Last night we were happy to play for Sean’s birthday upstairs in a pub in Islington.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That is not OK. You can’t play ska with no drums at all.<\/p>\n
So we negotiated a compromise: no kick (bass) drum and brushes rather than sticks.<\/p>\n
We dubbed this chamber ska.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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