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.
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