Well its been a little while, but I’m back with my legendary ramble’s, blogs and behind the scenes of all things Wild Strays. Well from my viewpoint anyway, but alas.. lets do this.
A new year and new beginnings along with new songs and plenty of cool stuff lined up for 2020.
I’m guessing by now you have all seen our re-branding and modern look to our band artwork, logo and indeed Bruce.
So I’m sure you won’t mind if I start this first blog by giving Grace a quick shout out. For all her hard work she puts into the artwork, promos, posters and videos which I think are so so cool..
While I’m here I also want to give a shout out to Liam, he has very quickly become a important part of this Wild Stray family and he is not just an awesome musician, but he works hard on the media side of things too.
So it’s Friday the 6th of February and we all have to day off work, as we know travelling to up to Northwich is going to be a bit of a mission on the last day of the week. Ah but we love it really, 3 o’clock in the afternoon comes and I load some gear into the van and then swing by to pick Grace up and then we head to Liam’s
Traffic was an absolute nightmare as predicted, and as we started to head to the M6, a overhead sign announced that Junctions 14 and 15 were closed.
So it was Grace’s idea to head onto the A38 to Lichfield. It wasn’t a bad road to be fair, although at one point we did end up in some country lanes. It took about 3 hours to get to the venue albeit a wee stop at Asda in Newcastle Under Lyme. Which seen Grace doing cartwheels in the car park. I’m not even joking, crazy woman ?
I got to say though, we did pass Roberts bakery and I think we all got rather too excited to see all the bread going round on conveyor belts. Twas cool though.
We arrived in Northwich and things started to look familiar, as it wasn’t so long ago that me and Grace was invited to talk and play guitar live on Northwich Radio. I’m not sure if the podcast is still available but we might have some other radio footage on the way soon. So watch this space or stay tuned to our News of the Wild updates.
Finding a car park for the Salty Dog did prove a little difficult as we must have done a circuit of the pub via the one ways system's at least 3 times.
On the third time, Grace said, hey, hey hold on a sec.. ,back the van up a bit.
On our left, it appeared that all of Mc’Donalds customers had poured out of the establishment to witness a fight. It was then Liam seen one of them pick up a bike and throw it at the guy he was fighting.
Crikey, and here's me thinking with all this beautiful architecture that this was a sleepy little place.
We managed to park behind the pub, and we walked in through the rear of the venue. It was then I was greeted by Paul Mcintyre, a great, great guy that I met back in Reading. He travelled 2 hours to come and see us which I thought was pretty awesome. Thanks Paul it was great to see you. I’m just sorry we didn’t get a picture with you after the show.
We then introduced ourselves to Shaun the sound engineer and we proceeded to load in. As I say, we managed to load into the rear of the venue and there was a cool canal and a bridge that kinda reminded me of Sydney Bridge.Ok not as glorious but squint your eyes a little bit maybe :)
We were placed in the middle of the pack for tonight's show, so we settled down to watch the first band called The Magic E’s.
As before I don’t talk too much about the other bands on here, but they had a great sound and we were told they would be off at 9pm, so everyone is chilling and I headed to the bar to get some drinks and got chatting to Alexandra, a really cool barmaid. Next thing I hear is The Magic E’s announce that this is their last song.
So I went back around and found Liam was out the back setting up his stands and Grace was getting changed. Oh well at least it meant we had a extra ten minutes to set up.
Which is just as well really, because tonight was quite special. As you may have read from News of the Wild, we are indeed a bass player down. But Grace decided she would step up and play bass on some songs and lead guitar on the others. It made perfect sense because some songs are very bass driven and others, we would miss the lead guitar.
We had practiced this a few times in the rehearsal studio and it sounded good. So that was the plan.
We kicked the show off with Beast Inside which I think is a first time we have ever started with that song, but it kicks the doors off from the get go and certainly the right way to start off a show,. Grace started the show on Bass guitar which then leads into one of our new tracks called Fireproof.
A quick sound clip and a change to lead guitar for Grace and we run through Broken Glass. Dodo Doom is to follow leading nicely into Own Personal Hell.
Next up a blistering drum solo from the one and only Liam McCarthy and into another new track called With Your Name On It.
We of course finished the show with the high energy and crowd pleasing track The Wild Strays.
We had an absolute blast at this venue and have been invited to come back with other bands. But more on that another day. Shaun did an amazing job on the sound desk and I must give a special shout out to my friend Phil who also made it down to the gig. I wasn’t expecting to bump into him or Paul, but thanks guys it was a real pleasure to see you both and once again, shout out to Alexandra. The Salty Dog in Northwich rocks \m/
A fantastic night and a great way to start the year with a trilogy of gigs in quick succession.
See you for part two of the saga, next Tuesday.
Or so we thought,
We finished the gig and drove home. I woke up on the Sunday to see Liam had noticed we had been tagged in a Premier Video on YouTube. It seems Bryan Spink has a youtube channel and films bands who perform at The Salty Dog and then Premiers them on Youtube.
So i spent Sunday evneing watching the countdown to the launch of our show.
So i couldnt resist but take a photo of it on my telly, but if you fancy watching it please click the link below;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwBTYwHsShM
Well thats it for now, its certainly good to be back,
As always,
Keep it Wild, Strays,.
Love and respect, KT x