Pickering in North Yorkshire

Weather good - so off for the five hour drive up to Yorkshire. First impression of the town was good, and we found the football ground easily. Alan - the man in charge who booked the band came to see us and we had nice easy access into the function room. Slightly odd shape as there are two rooms in a 'L' shape and we would be playing to both, so we set our gear up so we could work both. A little unusual as the people in each room could see us, but not each other. One bar serviced both. The bar staff were clearly in the spirit of the event, as they were in Hawaiian shirts and big Timmy Mallett style glasses. 

When we arrived the cup match was taking place outside the window, and sadly the home team lost. The place was packed by the evening and everyone had a great meal, and we went on stage for our two 45 minute sets at 9.15.

Dacre, our drummer and I went in the van with the PA, and Ian, Ben and Pete were in a car. Ian needed to be home early next morning, so he'd not booked the usual hotel - and we only realised this about 8pm! He's an evening person, so had no concerns about driving through the night - and when we all travel in one vehicle, he always volunteers for the night drive. I'm the opposite, so up early in the morning, but by midnight, I've gone! It never occurred to any of us to check the return details, so Alan the organiser, found us somewhere to stay, just down the road with a couple who will be at the show. Very friendly people - how I wish everywhere was as welcoming to visitors.

We did the usual selection of songs, and again as often happens, the dancers kept us in the fast number list. 

Anorak Stuff

Our usual monitor system is in-ears for bass and drums, and Turbosound floor wedges for keys and guitar - both are 2 x 12", and would probably be fine for a main PA in some venues. Ian and Ben were trying out some small behringer personal monitors - small speakers that fit on the microphone stands, and then have the boom sticking out the top. Amazing little boxes, that because they are close in, are pretty loud to you - but make the stage much quieter. I think one of the questest shows we've done - which pleases the PA people because they get more control over the sound. I turned my bass amp down too, and it made quite a difference. The only drawback Ian found was that he could feel the 'wind' from my basses bottom notes coming out of the tiny little speaker! weird.

More news coming soon.
Paul

Pickering - North Yorkshire

We're off to Yorkshire on Saturday - 250 miles, so around 5 hours on East Coast roads. People used to other parts of the country just can't understand the road system that goes all the way from Ipswich to Hull - we do have a few bits of dual carriageway, but to use the one between Loqwestoft and Ipswich as an example - the planners are mad! On single carriageway roads you can legally do 60 mph. On dual carriageways it goes up to 70 mph. Between Lowestoft and Ipswich there is one piece of dual carriageway, where you can finally overtake the white knuckle on the steering wheel people - BUT - this one mile piece of  dual carriageway has a speed limit of 50 mph! Yes - the only place you can overtake is slower than the rest, and of course, it's the only bit of road with a speed camera.

So for us to get up to Yorkshire, it means the A47 - not that dreadful, but the the A17. Once we get to the A1, we can speed up a bit.

The venue is a Sports Club, and the venue has been described as L shaped with the stage in the middle of the L. Sounds interesting.

Our set list is going to be expanded again. We do practically all of the Beach boys songs - including a few lesser well known ones, but we've decided to add a few more that the Beach Boys performed in their live shows, but weren't written by them. Back in those days it was quite common for the popular songs in the UK and the US to be different. An A side in America might be thought less suitable for our market, so one of their A sides might become the B side for a song that we picked instead! Covering other artiste's songs was also very common back then, so the Beach Boys released a song by somebody called Bobby Freeman recorded in 1958. In the UK it was covered by Cliff Richard, in the US, the Beach Boys. The song was Do You Wanna Dance. Cliff Richard and the Shadows released theirs in 1962, followed by the Beach Boys in 1965. Most UK people remember the Cliff version, which is a little different to the Beach Boys one, due to Brian Wilson reworking the arrangement. 

This is something that some Beach Boy fans won't like, while others love the idea of covering a familiar track. Once we've learned it, we'll pop it in the set and see what happens.

We're also going to add 'In My Room' and 'Hawaii'. Our biggest problem is that they wrote so many songs, and each show we do means cutting quite a few - so sadly it's often the slower ones that get left out if the crowds are up dancing - play another people can dance to, or slow it right down? Usually the dancing wins! In my Room and Do you wanna dance seem good to me - I'm not so sure about Hawaii. We will have to wait till rehearsals to decide.

What else is new on the UK Beach Boys front? If you don't like technical stuff - skip over this next bit. If you do, read on!

We tour our own PA system, but are happy to use a venue's if it's suitable. Lots of our events like the festivals and corporate events have all sorts of things on the running order, so they often have a PA system which is shared between bands, singers, and maybe even the odd DJ session. The Beach Boys are not a heavy rock or metal band - our popular music is from the 60s and 70s where mega bass wasn't needed, so for us, we don't need excess volume and tons of bass, but we do need to be able to hear what we're playing! That sounds pretty obvious, but it's not that simple. As we all have our own harmony parts, we have to be able to hear our own voices, but sometimes we don't want to hear certain parts - because they can so easily put us off. Me, for example - I need to hear my own voice, my bass guitar, and Ian's keyboards and his voice. Dacre often sings the lead or the high falsetto parts and they don't help me with mine. He doesn't need me in his mix either. Ben and Ian have their own requirements too. If we get the wrong things, it's so easy to sing out of tune - and for us, that's not an option. Dacre and myself have also started to use in-ear monitors rather than big loud speakers on the floor. These mini-earphones bung your ears up so you can have much quieter noise in your ears, and far too many musicians wreck their hearing, then wish they'd done it before. The only real problem is that when they are in, people speak to you and you can't hear a word they say. It just takes getting used to. When we do events where PA systems are supplied, we're at the mercy of strangers, who might be happier doing Guns 'n' Roses rather than the Beach Boys.

So we tour a nice modern Digital mixer, and a pretty potent PA system, so we can cope with almost every venue. If we go abroad, all we can take are guitars and keyboards - everything else is supplied locally, so we really have no idea what will turn up. We always send a rider - a document explaining what we MUST have, but usually compromises have to be made. I don't really mind what I plug my guitar into, but monitors are much more important.

We got some more information about our Special Event in the United Arab Emirates. It seems we're going to be doing very short sets during the day. We can't reveal anything about the event now - and hopefully we can pass more info on later. More on this soon - and I'll post up details about Pickering as soon as I can.

Newcastle

Next stop the Marriott Hotel in Newcastle - a private function for a department of the NHS who source and arrange cars for medical staff throughout the country. It’s a scheme where people sacrifice some of their salary and then can buy a car from many of the popular makes. It doesn’t cost the health service anything, and appears to be a genuine benefit for district nurses, doctors and other who need a reliable but affordable car. The party was sponsored by the car dealers and had a Tropical Theme. All the guests dressed up in bright shirts (not as bright as ours, but close!). Big LED screen on one wall showing a tropical beach. Really nice themed event - and we were the surprise. They had a great local band - The Fontains, a really good three piece who played modern covers, who are well known in the area - but we were to be the ‘themed’ music part. There was even a Steel Band who played as the guests arrived. In the foyer a mini-bus converted into a photo booth was busy all evening. The audience had just finished their meal, so we really weren’t expecting them to get up and dance - but they did, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people dancing and having a good time. By the end of the evening, many were clearly full, but we spent ages having photos taken with them. A great night.

Packed away and back to the posh van with comfy seats we’d hired to get us to Newcastle. Tapped in the postcode of our hotel, only to discover our lack of knowledge of the area hadn’t spotted the small problem. It was 100 miles away! Driving down the A1 we also discovered the diversion off the A1. However - whoever set it up made a fatal flaw, it took us off the A1, sent us miles out of our why to re-enter the A1 again - only to discover we’d gone in a circle and came up to the diversion again! In the end we did what British people do - we asked a Policeman, who said he had no idea, but if we went ‘that way’ we’d get somewhere - eventually we arrived at the hotel at 3.30 in the morning. I climbed into bed, and Ian made a cup of coffee and turned on the TV. It didn’t matter - I was gone! We got home at six PM - so that’s 34 hours away from home, and we were on stage for 75 minutes? What a strange life!

Next show is almost on our doorstep - North Norfolk!

A show almost on the doorstep - well, almost. Trimmingham, up near Cromer. A holiday centre in the middle of woodland. Lots of log cabins. Being Norfolk, the Sat Nav was a bit optimistic - In Norfolk, if the Sat Nav says 60 mins, then the usual settings of 'quickest' or 'shortest' mean very little. Our A roads are what the rest of the country call B roads, and our B roads are single file, with little passing places - and to get to Trimmingham is a bit of an adventure, when you meet a Tesco's lorry coming the other way on a blind bend! 

Anyway, the powers that be allow us to park near the rear entry to the stage, so in we go with the kit. It's Mike, our soundman's last show, as he's decided that being an estate agent is what he wants to do. Very oddly, and entirely coincidentally, his boss is Simon - the UK Beach Boys original drummer. We have a great night - once we've spent some time in the rather nice restaurant. Not enough time to play all the songs we wanted to, but we picked as many of the 'dancy' ones that we could, so we did miss some of the slower ones that I personally really like. The audience of course prefer the faster ones. A number of our songs are medleys - because back in the '60s, records only lasted two and a half minutes or so - so almost as soon as you've started, they're done. To solve this problem, we've put together a couple of medleys where we link them together - one is the 'Car medley' featuring songs about cars, and the other with the surfing songs. Very often the organisers have very strict curfews, so going over the expected end time is pretty bad, so we have a system where the surf medley can be three songs or five = depending on what time we have left. The signal for this is Ian waving his hand. Three fingers for three songs, five for five. We don't do two! anyway - we finish the song before the Surf Medley, and out of the corner I see Ian holding up his hand - it was five, I think. I ask Ben quickly - "was that Five?" - yes he says. One, two, three four - twang. Ian and Dacre start the third song, Ben and I start  the first. We excelled ourselves and took just two notes to realise and swap - not bad we thought! Thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I hope we'll be back. One of the snags with our band is that we're physically quite big. Ideally, we really need at least 6 or 7 metres in width, and 5 deep. Lots of our kit, like the amplifiers and racks are big things, so trying to squeeze us into smaller performing areas can be very tricky.

Ian arranged our next show as a fundraiser for a small village community centre, which we knew was going to be small, but it was for a good cause, so we figured it worth squashing us in for. Stokesby Village has a population of around 300 people, and is on the Norfolk Broads, so packing a third of them into the tiny village hall was a real challenge - but the organisers did it. Tickets were pretty expensive, but in the end they simply sold them top the village - none going outside at all. From the moment we got there it was very odd - because everyone knew everyone else - a great example of community spirit. This was two shows close to home - which was a record. As the teetotal band member, I always seem to get odd flavours of non-alcoholic drinks because I don't think they expect somebody in a band to not drink. Endless cherryade in this example. Not had that since I was a kid. This show was also special for another reason. This was our first gig since losing Mike, and we were struggling to find a replacement who understood the music. We had a volunteer - Pete Phipps - the old UK Beach Boys bass player, who I replaced. He sat out in the audience and made a decent job of the mix, because he knew the entire set so well. He also realised that this was the first time he'd ever heard the band from where the audience was. Hopefully, Pete will be able to do more of our shows. 

Next show is a long way again. Pickering, in North Yorkshire, up near Scarborough.

However - it looks like we're going even further. Hopefully, we'll be in Abu Dhabi in November for the Formula 1 Grand Prix, and then off to Berlin. 

More on these soon ............

UK BEACH BOYS 2013 - Devon to Newcastle

Down to Devon. Two shows, one inland a bit and the other on the South Coast. Sat nav says five and a half hours. So we leave home at Lowestoft (the most Easterly town in the UK) and head off. Eleven hours later we arrive! Somebody had sold bucket loads of motor homes to little old ladies with blue rinses ! It's scary to find one far enough into its own lane that overtaking is possible, and then you can't see a driver - you see two hands on the wheel and the top of their head just peeping over the wheel. The white lines on the M25 are for straddling like a scalextric! The PA at the theatre has been put in by an old mate - Bobby G from Bucks Fizz and it was rather nice. Nearly new QSC wedges so good things expected. For this show we didn't have the extra time and hassle factor of taking our own PA. For many bands hearing what you do isn't hugely important, but for the Beach Boys it’s vital. Everyone sings, so harmonies are very important. We all need to hear certain (and different) things. I personally don't want to hear the melody. I need to hear the two other harmony vocals and the keyboards - the only instrument that won't be out of tune unless Ian plays the wrong song! Dacre the drummer (who does most of the high falsetto parts) and I use in-ear monitors, like many people today, so our ears are bunged up with lug plugs which mean we don't have to be deafened. Ian and Ben the guitarist prefer real loudspeakers. It depends on what you are comfy with, really. We're on stage ready to soundcheck quite late because of the journey time and then get the shock. Four nice, good quality monitors, all powered up and tested the day before, but they don't make any noise! The venue is quite nice, and is a ‘community’ theatre. This magic word is often used to denote a crafty way our education system gets extra dosh! A school or college open up their premises to the public in return for money from local, national and European sources. So a revamped theatre, library or sports stadium is affordable. This theatre holds probably 300 or so and has pull out tiered seating, often called ‘bleachers’. After our PA was set up they had the final school assembly, with the seating pulled out. The little darlings had pinched every cable from the equipment the tiered seats let them lean over and grab. Bearing in mind our average age is er, not that young, experience says there's little chance of a quick fix and most importantly, no point panicking. The best we can do us connect the monitors together and hear what the audience hear. That's what we did. It's very odd hearing the things you didn't know even happened! "What's that twiddly bit you did in Help Me Rhonda?" Mystified me because I've always played it but they don't have my bass in their monitor normally. I remember hearing the melody for the first time in another song and thinking - so that's how it goes! It was actually a fun gig, despite the problems I really enjoyed it. All the people we met were really friendly and efficient, which is always great. The funniest thing any of us had seen was when just as we were coming on stage, we realized the house tabs were worked by a big handle in the wings, and with the confusion over the sound system, nobody was there to work them! So we did the usual intro – Ladies and Gentlemen, plase welcome the UK Beach Boys – and then Ian wound the handle like mad, and then ran on stage to play the first note! The odd thing was that despite the technical problems, we all really enjoyed the show, which was unexpected. Usually technical problems tend to make us cross – but this time, it didn’t seem to, and everyone had a good time.

After the gig we drove just a few miles to the next gig on Paignton organised by Palm FM the local radio station. A stage on the sea front and the start of a week long event. A really lovely bunch of people from the big boss to the volunteers. Plenty of set up time and then the heavens opened. Wow Devon can be wet! About an hour before show time the sun came out and by kick-off the crowd had dried off. On stage we go and half way through California Girls I get a strange feeling on my back. I am standing under a hole leaking water from the stage roof. The DJ set before us should have given me a clue. I thought it was sweat! Nope. The rain had pooled on the roof and was now escaping. I can't move because I'm glued to the mic stand. Then I see Ian wondering where the water on his keyboard is coming from. The next song has him playing with one hand, wiping with the other until at the end of the song he can move everything. PA guys smiling because they are under a tent thing and totally dry! One of the radio station ladies who is rather pregnant was standing on our side of the crowd barrier and noticed a bubble machine getting wet so she unplugged it. Bad move. Outside stages have lots of electrical protection devices that didn't like this so cut all the power off! After a few minutes all fixed and on with the show! Another good show with interesting moments!

A few days off then we left for Northampton. A private function at a park next to a lake. One of those places where people live in huge extended mobile homes that have never been mobile ever. There's a big clubhouse next to the lake and we were the entertainment for a party. Again, very nice people and a decent restaurant. Two very late spots 9.30 to 10.30 and then 11 to 12. We did the usual false ending then finished with Barbara Ann. Then they kept asking for more so we gave them the chance to pick one song. Good Vibrations won it!  Talking about winning, we got asked to judge the costume competition. That wasn't fun because although some had put in the same effort as my students when I was a teacher (as in no effort at all) others had really gone to town. We did get slightly worried when we spotted a chap removing his trousers in the audience, but were assured he often does this and wasn’t anything to worry about? After the show it was a short drive to Kettering, where we’d booked a hotel. All fine and we spelt well, but in the morning I managed to get myself locked out of the hotel room as the others wouldn’t wake up to let me back in, but eventually we all do breakfast then off to the next gig in Grimsby!

This was interesting – a big theatre style space with a balcony, but a huge stage space that would be ideal for orchestras and choirs, and has acoustics to match. It was originally a Methodist chapel, and now is an arts venue and the design allows for seated audiences and a decent size dance floor, in front of the stage. A the soundcheck, Ian tells Mike our soundman that the reverb sounds great, Mike says “what reverb?” I’ve not switched it on yet!

We’re really lucky to visit venues who have nice staff. The Grimsby Central Hall people are all so helpful, and didn’t even get rattled when they lost their keys and couldn’t lock up!

Nowadays, it’s very difficult for theatres in particular to make money, so places like this rely so heavily on being supported by the locals. We always spend time after a show talking to people, and many told us they heard the radio advert. To win a CD they had to answer a simple question.

What was the famous Beach Boys song.

1.    Cleethorpes Girls

2.    Grimsby Girls

3.    California Girls

I wonder if anyone got it wrong?

So we left around midnight to head back to Norfolk and Suffolk where we live – 160 miles says the Sat Nav. Lincolnshire, like Norfolk and Suffolk have not yet discovered motorways so that’s a long journey on twisty and turny A roads – but in true UK Beach Boys style, we passed a 24 Hour McDonalds, so stopped for food – only to find the other half of the band in their vehicle had the same idea!

Next stop Newcastle!