28/01/05, Part I.

So, we played a gig.

It all started here, on the back of a Galaxy wrapper, in the King's Bar in Bruntsfield. Filled with curry and the most expensive beer ever, we studiously ignore minor radio celebrity Grant Stott to hammer out the order of songs we could play already, songs we wanted to learn, and in a couple of cases, songs we hadn't actually written at that point.

In the end we stuck to the original set list pretty closely, only swapping Sister Isabel and Seven Nation Army, and replacing Whole Lotta Monkey (a rather too Zeppelin-esque Zep tribute) with a newly written song.

(It's a relief to be able to talk about the set list at last; we made a semi-serious effort to keep it a secret until the gig. This was only thwarted by a few minor problems:

• It's hard to keep any bassline a secret from flatmates that sleep only yards away from a bass amp resting on a solid wooden floor;
  
• Your correspondent's tongue can be fairly reliably loosened by the application of beer and/or the company of a beautiful young lady;
  
• Dom told everyone anyway :)
  

The rehearsals were by turns hungover, late, sullen, antagonistic and bored. But when they worked, which was more often than not, they went reassuringly well. We learned Creep in a single session. In another, an idly-played bassline was turned into our encore in the hurried 15 minutes before we had to pack up and leave:

Doug: "Did you come up with that?"
Me: "Er, yes. I think. Anyone recognise it?"
All: "Nope."

The patented "Sod it - let's make it a 12-bar blues song," approach was applied, and we were playing MonkeyFour before we knew it. A few bars in, Dave grabbed the microphone and sang, and Happy Twenty Thirty-Fourth Birthday just sort of happened, inspired by a hazily remembered Hogmanay incident.

To be continued...