Open Mike @ Mollys - February 2011

With the hectic uncertainty of the Jam Sessions, it's nice to come home to Mollys and know what's happening. It also feel like ages since I played with Fraser, cos there's been so much musical stuff in the past month.

Fraser's knackered cos he's working 2 jobs this week. I'm not much better due to the stress of work. We start with a pint of guinness and a fish and chips and that puts us right.

Having prepped a few tracks on Sunday - we wanted to knock them out early, but the voices also need to warm up first, so we did Ziggy Stardust and Dancing in the moonlight to break our voices and then did our two prepared numbers:





I think they went down pretty well. 'In the air tonight' is possibly a little dour. There was no danger of that tonight. An inebriated vision-in-red decided to join in for our last choruses providing some comic relief to the emotional climax to the song.

After this Tamira and Lisa came up and we did No woman no cry, I alone, You can leave your hat on and stuck in the middle with you. I hate no woman no cry - it's one of those songs that is so overplayed that I have never learned it - so any time anyone suggests it we end up staggering through it unconvincingly. Hopefully no one noticed.

After all the regulars, Ali who is a regular at our Thursday Tunes Jam plays some alternative tuning wonders for us. Included in the 4 songs were Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits and So Lonely by The Police. He was excellent - especially The Police cover which people really liked.(Translation - If Neil can sing this one he's going to steal it)

After this Fraser and I returned to the stage to do Boys are back in Town, Fat Bottomed Girls and Man in the Mirror. Fraser gave in to his tiredness and headed home leaving me to hold fort. He was swiftly followed by Tamira(not like that) who headed over to The waterhole

This left me on my todd - so to speak. A Mystere helped me out by performing three of his own songs(Need, Free and Fog). They were wonderful as always. At the open mike when people do their own songs, there's always a difficulty in keeping the audience attentive, but they seemed to enjoy them.

After that we had a Mollys Debut from german guy who sang songs in a German Dialect(Platt??) which is similar to Dutch. He was very good - very entertaining. Unfortunately other than his name(Stefan) I don't have any other details.

As our second Debut of the night, Francisco came next. We had spoken online. Unfortunately there were some language barriers in the way and at first I thought he was a guitarist. Once I'd worked out he was a Bass player, we did a few songs to end and then called it a night.