Sat 21st September saw us drive up north to sunny Yorkshire! Selby Town Hall was a lovely venue and, though not a huge, we played to a full and appreciate audience. The tech staff were incredibly helpful and made us all very welcome and well fed too! (Including the beautiful Bluebell - our Born To Win teams's gorgeous whippet, who loves to be on stage during rehearsal...).

This was the last Show of our current set, and we really nailed it, even though I say so myself! We also filmed us performing 'Mount Everest Sings The Blues'  for one of our big fans, Todd, in America who is poorly - so we dedicated it to him and sent him the footage, which he loved.

Friday 15 March: What a fantastic gig at The 100 Club; couldn't have gone better!

Got in at 15.00 - loads of gear to assemble but everyone in the band as always very upbeat and positive.
Nice long soundcheck at around 16.30 (but it's never long enough of course), then our support act for the evening Stevie & The Masquerades arrive as planned around 18.00.

(I saw Stevie busking in Bath a couple of years ago and loved her voice . Lost touch with her for a while until she alerted me to her new project with very talented musical partner Matt. You must check them out - exceptionally good).

Glenn and I joined Al and his friends at Vapiano's in Great Portland St. for a pleasant pizza then nipped back to see Stevie & The Masquerades do their slot at 20.00. (they were fantastic!).
The club was already heaving by this time and there was my wife Clare, our children Bea and Arthur + about 25 other friends from Bath and London. Brilliant!
Had lots of laughs getting ready in the minuscule but very atmospheric dressing room then at 20.45 it's our first set.

The audience reaction was amazing, better than anyone could have hoped, and by the time we finished our second set around 22.30 it was an absolute triumph, one of the most successful gigs I've been involved with in a long while.
And such a mixed crowd, including a couple of people who'd flown over from Australia especially to see the show.
Incredible!

Clare and I stayed over in London as did John Baker but the rest of the guys returned to Bath and Wales getting back at about 5 a.m.
But it was worth it.
 

Look forward to doing it all again at The Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham, April 6th.

See you there!
 
 

On 15 March 2019 we play The 100 Club in Oxford Street.

Classic! Talk about steeped in history. How amazing to be still going strong since the 1960s - the club, not me!

I think the last time I performed there was around 2014 with Stackridge and the atmosphere was fantastic. Posters covering every wall, sweaty, smelly and electric. And just to think they've all played there: Paul McCartney, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Rod Stewart - bloody brilliant!

I'm hoping any London or Home Counties supporters will be snapping up tickets and I must invite my sister and my wonderfully eccentric friend John Miller too.. Mmm can't wait!

Click on the pic below for tickets!

We've just performed our Korgis set at The Sunshine Festival!  

We got onto the site without any problem at around 16.00, (no queuing!) and the Artists Enclosure was right next to the main stage where we were due to play at 19.30. 

So we were having a pleasant time in the hospitality tent - tea, beer, vegetarian chilli - and then the heavens opened with a vengeance. Furious downpour and gale-force wind and you could see the main stage getting absolutely waterlogged. About 45 minutes later the storm subsided so we off-loaded all our gear from our 4 separate vehicles and carried it up the ramp to the covered holding area behind the stage.

Looking out at the field in front of us things didn't look promising.

Sensibly the punters were all sheltering inside the various performance tents dotted around the site so if we'd gone ahead as planned at 19.30, we'd probably have been playing to about 5 people and 2 dogs!

Fortunately the organisers agreed with us that it would be crazy to risk performing on the open stage in case we were hit by another mini-hurricane, so we got the message "you can perform in the Variety Tent but you have to be on in 30 minutes." 

So.... we had to load all the gear back into our vehicles and shoot over to the other side of the site, off-load, set-up in double-quick time, have literally a 5 minute microphone-check then start the show.

The possibility for complete disaster was off the scale!

But amazingly, some might say miraculously, it couldn't have gone any better!

Our fantastic audience waited patiently for us to get everything set on Stage - helped by the brilliant Sunshine Festival Stage Crew, who were so on the ball - and the sound on stage was great - so Thank You guys - you rock! 

The band rose to the occasion, the 500 or-so audience loved it and there were absolutely no technical hitches. Unbelievable!

Al Steele as usual had a formidable amount of technical things to deal with - which again he achieved effortlessly - Nigel Hart was deputising for Glenn Tommey on keyboards and played a blinder, Paul Smith was his usual incomparable self on "la batterie" and us vocalists Ava, Jay, Emmy, John and myself couldn't stop smiling and giving it our all! 

I love festivals!  

Let's hope we can do at least 30 in 2019!

Photos courtesy of Richard Purvis and Ceri Darknell

We just played a fantastic James Warren And Friends gig at The Stables, Wavendon. It couldn't have gone better! 

Technically our show was fiendishly complex and the possibilities for unforeseen glitches and general blundering were very high indeed.

First we had our dearly beloved Born To Win doing their own 20 minute set with their own equipment which then had to cleared to make way for all our stuff; then the overworked Al Steele, having just played guitar for Ava, Jay and Emmy, had to synchronise all our additional audi/visual stuff in real time as he was playing a whole bunch of blistering guitar solos. And even more difficult than that, I had to remember my words! But Al pulled it off like the legend he is and I managed to accurately recall 87% of the lyrics!

A triumph!

And it convincingly demonstrated to us all that we have a winner with this show. Perfect for all occasions - very upbeat and positive with great additional singing from Johnny Baker, Ava, Jay and Emmy, rock-solid drumming from Paul Smith and very sympathetic keyboards from Glenn Tommey. And of course Al holding it all together.

Come and see us do a Korgis set at The Sunshine Festival in August!

Love, Jim xx