The Bridge

I had a great time last night.

After a hot and sweaty time at the dayjob I dropped in on my parents for food and conversation. They supplied both with their usual generosity and then I packed up and drove to an Oxford rehearsal room to play with Bridge Street.

First, I should get the moaning out of the way. The place is under new management and it showed. We had booked a small room at a good price. When I got there I was told we could have the bigger room downstairs as no one was using it. Only at the end of the evening did we find that they charged us the rate for the big room. We had the small room booked for next week and vowed to stay up there whatever happened. But no, they had someone else in their so we'd have to come back to the big room.

Do these people not own diaries? It can't be a cynical way to make more money because they'd still have people in both rooms anyway. What they have no is one band who didn't get what they had been told they already had. This is a great way to guarantee that we won't put them at the top of our list the next time we're in the market for rehearsal space.

But the good news - the rehearsal itself was a pleasure from beginning to end. true, we weren't playing well, but then many of these songs take a lot of work to sort out. The room had a strange way of enhancing the top end of everything too. The snare sounded odd, my bass was unusually trebly (is that a word?) and even the guitar sounded too prominent in the high end.

Some songs were hard work but nothing felt like work, if that makes sense. We put a lot of effort into making music but it felt effortless. OK, my fingers hurt - the Fender Precision I chose to play is not as easy on the fingers (or hands) as the fretless I normally use with this band. Some words didn't come either. The line "big swimming pools and movie stars" from 'Gittar School' came out as "Big Wimplepoots n' Mendypies." But who's listening?

We had two short breaks. Long enough to catch up with Richard Drummer's stories from life on the road with Marillion and Carbon Silicon.

Richard Guitarist tried out his Strat (he normally plays a Les Paul) but too many years on the Les Paul made it sounds, well, wrong. Mind you, that's the joy of rehearsal. trying out new ideas and braving the mockery of your band mates.
The spirit was good, the whole night was shot through with a serious optimism and lack of cynicism than made me glad to be alive.

I love playing music live. And to play with such good musicians is a privilege I try never to take for granted.

Suitably buoyed up I came to find knackered wife and child. Teething and a bad reaction to an immunization has caused a few problems but, at the time of writing, it seems to be coming under control.

Oh, and another thing. Everyone go out and buy the album Pole by Tuner. It's mysterious, powerful and reviewed here. I've had this album for ages but recently it's become almost as prevalent on Radio iPod as Kathleen Edwards.

More soon.

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