It goes like this...

Well folks, here we are: the final (or should that be “ultimate”?) line-up of Twelfth Night.
From left to right: Andy Revell (guitars), Andy Sears (vocals), the local bigmouth, Clive Mitten (bass) and Brian Devoil (drums).
Taken outside the studio where we had our first (and slightly shaky in some areas, hem hem) rehearsal, it was a weekend of hard work and fun. Actually, the job titles are a little disingenuous, as Andy S ends up playing bits of keys, percussion and guitars, Andy R plays the odd keyboard bassline and does some backing vocals and Clive... Well, I don’t think they’ve invented enough instruments for Captain Bass Solo yet... ;-) Brian is the only one (if memory serves correctly) who doesn’t get roped into something other than drumming.

Here’s the poster for the gig which will be filmed at the Albany in Deptford on November 24th, 2007. A date for one’s diary, indeed, groovers.

A brief aside: There used to be a fun band in the South London of the mid-1980s called the Deptford Draylons, a riff on Brentford Nylons, a manufacturer of the sort of shirt in the 1970s that would combine maximum sweating with high-output static discharge. A winning combination, if ever I’ve heard one.
The Deptford Draylons, giving it large at Club Draylon

Back to reality:
Poor Clive ended up having to borrow basses and bits off me for the rehearsal, as the place he’d dropped off all his super-ninja basses and guitars to had rather inconveniently shut for a holiday on the day he’d previously arranged to go and collect them. The twats. Still, he made more of a fist of the tunes than I did, even though he was severely lacking in strings in certain ditties. I of course attribute this to large-scale cheating on his part...

I’d managed, in my infinite and labyrinthine wisdom, to bring copies of Clive’s notes on the songs and leave my own at home. This didn’t help terribly, as all my crib sheets would have meant I could actually have played on a lot more of the stuff on day one. Clive’s notes are obliquely useful (and I’m grateful for them, at the very least for working out what he calls this bit here, etc.), but there are a million little shorthand clues I’ve given myself on my notes that refer to sound patches, silly names for parts (which help me remember them) and when and where it turns into “Battle of the Keyboardists” with three people playing simultaneously.

“You mean I have to actually play all the way through this song? With both hands? God, man! Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Hope to see the odd reader of this blog at the Albany, as I’m sure it’ll be a gas.