When Is A Pig Not A Gig?

The Lauras had a gig last night, and because I'm one of The Lauras, I was there. It was a last-minute gig, not literally, but it was literally a last-48hour gig. So there wasn't very much time to badger and bribe our cash cows fans into seeing basically the same set as we played last Monday.

Being a replacement for the surely-marvellous-but-cancelled "Adam Hussein Show (from GLC)" is never going to be an easy one, so an audience of about twenty was a pretty fantastic result, although they were never all watching the bands at the same time, and at least a car-full left after the first band, which is a shame, because the first band were rubbish.

I don't know if I should really say this, but it's too late because I'm just about to: Lionhearts were really depressingly bad and my favourite part of their gig was when the singer defiantly ripped his mic off the stand to further emphasise the ....emphasisness of their performance, only for it to disconnect from the cable and improve the overall sound quality by approximately twenty-five per cent. (Actually my real favourite part was when one of the bullet-headed fans they had taxied over from Cardiff barged past me on the way back from the bar and spilt most of his pint across the floor. Hopefully he learnt that sometimes it pays to have manners, but I expect he will just shove harder next time.)

My third favourite part was when they said they had a song called "Dirty Rotten Scoundrel". It would have been a brilliant joke, but it didn't make a brilliant song.

The Jelas, though, do make brilliant songs! In abundance! Not only that but they are the nicest, funnest, funniest band we have ever played with. They seem like the sort of band who have ideas thick and fast, and just put them all together until they run out of room, making a skronky collage out of musical pipe-cleaners. We got on too, as bands, which is not a completely freak occurance, but it is definitely the first time that a band has been so sociable with us, and it was great!

We went on last and played alright. It was quite hard to be excited about it but I didn't play as many wrong notes as usual and Bert said something funny about Children In Need. He also wore his SPECIAL t-shirt, which might have been good but for me it was an anti-climax because I couldn't really see it. But despite playing Every Song We Have, it seemed to go by just as quickly as usual and if we'd had any more songs I would quite like to have played them (although no-one was exactly screaming for an encore). Bert's cousin who was once in a good band called The Danans said that I was a good guitarist, and that I used my little finger a lot, which I hadn't thought about before and won't ever again.

I got back to see the end of Children In Need (they were struggling to reach last year's total) and no-one had said anything nice about my new song.