What a strange yet awesome gig!
On Sunday we were set to play a show organised by The Crash Factory Recording Studios at Wax Bar in Nottingham as part of the Hockley Hustle, Nottingham's annual OxJam event.
So everything had been booked and arranged by Mark (our producer/current guitarist/Crash Factory owner/generally awesome guy) for this gig since August and it was looking to be a pretty cool all-dayer type thing.
Now, for anyone that doesn't know, Wax Bar shares one of its walls with The Screen Room which is the world's smallest cinema, a pretty cool thing in itself.
Anyway, Wax organise their events around bookings at The Screen Room as it's a cinema and the bar appreciate that no-one wants music from next door drowning out their film and seeing as there were no showings on at the cinema that day the show was booked.
Then we get to Friday night and Mark gets told that as of a week ago there are two private film showings that day where they needed absolute silence from the bar. If this was to happen then the show would have run until nearly 3am which nobody wanted, especially on a Sunday night.
So after much thinking and throwing ideas around it was eventually decided at 11am on Sunday morning (bear in mind the gig started at 4pm) that the first three bands would still play at Wax Bar and the five bands after that would play at Twenty Eight, a hairdresser's around the corner, and so it was!
As soon as the third band had played we had to grab as many people as we could to transport a full drum kit and two amp stacks around the corner to the new 'venue'. I have to say nobody was overly happy about this is it proved a huge pain in the arse trying to cart everything past all of the people that were in Hockley for all of the various events that day as well as groups of hippies playing drums right in our path.
However, this actually proved to be the best move of the day as the rest of the gig that took place at Twenty Eight was fucking awesome!
The sound was vastly better, there was more room for both the bands and the crowds and the gig was just cool... We were playing in a fucking hairdresser's! For one band on the bill it was even cooler. Mark's band, The Charm Offensive, played their first gig last night. Now I don't know about you but I would absolutely LOVE to say my band played their first ever gig in a hairdresser's!
Anyway, after a long and stressful day for everyone (and God help you if you tried to get any sense out of Mark!) the gig turned out to be awesome and one of the most fun gigs we've had in a good while!
The Gunn even got offered a free haircut when one of the staff knocked his drum sticks off his snare right before we played!
If you've never played a gig in a hairdrsser's before then I, for one, fully recommend it!
Well that was that!
See you at The Royal in Derby this Friday!
Ciao n that...
Joey xxoo