Old Neptune, Whitstable
Old Neptune, Whitstable, 29th August 1999:
This was an all day charity gig in aid of the RNLI, featuring a bizarre assortment of local bands. On the day of the gig, we had only had a couple of hours practice with emergency stand-in drummer Dave Willoughby, who hadn’t heard any of the songs before, although Alex had played with him in Invisible Dog at the very same gig the previous year. We arrived on the scene at around 6.30pm.
The event was quite badly organised that year, although things got better in subsequent years. After enduring a two hour wait and a soul destroyingly unimaginative but tight folk rock band, we finally got on stage about 8.30pm. Although we managed to set up fairly quickly, we didn’t get much of a soundcheck, so the on-stage sound was not particularly good.
We kicked off with “What’s Under The Stairs?”, as planned. The intro went well and the children in front of the stage seemed suitably impressed, even though the vocals failed to come in at the appropriate time. Recovering from this setback, we successfully completed the first song and launched into the random atonal noise with which we introduced our cover of “Crash”. This song went well and the crowd really liked it. Once we got the more difficult songs (”T.V. Girls” and “3AM”) out of the way without too many noticeable mishaps, we started to relax and play much better.
“ES-40″ went very well and “Buried Alive” provided a suitably rocking finale, although we had to get off stage to make way for the next band, so we didn’t have time for the planned crescendo of guitar trashing and sonic terrorism. Nevertheless, this was a good start and the audience reaction was generally favourable. We all performed well under difficult circumstances, particularly Dave Willoughby. Having only joined the band a few hours before the gig, he still managed to make fewer cock-ups than our “regular” drummer who resigned the previous day!
Set list:
- What’s Under The Stairs?
- Crash (The Primitives)
- T.V. Girls
- 3AM
- ES-40
- Buried Alive