Big in Falkirk 2009
I'm currently sitting on the couch recovering from two days of drumming, dancing, and general awesomeness.
We'd been preparing for Big in Falkirk for several weeks, going over all our songs and whipping them into a tight half-hour setlist. Marcus and Oli - the original founders of Puff Uproar, who passed the reins of the band onto Suz and Rory after the last Big in Falkirk - came along for one of the sessions and gave us some good performance tips.
I'd been nervously watching the weather forecast in the days leading up to the festival - drumming in the rain is possible (all of the drums, minus the djembe, are waterproof) but it would have been a bit of a miserable experience. I needn't have worried too much - Saturday dawned bright and sunny.
Falkirk was absolutely crammed with traffic on the festival morning, and I had a spot of trouble parking - the festival organisers had given out more artist parking passes than they had spaces, so after picking up Rachel and Ben from the station, I ended up dropping them at the festival then orbiting Falkirk for twenty minutes before finally finding a parking space... back at the station. Luckily, there was a shuttle bus running from the station, so I hopped on it - only to bump into my parents, who had come over from Glasgow by train!
After recommending the Dojo Drummers (a sister group to Mugenkyo, whom we'd seen twice before) to my parents, I dashed through the park and the maze-like interior of Callendar House and landed in our dressing room just in time for our last-minute rehearsal. Half an hour of running through the set, then it was time to don our black and silver costumes (black headband and waistcoat and silver tie in my case) and make our way to our pitch.
We were playing at the back of Callendar House, on a gravel terrace at one side of a large grassy field. On Marcus and Oli's advice, we marched out from the edge of the field playing the bell-and-snare intro to our first song to grab attention, then each player joined in once we'd reached the pitch and they'd dumped any extra equipment they were carrying. It worked well - we had a small crowd by the time we got to the pitch, rather than having people drift in during the first song. For later performances, Suz bounced around the field playing snare and herding people towards the pitch, like some sort of samba sheepdog :)
The first set was a bit wonky - I had new sticks, a new drum belt, and an unfamiliar venue, and some combination of those three meant my solos were sloppier than usual, and a couple of said new sticks snapped and sent stick-halves spiralling into the air. Luckily, I came prepared, with one cargo-pants-pocket stuffed with spares :)
The second Saturday set, and the two on Sunday, went a lot better - we played on the grass in front of the terrace rather than on it, to be closer to the audience. The final set was the best - we were all used to the setlist and venue, the drum changes went smoothly, and Marcus and Oli had turned up and were enthusiastically dancing along in the middle of the crowd. Nothing boosts confidence better than having an appreciative audience :)
After the 2 o'clock sets on Saturday and Sunday, we invited the crowd along to one of the tents for our Come and Try sessions. Elaine had borrowed an entire samba drum set from one of the local schools, so we handed out drums to the first fifteen or so people into the tent (including my parents :) ) and taught them Bell Hop, one of our easier songs. These went pretty well - there were many enthusiastic participants banging away, and with luck a couple of them might turn up on Wednesday and join us permanently. We got more people than we'd expected, to the point where the tent was packed with people watching. We could probably have formed several drum circles if we'd had time - unfortunately, we only had half an hour, so we had to turn away a lot of people.
I ended up staying til the finish on both nights - I don't get to see much live music, so I thought I'd make the most of the opportunity :) Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the Dojo Drummers, since they were playing during our rehearsal, but I did see:
I met their guitarist/conductor Dave backstage after the Stereo MCs show (we'd managed to get backstage with our Puff Uproar artist passes :) ) and had a chat - he said we sounded good, and asked if we were anything to do with Marcus Britton, since he'd recognised his influence on the arrangement of samba plus horns. It's a small music world :)
The finale of the festival was a Robert Burns-themed firework show by The World Famous, who had performed the amazing Full Circle last year. The firework show was awesome - it started off with a lone piper standing atop Callendar House, then progressed to a full pipe band escorting a giant lit model of Tam O'Shanter astride his horse (complete with witch grabbing the horse's tail). The performance finished with a portrait of Burns drawn in fire, with a background of the Saltire in the form of a cross of white rockets against blue starbursts.
Now I'm looking forward to next year :)
PS: just found the Falkirk Herald article about Puff Uproar from a couple of months back :)
We'd been preparing for Big in Falkirk for several weeks, going over all our songs and whipping them into a tight half-hour setlist. Marcus and Oli - the original founders of Puff Uproar, who passed the reins of the band onto Suz and Rory after the last Big in Falkirk - came along for one of the sessions and gave us some good performance tips.
I'd been nervously watching the weather forecast in the days leading up to the festival - drumming in the rain is possible (all of the drums, minus the djembe, are waterproof) but it would have been a bit of a miserable experience. I needn't have worried too much - Saturday dawned bright and sunny.
Falkirk was absolutely crammed with traffic on the festival morning, and I had a spot of trouble parking - the festival organisers had given out more artist parking passes than they had spaces, so after picking up Rachel and Ben from the station, I ended up dropping them at the festival then orbiting Falkirk for twenty minutes before finally finding a parking space... back at the station. Luckily, there was a shuttle bus running from the station, so I hopped on it - only to bump into my parents, who had come over from Glasgow by train!
After recommending the Dojo Drummers (a sister group to Mugenkyo, whom we'd seen twice before) to my parents, I dashed through the park and the maze-like interior of Callendar House and landed in our dressing room just in time for our last-minute rehearsal. Half an hour of running through the set, then it was time to don our black and silver costumes (black headband and waistcoat and silver tie in my case) and make our way to our pitch.
We were playing at the back of Callendar House, on a gravel terrace at one side of a large grassy field. On Marcus and Oli's advice, we marched out from the edge of the field playing the bell-and-snare intro to our first song to grab attention, then each player joined in once we'd reached the pitch and they'd dumped any extra equipment they were carrying. It worked well - we had a small crowd by the time we got to the pitch, rather than having people drift in during the first song. For later performances, Suz bounced around the field playing snare and herding people towards the pitch, like some sort of samba sheepdog :)
The first set was a bit wonky - I had new sticks, a new drum belt, and an unfamiliar venue, and some combination of those three meant my solos were sloppier than usual, and a couple of said new sticks snapped and sent stick-halves spiralling into the air. Luckily, I came prepared, with one cargo-pants-pocket stuffed with spares :)
The second Saturday set, and the two on Sunday, went a lot better - we played on the grass in front of the terrace rather than on it, to be closer to the audience. The final set was the best - we were all used to the setlist and venue, the drum changes went smoothly, and Marcus and Oli had turned up and were enthusiastically dancing along in the middle of the crowd. Nothing boosts confidence better than having an appreciative audience :)
After the 2 o'clock sets on Saturday and Sunday, we invited the crowd along to one of the tents for our Come and Try sessions. Elaine had borrowed an entire samba drum set from one of the local schools, so we handed out drums to the first fifteen or so people into the tent (including my parents :) ) and taught them Bell Hop, one of our easier songs. These went pretty well - there were many enthusiastic participants banging away, and with luck a couple of them might turn up on Wednesday and join us permanently. We got more people than we'd expected, to the point where the tent was packed with people watching. We could probably have formed several drum circles if we'd had time - unfortunately, we only had half an hour, so we had to turn away a lot of people.
I ended up staying til the finish on both nights - I don't get to see much live music, so I thought I'd make the most of the opportunity :) Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the Dojo Drummers, since they were playing during our rehearsal, but I did see:
- Esperanza, "Glasgow's hardest-working ska band"
- Carnival Collective - awesome band, described by Suz as 'a soul band who just happen to have a whole samba band instead of a drumkit'
- Stereo MCs - great live show, with the tiny lead singer/MC bouncing around the stage like some sort of purple-shellsuited and medallioned gecko on speed
- Capercaillie - beautiful sounds, but unfortunately had to leave halfway through their set due to being utterly frozen
- Darwin and the Dodo - during which I was co-opted to play the part of Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog" (in this case, complete with plastic dog nose :P)
- and about half of a fairly strange show called Brain Wave, which involved a giant animated face inside a small hut, with a window above it showing its dreams using various things on sticks.
I met their guitarist/conductor Dave backstage after the Stereo MCs show (we'd managed to get backstage with our Puff Uproar artist passes :) ) and had a chat - he said we sounded good, and asked if we were anything to do with Marcus Britton, since he'd recognised his influence on the arrangement of samba plus horns. It's a small music world :)
The finale of the festival was a Robert Burns-themed firework show by The World Famous, who had performed the amazing Full Circle last year. The firework show was awesome - it started off with a lone piper standing atop Callendar House, then progressed to a full pipe band escorting a giant lit model of Tam O'Shanter astride his horse (complete with witch grabbing the horse's tail). The performance finished with a portrait of Burns drawn in fire, with a background of the Saltire in the form of a cross of white rockets against blue starbursts.
Now I'm looking forward to next year :)
PS: just found the Falkirk Herald article about Puff Uproar from a couple of months back :)