| The Fifth Gig (Alex�s Bristow�s Birthday Party): So far the longest we had played to an audience was about six minutes and that was two songs, now we were being asked to perform a two-hour set for my brother�s birthday party, it was a difficult mission but we chose to accept it. We decided to get a bit more practise in for this one, so that was about 3 practise sessions before the day we played. We devised a set list which included three of our own songs, Life On A Milk Cap and The Happy Song which had been around for a while but never performed live and the brand-new Anger, Hate and Lies. The 30+-song list also included covers of Blink-182, Nirvana, Millencolin, Muse, Jimmy Eat World and Feeder. The Party was held at the Post-office (Busby) club in Chippenham and it started at one in the afternoon and carried to around three. We opened with Life On A Milk Cap, the extremely sparse crowd was very unmotivated by our music. There were only about 40 people there. My brother�s friends weren�t interested in us, they were too busy running around playing kiss-chase or something and the parents weren�t going to dance so that left our friends enthusiastically jumping about to our music. After the first song I told the crowd to �get up and dance� but they didn�t, we played Blink�s �pathetic� and Tom and I engaged in some sexual dancing. We ran through our first half of songs ending in a high-energy cover of Nirvana�s Tourette�s, but it still didn�t get the crowd on their feet. However there was laughter when we did the �bum-line� in the middle of �The Rock Show�. In this half we also did an abysmal cover of feeder�s �Seven Days In The Sun�. We started the second half with a guest appearance from my brother Alex on the drums for �All The Small Things�. The youngsters danced for that one, it�s a popular single. The worst song of the day came then when I attempted to sing Muse�s �Hypermusic�, the guitars sounded nice, my vocals, terrible. Bleed American all went down very well in this set and we ended on a below-par cover of Nirvana�s �Territorial Pissings� which led into us turning our amps up to create major feedback, throwing our guitars to the floor and walking out of the building. Adam, Tim and I wore dresses for the second half as an anti-homophobic statement. |