Another Lovely Wedding

Last weekend the Lovely Brothers played the wedding of our friend Steve Reynolds and his lovely new wife Laura. It was a very relaxed reception, and everyone seemed to be having lots of fun. Honey Tree played first (Steve plays bass), who were good as always, although the hired PA was rather rubbish. We came on rather later than was probably advisable, by which time most people just wanted to dance. It took a while for the audience to warm to us, which wasn't helped by the terrible sounds we were making (I blame the PA and lack of sound check). By the end everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, dancing on the tables and singing along. Except that is, for Gail Porter (who is going out with one of Honeytree), who spent most of the gig heckling us, and uttered the immortal line, "I beg you to stop singing, you sound terrible." There was absolutely no irony in her voice, she truly hated us! Thanks for that Gail, that's going straight on the quotes page! I asked the audience if we should stop at that point, but most of them seemed to want us to continue. Especially the bride who screamed at the heckler to shut-up and danced like she was watching ACDC. Not being used to such an abusive attack I did stumble through one of the songs slightly, but we regained the power of rock for the last song, where Ben stood atop an oversize barrel for his final guitar solo and proceeded to violently bash his insturment as if he were trying to smash it off its strap, which he eventually did.

Punks and God like the Lovely Brothers

Got back last week from our little jaunt around the country, first stop was Tallington, a small punk festival just outside Peterborough. The atmosphere was friendly, except when Ben tried to start a fire in someones tent, but the music was rather dull, luckily I had packed an assortment of boardgames.

Next stop was the Lake District, we were staying in Windermere, but as we had the car we managed to cover a fair area. I had bought a book on pub walks in the region, which weren't, as I was expecting, gentle walks taking in multiple pubs, but instead, rather involved hikes, utilitising only a single public house. The views were astounding though. Annalise was less than pleased though when we had to embark along a path which was rather euphemistically described as 'not for people with weak knees', but in actual fact looked like it hadn't been follwed since the book was written a decade ago, and involved descending on all fours in places.

Not for weak knees!

After the Lakes was Blackpool. Both the Lovely Brothers, and Pog(Annalise's band) were playing Wasted, a massive punk festival (well about 5,000, which is pretty big for us.) Sitting in the pub the evening before our gig I was rather surprised to get a call from Nad the violinist to say they hadn't yet left, and worse still their car was in the garage with spassed brakes. It was too late to hire a car and they couldn't fit their instruments on the train. Mick and Toni (the rhythm section) were already on there way, but without the others we couldn't play. I was pretty devasted, we had come all this way, to stay in Blackpool, one of the most depressingly backwards towns I have ever been to, and now we couldn't play. A couple of hours later I got a call to say they had managed to borrow a car from a waiter in a cafe they had gone to, he even gave them the keys to his flat so they could colllect the car keys. Exactly why an almost complete stranger would lend the Lovely Brothers his car for a week to drive hundred of miles still perplexes me. It was like a Lovely Brothers miracle. Concrete proof that there is a God, and whats more he's a fan! They finally arrived at 5am and all was well. We played a good gig, and the rather bored looking punks really warmed to us, even giving us a standing ovation at the end, bless em! The post gig celebrations involved going to a karoke bar, where I could serenade Annalise with Chris De Burgh back catalogue. We stayed at the festival for 4 days I got increasingly bored of banal punk music, but on the Sunday Pog played, who were splendid.

Punk Rock and Boardgames, the Lovely Brothers at Wasted festival

Finally.....

Well, it's been a long time since I last posted, as some people have felt the need to express to me in quite uncertain terms, so I'm going to post up a bunch of things, which will, I guess, appear in reverse order. If you have got to this post after having read all the ones preceeding it, please chronologically invert them in your mind.

I've been pretty busy of late, Annalise has moved in, which is great, and I'm having lots of building work done, which is not so great, both of these things use up a substantial amount of my time, that combined with the sheer number of gigs we have played this year, and it's even becoming hard to find time to play board games modelling the restructuring of Russia, let alone find time to blog.