We were invited to provide live music for a 21st birthday party, at Halifax Hall in Sheffield. Connoisseurs of this blog (a gruesome oxymoron), will know that we’ve not played Halifax Hall since the 16th of June 2016. In truth, I didn’t know that until I went trawling back though several years of listless verbosity that some worthless clown is trying to pass off as search engine optimised content.
Back in 2016 we were playing at a School fundraiser at Halifax Hall. It was the only time we’ve had underwear thrown at us. Well, ladies underwear anyway. You can find out more about that night here.
I arrived just before 6pm. My mission? To get the PA unloaded and a playlist on by the time guests arrived at 6:30pm. I managed to secure the closest parking bay and began to unload our gear. This was to be a black tie affair. The function room had been decked out with thousands of diaphanous lights adorning the floor to ceiling curtains. Jet black table clothes and seat covers were a really nice touch. It all looked very elegant.
6:20pm came and I was able to wind up the auto DJ and let it loose. Now to start organising power for lights and plugging in mics. James and Ben arrived as I was being offered a pint by our host. Perfect timing. Drums were assembled and mic’d up by 7:30 which gave us an hour to chill out with a beer and people watch. What a lot of astonishingly beautiful people there were. It was like a Bond Girl convention.
The auto DJ was doing a splendid job, but 8:30 arrived and it was our time to provide live music for a 21st birthday party. We kicked off set one with Song 2 and meandered our way through the the first half to Get Lucky. Luke had requested a few songs from our repertoire that we’d not played for a while and this was the first. We’d not played this one in about five years and never with Ben at the helm. Fortunately, it went well and the crowd enjoyed it. We followed this with The Kooks She Moves in Her Own way, another classic from the archives that we’d had to dust off to present. Again, this went down really well, so much so that we might put it back in the set. We closed off set one with Dakota.
Set two opened with the stalwart Take Me Out and it is here we hit a seam of tunes intended to get young and old out of their seats. We lure them in with Winehouse’s Valerie, then drop Proud Mary on them, before Muse’s version of Can’t Take My Eyes Off You puts the boot. Just as our audience is trying to catch their breath we launch into Mr Brightside and segue into Blink 182’s All The Small Things. Not satisfied with the unseemly behaviour elicited by our harmonious rhythms, I Believe in a Thing Called Love performs a pincer movement with I bet That Tha Looks Good ont Dance Floor resulting in yet more elaborate writhing.
Sweaty and broken, the audience begs for mercy as we pound them with Common People, Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Chelsea Dagger and Sex on Fire. At this point we relent and have a lovely sing along to Don’t Look Back in Anger before it’s back into the trenches with Seven Nation Army.
Our final number of the night was a pacey version of Slade’s Merry Christmas Everybody bringing the live music to an end. The auto DJ stepped up to fill the quivering void that the cessation of the live music had left in the festivities, while we packed up.
What a great gig to end the year on. Sadly this was to be our last performance with James on drums for a while. We thank him for his easy going manner and lending us his talents for the last three months. We look forward to welcoming back Andy from his hiatus in January.
