Blog: Totally Acoustic

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It was back to The Lamb last night for the latest episode of Totally Acoustic, where I was rather relieved to discover that the floor in the function room was no longer BROKEN. Last time there had been what appeared to be a TRAPDOOR appearing - apparently something had LEAKED and made the floor go SPROING. Leigh The Landlord showed me some photographs of WORK that had occurred, and I was VERY happy that it had been happening last week, not this!

All of our acts arrived in a very timely fashion, though for some reason the audience mostly left it to the last minute - it was ODD, at 7.20pm the room was empty, ten minutes later it was FULL, in good time for me to go on and do THIS:

Totally Acoustic

Just One Finger

A Little Bit Excited

That Was Margaret Thatcher

Privatising Everything

Being Happy Doesn't Make You Stupid

Easily Impressed

There was a LOT of new material in there, which made me a bit NERVOUS and forget-y. It all seemed to work OK tho - A Little Bit Excited and That Was Margaret Thatcher seemed to work particularly well in The Live Environment. I'd been a bit worried about doing SO MUCH that I'd not done before, so was DELIGHTED to find that there were LOADS of my "hits" that I'd not played in this series AND that had never been podcasted (and so would be back-ups for the podcast in case the new ones didn't work out) and so was able to offer consumers a CHOICE of which they'd like to hear. It was a RELIEF to be able to do them after the stress of new stuff - i don't know why Bands On Tour complain so much about doing the same songs every night, it's MUCH easier!

After the break it was The Understudies, who came to the party WELL PREPARED. All four of them had different instruments, and swapped around SPEEDILY between and indeed DURING songs, with a variety of guitar, ukulele, shaker, tambourine, melodica and especially GLOCKENSPIEL in use. It sounded BEAUTIFUL - a really gorgeous balance of sounds (I know I'm always going on about the fact that instruments sound GRATE when played acoustically together because they're DESIGNED to be played that way, but it is TRUE) allied to some beautiful songs, and played excellently too. That may make it sound a bit DRY, but the very opposite is true - one of the most AURALLY PICTURESQUE sets of any run of Totally Acoustic, it was SPELLBINDING.

As indeed, in a slightly different way, was Keith Top Of The Pops And His Minor UK Indie Celebrity Allstar Backing Band, who were playing a STRIPPED DOWN ACOUSTIC SET insomuch as there were only FOUR of them. Another thing I say because it is true is that Keith has a GRATE gimmick, which he uses to hide some BRILLIANT songs behind (i.e. people tend to be so busy going "Arf! There's nine guitarists!" to realise how ACE the actual songs are) but here he was EXPOSED to the world... and it sounded BLOODY LOVELY. The guitars all together sounded gorgeous, complimented by a wide range of VIOLIN SOLOES - violin players! none of them have ever succeeded in Pretending To Look Annoyed At Having To Do A Solo, they LOVE IT!

It was a joy to behold, building up to a GRAND FINALE with special guests and EVERYTHING. The evening then largely DECAMPED downstairs where some of us stayed right up to nearly closing time. Some of us are feeling a little bit hungover this morning as a direct result, but HECK it was worth it, that was a GRATE night - now to sort out the podcast!

posted 6/4/2011 by MJ Hibbett

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Comments:

I wish all gig reviews were like THIS!
posted 6/4/2011 by The David

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