There is now an updated gig list at our myspace site.

You can also keep up to date at our facebook page.

Oh yeah, we also twitter – tweet tweet!!

- Robb

It’s every cover band’s worst nightmare.  You tell the DJ that you’ll start after the next song. Then the opening bars of Whitesnakes’ ‘Here I Go Again’ float over the PA… 

See Robb jump out of his chair and run to the DJ.

See the DJ quickly change the record.

See our fans sniggering quietly in the corner.

See Ruth almost forget the words in all the commotion.

Despite that start, it was a great night on Saturday at the Bay Horse, Lindley, Huddersfield, thanks to all our supporters! A three-blister gig*.

Surprisingly, no-one believed me when I told the story about how Bad Company had stolen our song, ‘Feel like making love’, by inventing a time machine and then going back to the 1970s so they could release it first.

Some people are just skeptics I guess.

*Adam thought this was a better indicator of gig success than the stick breaking.  I’m not convinced.  There’s not much cooler** than playing so hard you break your drumsticks.

**Ok so there’s lots of things that are cooler.  But maybe not if you’re a drummer ***

***sorry adam and other drummers. promise I’ll start making jokes about other people soon.

Silverthorn rocked Mirfield! A definite 2-stick rated* gig.  The Wasp’s Nest, Mirfield, was jam packed with quite probably the best crowd we’ve ever had. And less than half were people we knew!  This was our first full-night gig in a pub without any other bands playing and without any false sense of modesty, I think we did rather well.  The evidence? We’ve been invited back and have been asked to do one birthday party and one wedding as a result.

Favourite moment? Playing ‘I hate everything about you’ by Ugly Kid Joe on Hallmark Day, oops I meanValentine’s Day.  Can’t beat a bit of anti-romantic feeling. Well, when you think about it, it’s a day celebrating the brutal murder of a priest.  Not much romantic about that.

*That is, the number of drumsticks broken by Adam. This is how all gigs will be rated from now on.

Tuesday saw our first mention in the press! Ok, so it was an article about my Dad. In the Halifax Courier.  But nevertheless, we got a mention! Hurray! Check it out here.

Us? Too metal? What?!

So Robb was messing about with his special guitar at our rehearsal on Monday, playing it on the ’sitar’ setting, which was quite amusing, and then someone starting singing “bhaji, when I think about you, I think about grub”, leading onto a load of other food-related changes to song lyrics, such as “you never korma when you’re sober”.

So here’s a competition – best food-related changed song lyric gets a prize…

It’s been a long time since we rehearsed a couple of songs; mostly because they require Robb’s special keychanging/guitarchanging guitar and he hasn’t been bringing it to rehearsals recently.  So this week we rehearsed ‘feel like making love’ for the first time in ages and when we were finished Adam was all happy and stuff and said “that was like seeing an old friend for the first time in ages… you know, when you think I really like him, how come we don’t see each other more often?”

So here’s to old friends…

So we were rehearsing last night and we were practicing a newish song of ours. We all made a few mistakes but it’s a sad fact for Adam that drumming mistakes are always the most noticeable.  Afterwards he referred to the mistake in his ‘eight bar solo’ to which we reminded him that it was actually 8 beats (that is, 2 bars), as we’d never let him have such a long solo, to which he replied that ‘I don’t know anything about music’.  Later on he admitted that ‘I can’t count’.  At least he’s honest enough to admit it.  Anyway, am considering buying him the following from Amazon to give him some help:

Learn&Groove

Yes, it’s Leapfrog’s “Learn and Groove” Maracas.  It seemed the perfect gift until I discovered that they are bilingual counting maracas, in English and French! So actually it’s probably too advanced… Will keep looking.                                          

                                                                                    – Ruth

So we had a gig at the Primrose on Saturday.  And it went really well, etc etc.  But here’s the thing. We’ve done quite a few of these multi-band gigs now.  And every time at least one of the bands hasn’t turned up – sometimes more than one. Like on Saturday, there should have been 4 bands and we were supposed to play for about 45 minutes. But one band cancelled and another just didn’t show up, eventually replying to the organiser’s text message 10 minutes before they were due to start.  How rude is that?  I mean, if something prevented me from getting to a gig I would let them know well in advance.  And it would have to be a really good reason, like losing both my legs in a paragliding accident. Or if it wasn’t a really good reason, I would at least have the courtesy to make up a really good reason, like ‘our drummer’s just died’. When I said this Adam asked why it was him that had to die and I honestly didn’t mean it personally…

This has happened so many times that I’m beginning to wonder if musicians are naturally ruder and less courteous than other people. And if they are, is it that being a musician makes you rude or is it that rude people are more likely to become musicians? Or is it just that we are living in a particularly uncivilised society today?

Saying that, apparently the band’s message was that they had ‘lost their bass player’.  I’m not sure if this means lost as in misplaced, lost as in ‘fallen out with’, or dead. If it’s the latter I feel pretty rotten for saying all of this.  However if they have just misplaced their bass player, well that’s just careless. Maybe they should consider investing in some kind of electronic tagging system or something.

There are two schools of thought on this.  One is that you do as near to the original as possible.  The other is that you…. “make the song your own”.

Robb