Well, it's been an eventful few days for us.
On Thursday night,
myself and Wayneo were at the Playhouse in Norwich to see the comedian
Adam Hills. I mentioned on our twitter that we were at the show and
Adam read it out on stage, started to talk to us about the band, and
then decided to organise a gig for us the following night in the bar.
During
the interval I text Ritch to make sure he was available, still not sure
whether this was just a joke or whether he was deadly serious. At the
same time, Adam tweeted for some song titles, that he would challenge
us to write and perform at the gig. Some of the most popular were: “I
Lost My Heart To A Girl From Ipswich”, “Shake It Like Shakira”,
“There’s No Folk Like Norfolk” and “Don’t KunK With My Heart”. However
the clear winner was “I’ve Got A Brand New Combine Harvester” so in the
second half of the show, Adam challenged us to perform a rock version
at the gig on Friday (this is when panic started to set in).
On
our way back from the playhouse on Thursday night, it occurred to us
that we had no bass amp, and that our van was booked in to the garage
so we had no way of getting our gear to the gig. Oops.
Friday
morning and few phone calls later, we'd managed to get our hands on a
bass amp (thanks Hannah!) and we had our van back. I then set about
trying to work out something for "Combine Harvester". I failed. I find
it hard enough to remember my own lyrics, so to learn something that I
really I didn't know in a couple of hours wasn't easy. I scribbled a
few notes so that I had some reminders for the lines I was struggling
with most and hoped for the best.
Friday evening, already about
45 minutes late for soundcheck we arrived at the Playhouse and set
ourselves up in the corner of the bar. In our 5 minute soundcheck I
tried to give Wayne and Ritch an idea of what I thought we should do
for "Combine Harvester". As it got closer to our 6pm start, the bar
started to fill up and we had a chat with Adam, who was very
complimentary about our music, which he'd downloaded the night before.
The
gig itself went pretty well, we'd turned everything down as quiet as we
could at the request of the bar staff so that made it a little hard but
we still rocked out as best we could. That's until it came to "Combine
Harvester". You know how sometimes you have a complete memory blank?
Yeah. Well, that's exactly what happened to me. I completely forgot how
the song went. I had some words written down, but had no idea at all
how the were meant to sound. Bearing in mind that I was the only one
that had learnt the song anyway, we were lost. We ended playing one
chord and sung the chorus for about 3 minutes. Nevermind.
We'd
already made the decision to put it earlyish in the set anyway, because
we knew it'd be shit, so that gave us a chance to redeem ourselves with
the rest of our set. We even played 'Game Over' and did a mighty fine
job of it. First time we've played that since Hannah left.
Before
we knew it, it was over. The most bizarre gig we've ever done. We spoke
to Adam for a while before he had to get himself ready for his show.
Amazingly he absolutely loved it and proudly wore a KunK t-shirt for
his gig in the main auditorium.
I have to say thanks to everyone
at the playhouse for making the gig happen, and also thanks to Adam
Hills for being an absolute legend!! He's a lovely and incredibly funny
man. If you get a chance, get yourself to one of the remaining dates on
his tour, you won't regret it!
If you want to read Adam's blogs about the gig, go to
www.adamhills.com.au