the World of Verbal Warning 26.04.2010

Well, what an eventful gig at the weekend, it took me and Wendy Verbett a while to find the venue as the only Melbourne Hotel we could find had a poster outside saying a band called the Underlimes were playing there, eventually we found out the Venue had double booked the room, a compromise was reached, the Underlimes would play at one end of the bar in between Fightback, us and another band at the other end of the bar, not an ideal match as the Underlimes were a swing covers band, so a bizarre night was taking shape.

Guitar boy did his best to steal my crown as the most undiplomatic big mouth in the band, standing in the gents he struck up a conversation with the guy next to him as you do, and it went something like, “you in one of the bands then”, Guitar Boy replied “yeah that’s right”, the guy said “what you like then”, Guitar Boy “old school Punk, but don’t worry we’re not as bad as the first band”, guy in the next urinal “I’m in the first band”, whoops, quick exit by guitar boy.

I did my best later on in the night to reclaim my crown by totally falling to recognise the bass player from Fightback when he asked to borrow a pick, thought he was a fan wanting a memento of the gig, but I wasn’t in Guitar Boys league I’m afraid.

After the gig I saw Singer Boy trying to explain to a girl who had been throwing V signs at us that White Riot wasn’t a white supremacist song, a few minutes later Lee Cooper informed me we were all about to get a seeing too cause we’re a racist band, now with hindsight I could see the problem, the set consisted of England Belongs to me, and I had England Flags on my amp because it was St Georges Day, add to this playing White Riot, not to mention enthusiastic jumping about by a bunch of skinheads at the front and I could see why a few pissed up badly informed liberal thinkers would jump to the wrong conclusion, but it’s a bit sad when we can’t even show a bit of patriotism without being branded a bunch of racists, in the end the threats came to nothing.

The gig itself was cut down to 40 minutes because of the double booking problem, and predictable the covers went down a storm especially 500 miles, apparently the vocals were drowned out by the crowd singing along, song selection that’s what it’s all about.

the World of Verbal Warning 20.4.2010

You may well think that we’ve been a bit lazy during the last month, but not so, we’ve been beavering away in the studio trying to get our long overdue 2^nd album finished and if the final master turns out ok it looks like it might be out in May. If I’ve not mentioned it before it’s going to be called Red Star Radio, don’t know how we came up with that title but we did and for some reason we think it sounds rather good, it’s got 12 tracks on it and the last 2 are a sort of Punk Rock opera, so all you prog rockers out there, go and get it.

We did have a gig at Kettering last Saturday which seemed to go ok after a slow start, I enjoyed the 2^nd set after we were told to turn up, which meant I could actually hear what I was playing, though some of you may think that would be a bad thing, I don’t think Guitar Boy over enjoyed it though he was stuck round the corner which meant he had to have his amp really loud so the rest of the pub could hear him, unfortunately this meant that he couldn’t really hear what the rest of us were playing, still we did ok and the Landlord’s not canceled our September booking there, not yet anyway, which is a good sign.

There’s a gig this Friday at Melbourne with Fightback, so we’ll have to restrict our set to an hour, only about 20 songs then.