Victorious & Free

Hallo there

Being in a band can be a lot of things – invigorating, exciting, liberating, sexually arousing, annoying, incredibly frustrating and heartbreaking – but, ultimately – it’s never boring. This weekend just past proved that with aplomb. I love the word aplomb. Aplomb. Say it. Brilliant.

Friday was the usual ups and downs of playing in London involving a car crash en route (a fairly minor one but still one that wrote off our Ox’s car and meant we had to use a guitar lead to tie the boot shut to get to the gig…) and the standard, minimalistic London crowd. We played well though and it was a good warm up for the next days show which is probably in my top few of recent times….

Victorious Festival was organised by some of the fellows that run a couple of the decent boozers in Southsea – namely Little Johnny Russels and The Belle Isle (Fact #1 – I was the first person to play a gig in LJR’s when it opened….check me out…) and it’s always nice to be involved with something that brings together all the best bits about living in our community. The independent spirit shone through the whole weekend and it was pretty much a roaring success. I even finally got to see Reef!!! (Fact #2 – my first ever gig as a pimply young nipper should have been Reef at Southampton Guildhall and I bought 3 tickets off a tout…silly….only to give the 2 real ones to mates I’d gone with….mates who didn’t know who Reef were….mine was fake and I had to go home….alone…..sniff sniff…..lesson learned though….)

Anyway – our set drew a great crowd and having a decent sound system for a change really does help us with all our silly instrumentation etc…here’s a pic by our Retrospective Soundtrack Playing chum (and trumpeteer on ‘Chemikals’) Pauly B:

Sexy hat eh? EH?

 

The rest of the day was spent catching up with chums and wandering about enjoying the delights of Portsmouth Dockyard…the wonderful old ships of the Mary Rose, the Warrior & the Victory are certainly beautiful backdrops for a festival. Special mention also goes to All About Tea for supplying their top notch Portsmouth Tea blend when the queue for the Ale Tent was too long….oh and Day of the Rabblement sounded great on the acoustic stage too.

Our sexy lovers Pie & Vinyl where also there ‘representin their endz’ with a stall in the Smuggler’s Market. They asked us back on the Sunday to do a ‘secret’ unplugged set for them which was most enjoyable….mainly because rugby player Rob had to ask the Camp Cooks (the excellent on site Drag Queen caterers…) to turn their music off for a bit so myself and Elliott could fumble our way through some songs we rarely play. Here’s a pic by the ace Joe Watson (who did our ‘Wander’ vid and fronts ace hardcore band ‘Attack! Vipers!’):

special friends….and me still looking good in the hat…

Here too is a wee review from the wonderous (and fantastically named) music blog ‘Call Upon the Author’:

http://www.callupontheauthor.com/blog/4489/victorious-festival-one-mans-view/

All this good cheer in the air has led me to think should give something back so we’ve made our twin EP’s from a couple of years back FREE to download for a while on our Soundcloud page. ‘

ART DECO’ is full band electric stuff and ‘ART NOUVEAU’ is stripped back acoustic stuff. Have a gander and see what you think. ‘Padre, oh Padre!’ on ‘ART NOUVEAU’ is one of my fave songs we’ve written but…for some reason…we’ve never played it live. Doubt we ever will either. Odd that.

Anyway – here they are for you:

…and…

So….finally…..that brings us to our next gig and one of our favourite events on the planet. The mighty Southsea Fest. I think we’re the only band who’s played every single one of these. God that makes us sound like seasoned veterans rather than the clueless amateurs we so successfully seem to portray on a daily basis. Best line-up yet too….

 

See you there.

Wit

xxxx

TBOTB