Blog

What a great night the band had last night at the Auckland Arms in Southsea. Apart from being one of the most welcoming and atmospheric pubs in town, the audience were plentiful and clearly out for a fun evening. I was a bit dubious about the whole evening at the start as I have developed my annual frog chorus chest infection, incidentally no one has sent me flowers again so no improvement on last year there! We had a back up plan, if my voice was clearly not up to it then Andy would take over and we'd have a blues evening which I would have enjoyed anyway cos I could have played the piano. Anyway, I introduced us a 'Croaky Broad' and set forth in to the land of melodies with frog in situ to see what would happen. Started with a Bessie Smith number 'Empty Bed Blues' as I reckoned this would sound great even if the frog sung it and that seemed to work.  So the first set was a bit husky but not so troublesome as I'd feared, Andy, being a gent, offered to take over with the singing to give my voice a rest and guess what I said? No, it wasn't rude! I politely but very firmly declined the offer! 

We'd decided, instead of carting my keyboard along, to use the piano in the pub, recently tuned, so I sang all the numbers I play sitting down, another first for me as I like to stand up really. The piano sound is really great though, no amount of electronics can really begin to sound like a real piano, they are so much more resonant. The only problem with it was that when I sat down I couldn't see anyone in the audience so I was performing to the back of the piano. That was a bit weird but I'd set a second mic up so that when I did the ones without piano I reappeared, rather like a Jack-in-the-box!

The second set was terrific, my voice decided there was no problem and the frog behaved. It kind of just began as our friend, Chris Morley (terrific pianist) took up the piano and was just jamming and we all joined in then he played for 'In these shoes' it was fab! I was particularly pleased with my 'Summertime' rendition and the audience definitely appeared to agree. We were all on fine form in the end and had a really great evening, such entertainment eh? The audience got to hear a frog singing and saw a Jack-in-the-box! No one can say Walker Broad don't go all out to entertain!