Tuesday 5th November

I wasn’t particularly bothered about missing out on Bonfire Night, (as it seems to be known these days, I remember when it was Guy Fawkes Night and people were encouraged to take a homemade Guy along to the public display to throw on the fire, nowadays the bonfire is fenced off in one of the daftest health and safety moves of all time – if you get burned by a bonfire, lesson learned about going too near), as it was my regular studio booking to record the live performance for those lucky Americans. The band that I had originally booked had dropped out last week, so I suppose it was my fault that I left it until last night to try and fill the booking. My method of opening Facebook on my laptop and working down the list of people who were online didn’t seem to be paying off as most people couldn’t do it because it was Bonfire Night. You’d think I’d asked people to work on a Bank Holiday or Christmas Day from some of the reactions. Anyway, at one o’clock this morning, Oscar Speed got in touch via Twitter to say that he would like to do it.

By the time I had fought through the traffic to get to town, and made my weekly trip to the Tesco inside Vic Centre for my meal deal, I was not in the best of moods. It is well known that I am not a fan of supermarkets and try to avoid them at all costs, but my weekly fix of artificial food is enough to put me on until I get home for a proper meal. Last week I had to make several attempts at getting the right packet of crisps as there were crisps in the meal deal display that shouldn’t  have been there, I eventually snapped at the checkout person to just “fetch me a suitable packet of fucking crisps, I’m in a hurry”. I hate myself for losing my temper in such a way, but piss-poor customer service is one of my biggest bugbears, and of course the reason why I hate supermarkets. This week I just took five packets of crisps to the checkout and asked her to scan whichever one made my meal deal work. It saved time in the long run.

Oscar had been in the studio all day working on new tracks and had a sore throat, so I wasn’t sure what I was going to walk into. He was fine though, and delivered a lovely set of songs for this weekend’s show. We somehow managed to get through the entire thing in record time, including the interview, the photos and the technical stuff. The atmosphere was a little different tonight with no Joe or Jack on board, and we were all out by around nine o’clock.

Picture by Caz Harby for ROFL Audio

One of the bands I championed at the beginning of the year, The CTRL, was playing at The Maze so I wandered up to try and catch them. They were playing the Notts In A Nutshell night, which is a quality lottery at the best of times but tonight was diabolical. I walked in during a set by a band I didn’t recognise and found my mate Darren (not that one, I have two friends called Darren) and the band. They weren’t on for about another hour which meant I had to sit through another band. My support for the support bands is well documented but even I have limits, this band from Derby were on next, I can’t remember their name but I want to say Parasite. Imagine a bunch of awkward teenagers who spend all their time in Games Workshop masturbating over pictures of Lara Croft and listening to heavy metal music, then imagine giving them guitars and telling them they are a really good band, then sitting back and surveying the insult to your ears that ensues. They performed a handful of standard metal covers; ‘Paranoid’, ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Can I Play With Madness’ and the like, the lead singer (a chubby kid who could have been a boy or a girl) thought he was playing Wembly and kept trying to rally the small crowd into clapping along when I just wanted to get the whole sorry affair out of the way.

The CTRL were great although were suffering from some sort of cable based bother from the onset, but even when they were playing below par they were still a million times better than what had come before them. Charlie the drummer was using Parasite’s kit, so the band had to wait around and learn how to play a gig as a proper group does. They seemed popular with the crowd too; I have a feeling that (providing they stay together and remain as tight as they are now) next year will see bigger things for them. They’re recording a session for The Sound of Nottingham UK soon, and things don’t get much better for a band than that.

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