Last night, me and J performed our first professional gig.

The day before, I woke up with a cold. The weather in the UK this week has been freezing cold. So I was dosing myself up on throat sweets, Lemsip capsules, tea and honey and a truck load of voice rest. By some miracle, I was well again for last night!

As far as a first gig goes, it didn’t go bad. We made a few teeny mistakes but no one seemed to notice.

It was definitely at night for firsts!

First time performing on a Saturday night, the busiest night of the week, which is a challenge in and of itself depending on the type of crowd you’ve got.

We set everything up, did our sound checks, got our music ready and started. Volume wise, everything was going ok, the back could hear us with their speakers (as we checked during sound check) with enough volume to spare if chatter got louder, so everyone in the whole venue could hear us properly…

And then this group came in.

Drunk women who were screaming at the top of their lungs. Yes, screaming. As in, full scale banshee I-can’t-even-hear-my-own-thoughts screaming.

Now obviously you’re going to get noise. It’s Saturday night, people are drinking and letting their hair down etc. (we even had our first heckler shouting “Play Adele next time!!” but we just laughed it off. Not everyone’s a fan of country music! 😂)

But that was insane. To the point where no one else could actually hear us and the owner had to go and warn them to keep their voices down.

We carried on as normal throughout and by the end of our first set, the group of banshee screaming ladies were gone.

The venue’s an upmarket restaurant /pub. Majority of the clientele are regulars and the whole atmosphere is very relaxed, not like a nightclub or your typical pub where loudness, rowdiness and everything in between is a given.

We’ve been there before and rowdiness/rudeness etc. is next to non existent. It’s just not the kind of place where that happens, if it all (except for last night of course! Needless to say the staff were great in dealing with the matter.)

Safe to say the punters were pretty happy when the ladies moved on!

So learning from that, we re-did our sound check during our break and turned the volume up a tiny notch (any louder it would have been too much). Everyone was fine, could hear and we gave the green light we were good to go.

With that, the second set ran a lot better. We really enjoyed it and any nerves we had went completely away.

The general response when it came to the punters said they enjoyed it and for those going just a drink, it was a bit of chilled out background for them.

The owner told us he’s going to look at next available dates to book us for some more gigs on Friday nights, so we’re incredibly happy about that! 😀

Hopefully we’ll avoid the screaming ladies next time! 😂

All my love,

Violet xx

*Picture – Pinterest