We found ourselves doing a back to back, Friday and Saturday gigs in October. The Friday was a 50th birthday party at a venue in Hillsborough. The other was a wedding reception at the beautiful Church House in Central Sheffield.
We learnt a lesson this weekend – Always use your own PA if you can.
Our trusty Behringer PMP6000 powered mixer.
The Friday night went without a hitch as we setup our PA, sound checked efficiently and went home to get changed. When we came back, we picked up our instruments and dived straight in. Switched seamlessly into Disco mode for the interval and then back on for the second half – no worries
Using the house PA at the Church House was a stark contrast. Despite the best efforts of the sound guy (who confessed he’d only had the gear a week) we found ourselves plagued with technical issues and feedback. The sound check took a laborious 2 hours. When we returned to the stage to start our first set it was as if a malevolent spirit had taken possession of our instruments and cursed them with a weird delayed echo effect that took the sound tech considerable knob twiddling to remove.
The Church House Interior
Once this issue was overcome we had an absolute blast of a gig, the crowd were well up for it and danced through the night. We surprised the bride with a song her husband had told us she loved – Family Tradition by Hank Williams Jnr. He didn’t tell us that the chorus had a call and response element to it. So when I sang:
“Hank, why must you drink?” I had the full force of a tipsy bride and her three well lubricated friends bellow back “TO GET DRUNK!”.
“Hank, why must you smoke?” – “TO GET STONED!”
With the first set under our belt and the sound issues of earlier an distant memory we got stuck into the second set which went down even better than the first. It really was a great gig and we had the entire bar dancing.
