The Dawn Chorus / The Retrospective Soundtrack Players - Blogging all over the World

Wednesday 1st November 2006
Southampton Joiners

Luke Haines
Lisa Lindley Jones
The Dawn Chorus

Well this was the definition of misunderstanding your potential audience! Being a bit of an indie-geek I thought that Luke Haines would draw a pretty decent crowd on reputation alone, having been in The Autuers and Black Box Recorder not so long ago. As it turned out it was pretty much the emptiest the Joiners has been when we’ve played, but hey ho. We still enjoyed it but since we fell slightly short of the Joiners’ required ticket sales we didn’t get paid anything either. But hey ho! Worse things happen at sea.

On the plus side – despite realising that cold gigs are very much back – we played pretty well and did ‘End of the World Party’ for the first time with Paul B on trumpet. Also did Act of God for the first time in ages and that went pretty well too. I think we’ve reached a point similar to when we played in Bournemouth back in the Spring, where we need a break to chill out a bit and get all our new material hammered into shape properly. We are recording a new 6-track ep soon, and also hopefully a limited edition one-off single which we’ll be recording at the Valley Studios in Winchester.

No live blogs for a while now so in the meantime, look after yourself and don’t forget to wear a scarf x

Tuesday 31st October 2006
Portsmouth Edge of the Wedge

Steve Dalzell
Sarah & Lewis (without Lewis)
The Dawn Chorus

Amazingly our fourth time at the Edge of the Wedge and our most fun yet. The 4 of us all played for once, and we seem to have finally got the hang of doing acoustic sets. On the way into the venue a nice man held the door open for me, only for me to lose control of what I was carrying and let keith’s bass swing off my shoulder and smack into the man’s face. So sorry again to that man. We played a new song today called ‘Lobster Telephone’, which is meant to cleverly compare a frustrating female to a piece of modern art, but as usual a lot of the lyrics had to be chopped about to fit the rhythm so the meaning got lost a bit along the way. Anyway, it’s new, and we played it. It will hopefully be on our next recording.

After us a girl called Sarah played some modern pop songs such as ‘Crazy’, ‘Sing it back’ and ‘I just can’t get you out of my head’, with just a simple finger-picked guitar and beautiful vocals. It was very enjoyable and probably much more appropriate than our dreary old nonsense. It was obviously a night for strange cover versions cos a guy called Steve then played ‘American Pie’ and George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ amongst his set. Luckily he didn’t play the full unabridged American Pie though. Not that he didn’t play it well but it’s about 18 minutes long and I wanted to go home to me dinner.