Blog: I'll See You In Hull

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Last night we played in Nottingham, and it was GRATE. I felt GOOD about it from the very beginnings - I met Tom at Leicester station as planned, we drove to Nottingham, and everybody turned up easily and punctually. GOOD - I know having a band of people who are ALL reliable and have all, at one time or another, run their OWN groups and so Actually Get On With Stuff isn't particularly GROOVY or Rock & Roll, but it doesn't half make life easy. ANYWAY, as we'd all arrived so on time we were lurking around outside chatting whilst Chris TT and co. did their soundcheck, when a young chap approached ME and asked what time we were on.

Now, this may not sound like much, but I was WELL chuffed - someone I didn't know had SPECIFICALLY come to see US! Hoorah! It turns out that Duncan (for that was his name) had read about us on NTK and downloaded stuff - GOD BLESS the Interweb, and Duncan, if you read this, thank you very much indeed, you made us HAPPY.

We soundchecked FINE, then popped over the road to The Goth Pub to sort out travel arrangements. I must say, GOTHS today are really NOT what they were. IN MY DAY your Goth would drink in whatever pub had the cheapest cider, and that was that. They certainly wouldn't drink in a ludicrous Goth Theme Pub, complete with plastic Dracula's Castle-Effect stone doors and gargoyles. Needless to say, with the decline in Goth Standards, the place was gently filling up with skinny pale boys and less skinny pale girls seemingly unconcerned that their supposed outsider culture was being repackaged and sold back to them. I bet their favourite Cure song is "Love Cats"!

We sat down and SORTED OUT travel arrangements for the remaining band gigs (we're going to drive back to Leicester, basically), Emma excused herself from the Hull Trip due to it being a really long way away and her being all pregnant, Tim raised the possibility of a semi-band ATAK in Brum, and, yet again, we wrought humour from Tom's recent wrist injuries. BAND STUFF! Then it was HO! for the venue, where we watched a stocky bloke play a cover version of a famous rap song on an acoustic guitar, then make Humorous Remarks afterwards... it was all a bit Twilight Zone really. He didn't half go on though, and I rather lost sympathy for him when he tried to BOTH play a song about how much he loved his girlfriend (who was present) AND pass it off as a joke exercise in songwriting. NO! That will not do! Also the talking went on FOREVER, I was GOING to tell him he should put the talking jokes INTO the songs, but it went on so long that we had to DASH for the stage to get going, so I didn't.

And then we were ON! Anyone who has been to The Social will know that it is a small-ish venue with the PA of a MASSIVE one, which points DIRECTLY at a huge wall about 20 feet from the speakers. THUS it is EXTREMELY LOUD, and so we must have made a RIGHT RACKET. It sounded pretty good to us on stage though, and the whole thing, to me, felt really GOOD and RELAXED. It's nice these days that we all seem to know what we're doing, and the only times I look around at everyone else is to GRIN at them. It was LOVELY. But LOUD.

Afterwards I had a chat with a few people - The Chemistry Experiment came down for the gig, and we DISCUSSED Recording Practices like Proper ROCK people. I also had a quick chat to Chris TT, and felt a bit of a twit when, excitedly talking about his recent Massive Exposure, I said "Cor! And did you do all the press stuff yourself? Or did someone help out?" "No," he said, "The record company has someone to do it." Oh yeah.

The Extreme Noise Theory was borne out by the INCREDIBLE LOUDNESS of Chris TT's band, so various of us HID in a quiet bit. We Seriously Discussed the content of our live shows (Tim wants to vary it a bit, I pointed out that that'd mean we'd have to practie...), got Quite Excited about recording the next album IN A WEEK, and IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, and then had a Group Hug. We all set off our various ways, with me going back to Tom's house, and DELIGHTING him by saying "I'll See You In Hull! ARF!" all the way home.

My band are GRATE, really they are.

posted 30/9/2003 by MJ Hibbett

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