GIG - The Roost Rock venue, Long Eaton 21st Oct 04

The Roost is a pretty decent venue. A nice pub with a large gig room tacked onto the side. Decent size stage, long rectangular room with dance floor, seating area and further raised seating area an not random pillars. The PA is almost big enough for the room, but is let down somewhat by the use of cheap microphones.

Original acts get Thursday's and Tribute and covers on Fridays (we Smurphed it a couple of weeks back).

Long Eaton suffers from being smack band between Nottingham and Derby and just a quick, cheap bus ride from either, meaning that there is a lot of competition from the cities for the live music audience.

Support band today were No Hope. They had some very interesting sounds going on, which I won't attempt to classify but words like indie, alt rock and ambient rock steer you in the general direction. We desperately want to get hold of a demo to see what they really sound like, as the live mix was a little muggy at times. We enjoyed them though!

So to our set. Another disaster laden bucking bronco of a performance which we somehow managed to keep astride. Paddy's amp disappeared about 20 seconds into the first song and when it eventually came back in, drowned out absolutely everything else in the foldback arghhh.

The Bass issue we had at Rotherham resurfaced and made Purgatory and Laughing in the Sun particularly bad going until Nev managed to tame the rumbling harmonics - looks like someone had a bit of a dick around with the amp switches and settings at Rotherham. So after a nightmare in which Ian really wanted to be beamed away we managed to wrestle control and rely on experience and a philosophical outlook to get through. So when Ian's amp blew a fuse and dropped down to half power, it merely raised an eyebrow.

We had a crack at Radio Waves in a new arrangement which we'd never played but discussed in the bar 1/2 hour before the set. This is only the second time we've gigged this song and the results we're encouraging.

So coming off stage, we had mixed feelings as to how good a gig we'd played. Ian thought it was a disaster but Paddy said he thought it was probably better than we thought. Having just listened back to the desk recording of the set, Paddy wins as it wasn't too bad at all - technical problems aside it was a fairly solid performance. We'll make some of the live material available for download at some point.

The crowd was thin, but hey it's a school night and we're out of towners. So not our best gig, but maybe we've got the dickey one out of the way for this season. We now have a couple of weeks in which to do some more performance polishing and service our equipment.

The set was:

1. Wrecking Ball
2. Smallville
3. Bully For you
4. Purgatory
5. Laughing in the Sun
6. Bubblegum and Machine guns
7. Scars
8. Radio Waves
9. Angelina Crush
10. Def Con 1