The Acoustimass Project - The Victoria 8/9/11

Other Acts: Paul Heeley, Thornleaf, Stokie Mart, Julia Rowley, Sarah and Jonno, Ed Lawton

Venue: The Victoria Hotel, Stoke

We arrived early to this event in order to ask James to record a couple of songs for us. We're interested in putting more of our work out there, so we recorded the same 2 songs around 8 or so times each!!! Crazy, but hopefully worth it, we might get a working couple of demos out of it!

There was a plethora of talent there, as is often the case with The Acoustimass Open Mic night. So many good acts and so many shakey/drummy things!! lol

We tried out a couple of new ones (Forever and the one with no title as yet), which were warmly received, though it made us aware that we need to work on them more. However, onwards and upwards!!

The Boat Band Acoustic night - The Greyhound 7/09/11

Other acts: The Boat Band, plus the usual menagerie of performers from various places

Venue: The Greyhound, Penkhull.

The Boat Band do really put on a show, a mix of folk/cajun.. whatever...
Everyone has a play, everyone inputs a dance/song/poem, whatever and managed to make for a very entertaining evening!

Band of the Land competition - The Vic 03/09/11

Other Acts: No Redemption/Thornleaf and Beyond the Blaze

Venue: The Victoria

Well. this was a rather unexpected gig. Phone call received at 7.30pm from James (No Redemption/Thornleaf) asking if we'd like to support them at The Vic. We were totally unaware of the Band of The Land competition and they had entered it, simply instead we thought we'd be providing a musical interlude.

We arrived at the venue within half an hour to be told we'd been entered into the Band of the Land 2011 competition!

Lots were drawn, and we pulled second! First to entertain were Beyond the Blaze a group of young lads from Coventry, who apparently had only been together for a couple of months.. All original material and loads of enthusiasm.
We were up second with: Forever, Je Ne Regrette Rien, At Seventeen, and others.
No Redemption/Thornleaf went on third and generally blew everyone away.
Time for judges consultation was met with much mutual patting of heads and drinkies.. Then the winners were announced.
It was decided that all bands were good enough to go through to the semi-finals, with the overall winners of the night being Beyond the Blaze!!!
Watch this space for news on the competition!!

New songs and thoughts on them.

Well, the time has come for us to work on new songs. We've been singing the same 7 or so songs for the past few months and the decision was made to work on some original material and another cover. These things inevitably take time to come together, through discussion, disagreement, and downright hard work. Some songs are relitively easy to do. Their chord progressions make them easy to interpret and the lyrics are straightforward and might hold memories. Some songs are by their very nature tricky. They are hard to learn, hard to find a way into and hard to interpret. Thats why we choose to do them. No point in trolling out the same covers as everyone else, we made a  concious decision to work on material that very few actually cover, specifically because its difficult, it might have strange progressions, tricky time signatures, or otherwise tongue twisting lyrics.
One song has kept us busy for around 2 months now. It was refusing to be bent to our will. Whatever we did to it, something just wasn't "quite right" with it. Last night (Friday), we finally cracked the three songs we've been working on. Well... we cracked 2. Both original songs. We feel like we're accomplishing something now. Its inspiring us to create more songs and work harder on the ones we have already done.