though I’m sure we’ll do a report here.
But it’s now only a couple of weeks until our next public gig in London.
It’s Saturday July 24 at the Last Days of Decadence, 145 Shoreditch High Street, London, E1 6JE.
Here’s the Facebook invite – and here’s the venue website
By skamonic
A message from our client from the weekend:
Thank you so much for playing on Saturday. You were brilliant.
Even your errant keyboard player Leo had to admit it!
We enjoyed it too!
By skamonic
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.
By skamonic
We do not have very many full band rehearsals. Getting a time when everyone is free is always difficult, and we have a good gig-hardened repertoire anyway.
So it’s worth marking a rare (almost) full band rehearsal yesterday.
We have a big function gig in Dorset next weekend so as we haven’t had a gig for a few weeks it was good to get back in the skank.
It also gave us the chance to try out some new tunes.
We never like to announce these before we play them, but our version of the Dr Who theme which has yet to be played in public was sounding pretty good and we will definitely play that next weekend.
And in our continuing mining of the 1980s we have a great ska-ed up version of what – at least in the UK – was a one-hit wonder.
Here’s a clue. It was originally in German.
Perhaps we will persuade Leah to revive it in the original language.
By skamonic
We’ve added the Skamonics to Last.fm.
The best thing about this is that you can now listen to Skamonics radio – a stream of tunes either by the band or by similar artists. Given a few plays, it is clear that Last.fm has some fairly eccentric views about what music is similar to ours, but has also led to some interesting discoveries particularly in Europe.
Go on, give it a try.
You can find the Skamonics at Last.fm here: http://www.last.fm/music/Skamonics
By skamonic
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.
By skamonic
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.
By skamonic
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.)
So here are the diary dates:
- July 24th The Last Days of Decadence
- August 28th Upstairs at the Ritzy
