Wish you were here…

Seriously.  I wish you had been there.  Yes you.  Royal Chant just played what was, at the time, our last show of the year, and although the room was comfortably full we wish it had been uncomfortably packed.  As in sweating and heaving in one giant mass packed.  Since we didn’t have that, and since you weren’t there, I thought I might share some of the highlights* of the night.

*(by highlights I mean whatever we managed actually get on tape).

We kicked off the evening with something new.  Brand new.  This was the public debut of “Junk Theory”, a song that I’m finding increasingly difficult to finish off.  As it was, we only played one verse and a bit of the chorus, which was probably more than enough.  Highly observant folks will note that it’s Matt on guitar, and me on drums, which was a nice way of breaking up the doldrums of our usual roles.  A member of one of the opening bands came up after the show to helpfully tell me that he liked this song but I’m not as good on drums as Matt.  Also, since I’m in charge here, I’d like to point out that James started off his bass riff with the time turned around.  Once that happens it’s almost impossible to turn it back around, so I gave him a dirty look and swapped the time for him.  I think we charged him a beer for his infraction.  It happens.  Anyway, here it is….

I’m not sure when we played this next crop of songs, but it was somewhere in the middle.  They are “Oh, The Shame” followed by “Irish Eyes” and “Hesitation Kills”.  We’re going into the studio again next month, and hopefully when we leave we will have one, if not two or three of these songs ready to take over the airwaves of your local 15 watt community radio station.

Love my reliable gear.

And lastly, here is “A Series Of Sighs”.  This isn’t a new one, having come out on Raise Your Glass & Collapse, but there’s something special about this version.  I can’t say what it is exactly, but it strikes me as one of our better performances.  Maybe it’s watching James jump (right around the 2:15 mark).  Maybe it’s something else.  What do you think?  Help me out here, I’ve not got much to work with.

And that’s a wrap.  We played more songs than that of course, but it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.  And yes, I did subtitle every song in our set as “North American sex life”.  I said it once and kept running with it because it works with nearly every song in our catalog.  “Bored Awake”, “A Series Of Sighs”, “Oh, The Shame” You get the idea.  I’m a riot.

So here I am on a crap Summer day.  There hasn’t been a wave in weeks, and today is not looking any better.  There’s a very popular music Festival on in town, but I can’t be bothered going coz I’m far too cynical and jaded to enjoy much of anything at the moment.

What we thought was our last gig of the year has turned out to be our second-to-last, as we will be playing at the Beach House right here in sunny (in theory) Port Macquarie  for their Boxing Day Bash.  I have yet to understand what Boxing Day is, where it comes from and why we need an extra day off of work after having both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to ourselves, but from what I can tell here in Regional NSW it involves most of the townsfolk getting really, really drunk.  That’s where we step in, taking the stage to play in front of a wild, unruly audience who would prefer to hear AC/DC and will not stop letting you know that very fact.  Should be a riot.  Literally.

I know we have posted this photo before, but since we’re broke and don’t have an advertising budget we had to make up a crappy poster.

Oh boy!

That is all from here.  There is a very real chance that I won’t do anything special here for the holidays, so if that is the case I’d like to take the time now to thank you very much for reading, listening, and staying in touch over the past 2 1/2 years of this blog.  This is a very, very, very small corner in the online universe, but it is mine/ours/yours and it means a lot to me.  Thank you all very much.  Happy Holidays to you and yours.  Stay safe and stay in touch.

Cheers,

M

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Tags: A Series Of Sighs, FBi Social, Garage, Hesitation Kills, Irish Eyes, Junk Theory, Kings Cross, Live, Music Videos, Rock, Royal Chant, Songs, Songwriting