I’ve been away, hence the slight hiatus in posts. Acuphuncture played at Jazz at John’s on March 2nd, which was a nice bit of repeat business, though with all the same presentational issues of the last time: why do they hire a big PA and sound guy set up, yet insist on keeping all the house lights up? Hire some lights, guys, it’s supposed to be a party! Regarding the sound, I’m starting to wonder about Mulletboy’s style; I remember Derek commenting on the recording from last year’s gig that his kit sounded like a huge rock monster, and the same effect was achieved with Seb’s kit this time (Seb kindly standing in for Derek whilst the latter was off doing a big band gig.) Still, disregarding this stylistic difference, it’s difficult to fault the quality of the sound, so I shouldn’t split hairs.
Support was provided by a random student band that apparently was going to be the house band for a play later in the term… though they didn’t play anything from their show, instead doing a bunch of Commitments style covers. It was passable enough, though a little difficult to explain what the hell they were doing at a jazz gig until the chap who organised the evening turned out to be in the band. Ah ha.
Unusually everything ran pretty much according to schedule, so we played 10.30 ’til midnight, with a setlist that only included one new cover, Jamiroquai’s High Times. (I’m particularly pleased to be covering this because it contains one of my favourite guitar solos - it’s not tricky, it’s just right.) Because of the busy-ness that I’ve mentioned previously I hadn’t done much practice, so I opted to substitute volume for skill and took my big amp. This actually turned out to be fortuitous, because our on-stage levels were up in the ear-buggering zone; generally I’ll run the amp in half power (20W), but I had to take it up to full power to maintain a reasonable clean tone. However the foldback was able to cope nicely, so despite the volume we were all able to hear what was going on. All told, not a bad gig; I’ll have to start doing my bit and see if I can land some others, because I think Tom’s sorted them all out so far…
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