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'We're the last sacrificial lambs on the altar of the song competition for tonight.' My opening words when we got on stage as the last act of the last heat of the competition 'It's all about the song.' How these words came back to haunt me.

There were 4 acts and each act had 6 personally invited audience judges who voted for the other acts but not their own. Then the artists also voted and a couple of staff. We'd worked hard to choose a varied set list of 4 songs demonstrating our work, we played well and the sound was pretty good overall. All the other 3 acts were similar, guitar strumming and male vocal, so it should have been no surprise that they voted for each other and not us. I was gutted having taken the title of the competition literally, bit naive I realise now and Andy, who's far more stoic than I, said it just made him more determined to do better. His guitar playing shone over the whole night in my opinion, which is rarely humble!

As well as our 6 judges, who included 2 artists (checkout http://www.jessknowles.com/ to see one of them) an engineer, the cleverest librarian dude in Britain and two fellow musicians, a whole crowd of the most wonderful young people, some of whom have seen us several times now, were also there. They were all a fabulous support. Thank you guys xxxx

So, what have we learnt? Well, firstly that music competitions are a bad idea and second, it helps to have the hide of a rhino when working as a musician. Unfortunately, my skin isn't that thick yet so I'm off to lick my wounds in a dark corner.

xxxxx