Bad gigs, creative input and fun.

The lights go down, the DJ stops, you walk on stage pick up your instrument and prepare to start playing. You're looking your best, you strike up with a fast paced song to get people going, get them excited... they're still eating their chicken & chips or chatting to people over by the bar and hardly notice you exist as anything more than a sudden volume increase.

Recently I've been getting a bit annoyed with the band I'm in. I'll give you a quick explanation of what we do for those of you not in the know. We are an 11 piece soul tribute band. We play weddings, birthdays, corporate functions... hell, we'll play your funeral if you book us (note to self: book a band to play at my wake). The problem is we've been playing the same 30-40 songs for the last 3 years and although we're much better than when we started, we still get things wrong. The problem is that I'm bored with the songs we're doing and that when things go wrong the band falls apart.

We've also played some horrible gigs recently. Ok, so I'd only had an hour's sleep before an 8am start at the last one but when the technology fails, the band panics and the host is a coked up douche-hole it just isn't fun. Top that off with a horrible get-out finishing at 2am and you've got an Albull being very physical and active for 18 hours and not even enjoying it.

I need to get out of this rut and improve on some of the songs and get OTB Rock going, play some completely different music and enjoy it again. Oh and sort out the chain of command on stage. It seems that although Viv may control the negotiations best and Sean is the frontman what we need is someone from the backline who knows the entire songs inside out musically who can make decisions and take charge when the guitar amp fails/bass batteries die/keyboard melts... whatever. That's a point... I need to learn all the introductions to the songs so I can replecate them in case of emergency.

The great thing about writing a blog is it can be cathartic... even if no one reads it :-p I'm in a better mindset now and I'll get on making OTB Soul fun again. I mean it's either that or just quit, and I don't want to do that now do I?

This is Albull, last surviving member of OTB Polka signing off.