Get Your Lighters Ready

Well, we have a change in the song choices and in the members that make up the band. Neil hadn’t come in today for practise as his uncle had passed away and he won’t be in tomorrow as well. Plus he really hasn’t practised with us at all. Our proposed bass player Tony has also not come in and won’t be joining us. He too hasn’t played with us all but we thought he would only need a day with us since he knows the songs and is very capable on the bass. And as you already know, our drummer didn’t even want to set up and take a shot!

So we are now down to a trio – Eldo (guitars), Patrick (keyboards) & moi (vocals). We spent quite a long time today perfecting our songs and Eldo showed Patrick the tracks he needed to program into his Yamaha. We got into a groove and have really got a killer version of Smoke On The Water, which we are pretty happy about. I think that we can really give a good performance of this song. I even managed to add a scream after the second verse, just like I’ve seen Ian Gillan do it on live shows.

While playing Hold My Beer a couple of times, we realized that the song is too complicated for just the three of us to do it, so even though we love the song, we have decided to abandon it. It proved to be too much for us. We thought about just going with the one song, even though we are scheduled for 12 minutes of performance on stage. But since we had a good feeling about Smoke On The Water, we thought it would be ok.

However, we were inspired by a visit by two lovely ladies from HR, who wanted us to do Bryan Adams’ classic song Summer Of 69. We decided to try a somewhat slowed down version, more semi-ballad than arena rocker, and worked it out. The two ladies approved and have us a big thumbs up. They sure liked it.

I am hoping that the slower version will bring more emotion to my voice and get the audience all choked up and bring out their lighters. I think with a couple of hours practise during the morning hours we will ace this one. So we play this one first and after the crowd are all emotional, we plan to rock their socks off with our version of Smoke On The Water. Yeah man, I think it’s gonna be fun.