We had a great show at THE WHEATSHEAF in Oxford on Friday.
It was a great night of drunken guitar driven fun. I really enjoyed the show, there were a lot a friends down for it, and unlike the last gig there, no technical problems.
Nikki Q came down and got some great live shots of us, you can check out her work HERE or have a look at the gallery of shots of us from the show here:
Holly got some video done as well, including me playing a solo with Hazel sitting on my shoulders. It did take a me a bit by surprise, but I guess it's nice to be spontaneous and keep me on my toes. The acrobatics start at about 2' 30"
As I've already ranted, we had a really great show on Saturday at AQUANET at South of the Border. It was fantastic night of gin fueled fun.
First surprise of the night, Colin unveiled THE SOHO COBRAS printed bass drum skin; Very fucking sexy.
While we were there we had a few cool live shots taken by Gareth Thomas, so a big thank you to him.
We also had a few promo shots done by Hannah Thomas, so again a big thank you to her for making us look so rock n roll, if not quite as good as she made Hazel look.
There are a few examples of each here for your viewing pleasure:
PROMO SHOTS FIRST...
NOW SOME LIVE SHOTS.
...and finally a big thank you to Shady Dave of Shred-reviews.co.uk for featuring our track "BOYZ NIGHT OUT" and it's sweep-tastic solo in his LATEST UPDATE.
We got offered a gig at 12 BAR last week. It was for the following Friday but we jumped at a chance to do a show at there even at 4 days notice!
I've wanted to play there since I saw THE STEREO JUNKS rip the place up a few years ago and since Hazel had already played there a few times with GINKINTA her last band I was feeling a bit left out of all this 12 BAR gig action, so a massive than you to LONDON CALLIN for putting us on.
It's weird in, any reasonable way the place is an awful venue, the stage is tiny, I've seen bigger dining tables and obscured by a balcony, but it's just SO FUCKING COOL you can't help but love playing there.
We had a pretty good crowd despite being first on. Opening the night combined with the difficulty of changing over gear in such a small space meant I had to leave my lovely new amp at home and we all used the headline bands gear, so a big thank you to ELECTRIC RED DRIVE for sharing amps. I got to play through a huge Fender combo, great amp, but not really my thing, so I guess I struggled a bit with it at first, but once we got going it was all cool as fuck.
The sound in the room was pretty good, but it was loud as hell. So far I've had excellent sound on the video with my camera but I think finally the noise levels were a bit much for it in a quite small space. Even though the sound isn't great I've stuck up all the videos because I think the atmosphere more than makes up for the sound quality. It was just a great night from start to finish!
You can find a couple of the videos below along with a link to a playlist of the whole show.
VISH came down as well and took some cool pics, some of which you'll find below the videos.
We've already been offered another slot at 12 BAR but we couldn't take it because we have another gig booked for the 24th. My singing debut in Aylesbury!
Hopefully we'll be back on stage at 12 BAR soon though...
The gig on Monday was a great night. We had been due to be first on of three or four depending what poster you read, but in the end we were main support. Main support at The Underworld ain't bad for gig number 3!
The guys from NINJA GUN were great, and I borrowed a cool old Marshall 1960A to run the head through from them. It was an unusual night for us though because we played as a four piece with just one guitar. Stevi couldn't make this one so Mr Sober Dave took over on bass for the show. I did feel a little exposed being on a decent sized stage with no rhythm guitar to hide being, but I soon got over that when we started playing.
Any how, back to the new amp :-)
This is it, the JCA20H, it looks great and has a blue light on the front. Plenty loud enough to gig with and at about 10kgs light enough to get places without having to spent the next day in bed. That really is a big plus for me, I've always been quite happy with my MARSHALL TSL601 combo but at about 30 kgs it's just to big for me to get around, so I started looking for something lighter and I found this! It's still a good size, I wouldn't describe it as a Mini-head in the Orange Tiny Terror style, but it's probably 2/3 the size of my old TSL60 but a lot lighter.
But what does it sound like??
Here's a youtube video I put together from a few of my favourite solos from the gig so you can here what it sounds like and marvel at the little blue light!
I'm looking forward to a lot more gigs with this behind me!
We played in Oxford on Friday. I hadn't really been back there since PISTOL KIXX broke up, so it was really cool to get there and say hello to some familiar faces. Again, a big thank you to John for booking us and having the faith to give us a gig before he'd even heard a note.
We had quite a wait between sound check and playing so we did sink quite a few drinks... maybe to many, but things were a lot more relaxed now that we have gotten rid of the first gig nerves.
I did get to meet some interesting locals while standing around boozing including the owner of possibly the nerdiest and most glorious tattoo I have ever seen. Check out these winged storm trooper helmets! Who would have thought to combine tits and Star Wars in a single tattoo...? This chick, that's who! :-)
The gig itself was great fun. The sound wasn't so good, but now that we've lost our live cherry we were all giving it a bit more in the jumping around and gin-spitting departments.
I did have some technical problems which threw me a bit. My guitar kept sounding like the volume was backed off no matter what I did, and then my crappy Behringer tuner froze on me... (time to finally buy the Boss one I've been promising myself.) I spent most of the night convinced that my fantastic Marshall TSL601 was on it's last legs, but once I got home and had a chance to look into it, it turns out my pick-up selector switch was full of dust and crap and wasn't connecting properly. It all seems fine now, but worst case scenario, I have to replace a £10 switch rather than an £850 combo, so it's all good.
It did mean however that the guitar sound wasn't great on the night and kept cutting out on me, but I put on a brave face and did the best I could.
The sound isn't as good as the video from THE GAFF, but I think that's half down to my guitar sounding a bit shit and the sound in the room just not being as good.
Still, having said that it was a great night.
I can't wait until the the gig at The Underworld in Camden on the 29th of March.
Gig number two is just a day or so away and I'm very excited. It'll be good to be back in Oxford, we had a LOT of really cool PISTOL KIXX shows there, so in a way I'm quite glad we've gotten over the first gig nerves before we get to strut our stuff there again.
I've just got a battery for my wireless system as well so I'm looking forward to a bit of jumping about and all that.
I've also uploaded the video of the whole show from THE GAFF to zshare.net because it was too long to put up on youtube in one bit, so you can view the whole thing from start to finish by clicking below:
I'm still very pleased with how the show went, I just posted links to video for the whole night, but here's your chance to steal the whole thing as MP3s...
It's nothing very spectacular, just the audio from the MP3's has been ripped off and placed on my reverbnation.com player for a few weeks
You can either download them form the reverbnation media player at the side of this blog (if you can't see that, you may be reading it somewhere else so go to: http://rob-silver.blogspot.com/ and the media player will be down the right hand side of your screen)
What ever the main article is check down the right hand side for downloadable MP3s.
Or you can click on the link HERE and listen to or download the whole thing :-)
all in all a great night :-)
Here's a few random live shots from what I've found so far...
All nerves disappeared once I was actually in the venue. THE GAFF is cool as fuck can I just say. We all got a few drinks in us, actually got a sound check despite being on first of four and had a really cool time.
It was just a total blast from start to finish. The actual gig was great. Everything went so well, and this line-up fucking rocked! I knew Hazel was quite "extroverted" shall we say, but I was so impressed to see her throwing herself into things like the gin-fueled rock-lunatic she is :-)
Usually me and Dave make it our job to jump into the people and generally make menaces of ourselves, but in the end we just sort of let Hazel fly free! She was menace enough for all of us on Friday :-)
I think with it being the first show as well, I was a little more subdued myself, I just wanted to make sure we really could play the shit live!
Turns out we can!
It was great night guitar wise.
I got to play through a really cool Marshall Mode four stack. A big thank you to Davey from New Gen for letting me borrow it. It was really cool. The only guitar fuck up I had was a little wobble in the solo to "Boyz Night Out" but I think I covered it well, and bearing in mind that I still couldn't play that solo standing up last week, I think I did OK.
It was brilliant from start to finish!
There was one particularly funny moment during New Gen set. They ended with The Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop" and got everyone from the other bands onstage to help out with the "Hey Ho's" and so on, I finished my drink mid "Hey ho" so I lobbed my glass into the crowd without thinking (It was plastic, I was being exuberant/antisocial not a psychopath) and it hit this chick in the front row right between the eyes
She took in the good humour it was intended though, so I didn't have to have a fight with her boyfriend.
Apparently in the same song, Hazel snogged the singer from Vanity Ink, while I was standing next to her, but it seems that I was so caught up in drunkenly shouting "hey ho, lets go" that I missed the sapphic floor show next to me.
Anyhow, I have just uploaded videos of the whole set to youtube so here we go:
Rehearsal has been going really well so far and I've been writing songs faster than we can learn them.
We're also demoing three more new tracks in the next few weeks. These will be the first completely new full band demos since "GET IT ON" had been written and demoed some time ago for PISTOL KIXX. We never used it, or even played it live, so we decided to get Hazel to record vocals for it and use the track with the new band.
That's all well and good, but eventually you have to get out of the rehearsal room or studio room and do things for real. Now with the first gig only a week away it's time for things to get serious.
Our first gig had been booked for the Friday the 19th in Oxford. (more on this soon) and a big thank you to Johnny Moto for having the faith to book us without having heard a note, but a few days ago we were offered a slot at THE GAFF by Nix from PURERAWK opening up the HIGHWAY TO HELL club night.
I don't think I've ever turned down an offer of a gig I had even the slightest chance of actually getting to, so we decided to bite the bullet and bring the debut live show a week forward. We're first on of four bands so it'll be a nice short set to ease us in to a longer set higher up the bill the following week in Oxford.
We were taken a bit surprise by all this, we didn't even have any pictures of us all. In the end we threw this together from random live shots of us all:
Luckily there seems to be lots of red and black walls in all the pics, so it looks a bit like they were all taken at the same gig, although Hazel doesn't look like she's just crawled out of a TV any more.
So... anyone who's free on Friday March 12th, come and check us out at The Gaff on Holloway Road:
Only £5 for four bands and a club night! You just can't lose can you!
Been having a busy few weeks. I'm really excited about how things are shaping up.
Despite four of us getting so drunk in Crobar the other hight that Dave passed out, then Colin puked, then Dave had to be carried out and promptly fell in Colin's puke, we've been getting a lot done.
First up, as an interim measure before we can get into the studio properly and just because it was fun, we've recorded a few acoustic tracks. I am really keen to get some proper demos done of all the new material, but for now here's a slightly drunk me and Hazel:
Playing some rough n ready acoustic versions. They are simplified "campfire" acoustic performances, so you get the basic song minus the solos and... well any of the fiddly bits, but like I said were great fun to play, so here's
I just came across what will be I guess the last PISTOL KIXX live review. Check out this months OXFORDSHIRE MUSIC SCENE. I guess it's cool to end on such a good review, and I even got my glorious sideburns into the magazine which is making me smile more than it should.
Hopefully we'll all be back out there playing live in various bands as soon as possible. I for one am itching to get out there and play lot more guitar behind my head, like the show off twat I am! Full review below:
Pistol Kixx prepared to rip our ears from our heads. After our earlier listening delights this was tantamount to Damien Rice warming up for Lamb of God – one of the great things about every Punt. As soon as they launched into their first track with a snarl and a swagger, it was obvious that this was going to be awesome. “F****** hell, it’s a Wednesday” were lead singer Carli Hart’s first utterances, and he was right night would have been more forgiving to this assault of sleaze ridden guitars and bleachwrecked vocals. They gave their all – falling around each other and off the stage into the audience not giving a damn, it was as rock n’ roll should be.
I was having a clear out the other day when I found a blank cd-r that I had obviously "put somewhere safe." I stuck it in the computer and much to my suprise I found some live footage from a DUST:RETOX show.
It was a show at the Underworld in Camden as main suport to Sheep on Drugs on the 3rd of may 2003.
It was the first live show after D.U.S.T. had changed their name to DUST:RETOX. I think we only did about three or four shows as DUST:RETOX before we changed the name and PORNOVURT was born.
The footage is shaky and the sound is awful. We had a few technical issues and Paulo who was controlling the synths and drums kept fucking up, but it was still a great of night shirtless fun.
We drank a bottle of tequila before going on stage and I had used a whole can of spray glitter on my chest, Sheep on Drugs had chucked the other bands out of backstage so they could "get ready," so we got pissed off and covered their rider in red spray on hair colour. All good wholesome fun!
We played at what is now my favourite glam/sleaze night a few weeks ago. All hail WHISKY at the Golden Cross in Coventry. It's really cool to play somewhere that the promoter really makes an effort. The room looked great and was full of scantily clad "Whisky Girls" and drunk folk off all descriptions.
Having said that, despite the fact that the night was amazing, the gig itself was a bit of a shambles as the video will show. It turns out that Dave had started drinkingat 9-00am a full 13 hours before we went onstage which with hindsight might not have been such a good idea, but hey, you live and learn. We did have a few technical niggles as well, it was my first gig with my new wireless system and that was giving me a few problem. Rob's advice for the day, NEVER fucking EVER play a gig with a new bit of kit that you haven't plugged in before going on stage. I'll be making sure I have at least one rehearsal to get use to anything I gig with from now on.
We have been invited back though, so when we play again in August we'll definitely be saving the free booze for after we play or maybe just not touch it til an hour before we go on. It was still a fun gig, but not quite the peformance we would have wanted to give. By the last song Steevi had broken 2, yes 2 bass strings and Dave was so fucked that he wasn't playing at all! We still made it through FDR the last track with just one guitar, drums and vocals. Highlights included Dave falling over and even chucking his guitar on the floor.
What a fucking bunch of rock heroes :-)
So here's some fun but very messy live footage from Whisky at The Golden Cross in Coventry.
This is "Shit's going down."
and this is "FDR" with pretty much just one guitar drums and vocals
I've had a couple of cool gigs since the last update, there'll be a pile of live footage from our gig at the White Swan in Aylesbury. It was a fantastic night, I can't wait to see the footage and get back there to play again. I did have one nightmare where one of my string had popped out of the saddle, so I had this high pitch noise when ever I strummed. I spent two songs wishing whoever was making the stupid noise would sort it out before I realised it was me.
We also had our set at the Purple Turtle in Camden recorded. The 28 minute set was recorded. It was too big a file to upload into the reverbnation widget, so you can click HERE to go to our Glamnation page where you can stream the whole thing. I'm really pleased with how the solos sound live even if Carli did start singing over my favourite one.
EDIT: The link won't work unless you're a member, so here's the player instead:
We also had photo shoot this weekend with the lovely Sabrina of Mademoiselle S. Photography we felt like tits posing round all day, but the tequila kicked in and it all went ok. There's a couple of pics below:
