Hello all. Well, here goes with my first “proper” WordPress blog. How exciting 🙂
Last night saw Panic Room head off to the Little Civic in Wolverhampton for the latest gig on our mini tour ( does that make it a Tourette???). As longterm followers of the band know, getting us together can be a challenge – we picked Gavin up from Birmingham International Airport, as he was flying back from Fish’s tour that morning, and Anne travelled down from York as she’d been rehearsing with Mostly Autumn in preparation for their upcoming gigs. But somehow we still got there with plenty of time to spare.
The Litttle Civic is a nice rock club alongside Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall, with poster plastered walls, loads of room backstage, and (oddly) a large chandelier, which can be seen along with other random pics over at my Panic Room tour page. The backstage area is a bit of a labyrinth and did remind a lot of the scene in Spinal Tap where they can’t find the stage and keep going in circles :-)The load in isn’t the nicest though, a couple of flights of stairs interspersed with dodging the local traffic wardens who seemed to pounce from nowhere.
Once the gear was in, the virus I’ve been keeping at bay decided to rear its ugly little head, leaving me to sit in the dressing room for 10 minutes until the room stopped spinning – no fun!
Mike, the local sound engineer, was great – getting everything set up very quickly. Due to the shape of the stage ( about 20ft deep but only 12ft wide) I ended up setting up my gear behing Paul’s cab in the “naughty corner” – not ideal but OK ( and it meant that I could at least kneel on the stage behind the cab when I wasn’t playing without making it obvious that I was having trouble standing up!)
Soundcheck took a little while due to some mysterious gremlins playing havoc with Jon’s mixer and Anne’s pedalboard. we still managed to run through a few songs to make sure we could remember them before sneaking off to the local KFC while Quecia set up for their acoustic set.
We got back to find that one of Quecia had gone missing – the traffic wardens had struck again and he was frantically driving around looking for somewhere to park :-(. As Quecia started ( they were fantastic incidentally), we realised one of Gav’s bags was missing. It turned out that some kids had snuck in through the back door and run off with it. We got the bag back but not his MP3 player 😦 Assholes!
Our set was basically the same as the one we played at Cardiff’s Point in September:
Elektra City, Reborn, Sandstorms, Into The Fire, Banks of The Ohio ( dedicated to Nigel Bradford-Sharp as he’s previously mentioned to Jon that he didn’t like it 🙂 Jon is cruel sometimes 🙂), Firefly, Go, Endgame, Hadditfeel, Domino ( the last two were performed solo by Anne), Yasuni, Black Noise, Apocalypstick, I Wonder
Due to the venue’s strict curfew we only intended on doing Blood Red Sky as the encore but we weren’t going to be allowed to escape that easily and went back for an unexpected, but lovely, second encore – No Quarter.
The sound,lights ( by Mostly Autumn bassist, Andy) and audience were all fantastic – what a great night. I only wish I’d felt better and been able to enjoy it more. We also sold a load of merchandise ( thanks as always to Ray and Steph for their hard work!) The venue cleared the audience very quickly after the show so apologies to anyone we didn’t get to see ( I know I missed a couple of people-sorry!).
After the gig, we huddled into Paul’s borrowed Freelander to do a quick Radio interview for a new station in Bridgnorth. It was fun but intimate 🙂
Can’t wait to the next one now, which will be next Friday in the Marrs Bar, Worcester. Hope to see some of you there!
Take care
Alun
Stumble It!
Alun Vaughan 