Saturday, January 28, 2006

Shaftsbury Avenue nights...

OK, this is yet another non-musical post. But I've just come back from London (I did buy a bottle of lemon oil for the cleaning of oily skin deposits off bass necks, just used up the last of my stock) where Nic and I saw "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at the Apollo in Shaftsbury Avenue, following a light snack of burger king in leicester square. Bad, I know, but it was one meal between two and we really needed it - as it turns out, the performance lasts 3 hours(!) and you need to be able to follow what is at times fast paced dialog, and some twisting and twisted tales :)

Seriously, I'd recommend it to anyone - great cast, some real belly laughs.

Afterwards we had chinese down chinatown, really good crispy duck and a top chicken and salty fishbits fried rice. I'm stuffed!

I will now return to practising my arse off. Tomorrow I'll be posting a few megs of rehearsal bootlegs to the website for our new drummer to download, so he can get a good reminder of structures! Plus, it'll be some stuff for people to download.

They may well be bass-heavy though - I tend to record these for my own reference, so most of them have bass only in the left or right channel and a mic pointed into the rehearsal room for the other stuff. Does the job!

Speaking of which, this rehersal place we're going to be using looks pretty good: prices top out at £10 odd an hour on sundays, but during the weekdays the day rate is £6.75 an hour(!) - when I used to rehearse at Stage2000 in dundee the rate there was anywhere between 8 and 12 pounds an hour!

And having just checked their site it's still exactly the same!

I dunno, I just expected rehearsal rooms to be more expensive in london: after all, you're ripping off people with dreams here, they'll pay... and the gear at Panic Music is nice too: ashdown rigs in most of the rooms, and trace gear in the others!

So I won't have to take my rehearsal rig with me, which is a real bonus. We won't have to set up PA systems either, which is cool too. Hopefully Jake will have more time on his hands (depending on what job he ends up with in london I guess) as he won't be trying so hard to pay rent on a studio space at industrial unit rates. I'll miss the space at Witney, but I can see good reasons for moving to london (most of which must be obvious to anyone who knows the biz)...

Wish us luck. I think it's going to be an interesting few months... actually, I saw something on a poncey record review slot on GMTV the other day that made me think. They'd just finished singing the praises of Arctic Monkeys (whose rise I followed a bit in the music press) and then they mentioned the Go Team - who I read about a couple of years ago. Their gigs were supposed to be insanely energetic affairs, real fun stuff - they obviously kept plugging this whole time and now they're making waves. If they can hack it for two years, I can!

Now to get the 6 string hooked up to the pandora.

C ya l8r

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