Winging it at the one rehearsal. |
By now we had the venue booked. It was the Three
Counties Hotel in Belmont where Paul had had his birthday some time ago. We
booked the staging and Paul had sound and lights.
We had set the date
for October the 5th, a ticket agency was found, and of course extra
security was arranged. After all, this was Hereford-England's wild West!
I had a guitar rehearsal with Paul Cheshire and Paul
Cobbold. 'Chesh' was a friend from Hereford back when Jimmy Scott was still a
kid and Pete was getting into his first band. Paul Cheshire was a key
man.
Another guitar rehearsal saw me requisition a guitar player,
Matt Warren, who I had used on my first track in Paul’s studio about two years
ago. He is a young man with talent and good feel.
These rehearsals were spread over the best part of a
month. In reality, three rehearsals of about 5 or 6 hours in total.
I had learned a lot. I had also done the unthinkable again.
On the last guitar rehearsal, I had got another one of my songs into my 'set'.
This was a slow acoustic song. I played it on my 2008 Martin guitar with
mellow bass to accompany me and the two guitarists playing small roles to give
the song some atmosphere and shape. The song was called 'Postcards'. It was
again about Jim and Pete and how they are still, fantastically, in my
life.
Now I am singing and playing guitar on three songs. How did
that happen?! I guess they just needed to be sung. It felt like they were
desperate to escape!!
A full band rehearsal was called for late September.
Everything was loaded in and set up by a small group of us and the organisation
of the rehearsal got underway. I had never fronted a band on guitar in my life.
I needed to get 'my sound' but I didn't know what it was.
We played the Steve Winwood song and I could hear very
little that I liked. We were playing to a wall some twenty five feet in front
of us, and I simply had trouble hearing my guitar or voice. In the middle of
the rehearsal, my amp blew a speaker and started to flap a little (not that I
noticed during the run-through).
By the end I had to make a few split decisions. The
show date, my debut in my home town, was coming up soon. There was no way I
could just busk it.
I had organised a projector and operator from the Friends of
Lyde who were the beneficiaries of the show. I wanted as many pictures of Jimmy
and Pete as I could get and some live pictures of them in concert.
It wasn't long before it dawned on me that there were
a few key people who should have their pictures up on the screen with Jim and
Pete. One of them was my long time tight friend Bryan Morgan. He had driven the
van and set the gear nearly fifty years ago and on October the 5th, show day,
it was the third anniversary of his death.
Meanwhile I set out to finish lyrics to my two
self-penned songs. I had to improve everything, and fast.
M.D.C.
M.D.C.