The Limelight, Aylesbury

We got to the Limelight Theater after the usual misadventures (lost the car we were following, drove around Aylesbury for fifteen minutes, finally found a place to pull over and got directions.)

Chris Sharley was kind enough to provide drums for us, so he was waiting there.  We brought everything in and I saw my old friend Krissy Mathews, who was opening for us.  Krissy is a natural born guitar player - I first met him when he was 13 and he blew me away.  No excuses, no "good for a kid", he was great right from the start.  I've never heard him on acoustic guitar before, and he was an absolute pleasure.  Put on a great show and the audience loved him.

Speaking of the audience, we got a great crowd.  There were only a few seats left in the balcony.  There was a problem, though. 

No stage monitors.

Yup, it seems the house engineer didn't check the equipment before he left for Cambridge.  What's more, he left it all in the hands of Ed, who openly admitted he wasn't a sound man.  He tried his best, while Mike Porter rewired everything in every possible way.  The windup was that we went on with no monitors, and no sub woofers on the main.  Just loaded bins stuck on top, so we had mids and highs but no lows.  We turned one of the mains sideways, and I used that as a monitor by walking to the front of the stage area.  Poor Ed was  trying to stop everything from feeding back, and keeping up with the horn section, my solos, etc.  He did a great job under tremendous pressure.

The gig itself went great - the audience was wildly enthusiastic, bought lots of CDs and a couple of our new tee shirts, and in general we all had a great time.  Krissy Mathews and Chris Sharley sat in with us on the only cover we did that night (except for the encore, Death Letter.)  I used the tried and true "Thunderbird", and everybody got a chance to solo.  Lots of fun, and Krissy got to show his absolute mastery of electric guitar.

So, we leave in a couple of hours to go to Oxford for the Famous Monday Night Blues performance.  I'll post about it tomorrow - wish us luck!