30th May 2009 - Railway Riffle Club, Portsmouth

Really nice journey down to the south coast this one - lovely sunny day, FA Cup Final on the radio (Chelsea 2 - 1 Everton ... boooo!) and the full band in the van for a change. The assholes stopped off for a game footy before they'd picked me up though!! Boooo again!

The venue had advertised this gig really well, including a couple of large posters outside saying stuff like "second time here, not to be missed", "The awesome Coldplace" etc. They really bigged it up. We greeted the staff, had the usual "welcome back" chat during which they told us that they'd almost sold out and the phone had been red hot for the couple of weeks leading up to the gig. Always good to hear that kind of stuff, gets you in the mood for the gig right from the off. Set up almost went nice and smoothly, just a slight technical hitch with a lack of power to the left hand side of the PA which we eventually tracked down to a dodgy pot on the mixing desk main slider. It did consume a fair bit of time though and a few eager punters had already taken their seats so we had to sound check a few songs in front of them, which is always annoying. Much more preferable to sound check in an empty venue. Anyway, with the job done, we killed time until the gig playing pool on the best pool tables we've played on in a long time.

We took to the stage about half 9ish and when I looked up during the intro everyone in the place had turned around and were watching us intently, it looked well strange :D Not that it's unusual, it was just weird because everyone had been mingling about, sat around tables in their own circles etc (it's quite a deep venue) and the change from when we took to the stage was quite stark. Took 'em a while to get dancing though! As we progressed the set I remember thinking "ah, this one'll get them up on the dancefloor" but alas, it took until the encore to get them on the dancefloor en masse! There'd been a smattering of dancing just prior to that, a few adventurous souls had braved the empty dance floor to Talk and The Scientist. We put it down to the row of tables that had been lined up at the front of the crowd and the edge of the dancefloor, almost marking a boundary between the band and the crowd. Oh well, they got up in the end and we gave them 3 or 4 songs in the encore.

Overall, a very enjoyable a gig. It's great to return to a venue for a second time and see such a marked increase in crowd size. I think there'd only been 30 or 40 people first time we played here and on this night we must've been close to 200. Gotta tip your hand to the venue for achieving such an increase. Great advertising and, most likely, a good amount of word of mouth. We look forward to another return gig.

Special mention to Jenny Browne and Ryan. We had the pleasure of spending a day in Jenny's company over in Jersey when we played at the Party in the Park. It was a very nice surprise to see her in Portsmouth and very nice of her and Ryan to come to the gig and spend some time having a chat after the gig. Need to work on their pool game though

Wayne, 11th June 2009

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