The Fake Aunts

Despite heads full of mucus and general cold- and swine flu-related malaise, The Fake Aunts performed for their first professional gig last night. And oh, but that it was fun. We rushed down to Southsea thinking ourselves late at about 7.30 only to be met by a very relaxed Bob who wasn't entirely sure when he'd asked us to start (it was 8.30) and then asked if we wouldn't mind waiting until the end of the readings to do our first set (so, looking at 9.30 at this point) and then we'd go pretty much straight through into our next one. So we sat around in Rosie's for a couple of hours trying to warm up with a background of quite random jazz. I tried to run through one song but ended up matching the beat and key of the song playing from the speaker behind me, it's all good and well having an ear for those things but it got a bit silly. Even though it was a very long wait (at about twenty to ten we were starting to get a bit frantic as with the whole illness thing, this was basically eating into our bedtime. Bedtime!) I did have a good time. Jaaams is down from Liverpool and was there as moral support and watching him and Mrs DA together is very entertaining. He ordered a bottle of wine to himself, and we watched him have his dinner, while nicking mange touts from his plate, I was very virtuous and drank tea and room temperature water, the latter request got a huge amount of scorn from Mrs DA who was on Diet Coke and ice but I'd spent hours drinking warm drinks and as good as the Diet Coke looked, it wasn't going to help me very much.
We eventually went in to the Writers' Workshop that we were playing for. Part of me would have liked to have listened to the stories being told but I would have struggled to concentrate, I think. They seemed quite keen to have us back though so, next time. But we ran through our set list and the response was really pleasantly positive. It was odd singing but not sounding like myself and I did struggle at points, although I like to kid myself that that adds character. The thing that really made me extremely happy was the overwhelming response to the song that we wrote. Originally called the Magic Song on the basis that we actually made it from scratch ourselves, we decided that we had to give it an actual name otherwise we'd keep writing songs and they would all be Magic Songs and it would get a bit confusing, it's called What We've Not Got. Dude, even the title got an appreciative giggle and we got, like, an actual laugh on "I'm stupid, I'm silly, I'm possibly mad", which means that writers are obviously our perfect audience. Then, after we'd finished our second set, we were asked for an encore and they requested that we do that song again. Then a group of guys who'd been quite vocal throughout, Jaaams had even heard them commenting on goosebumps, yay, came up to us at the end, two of them even volunteering to play with us if we had need of a bassist and drummer and the overwhelming opinion is that we're good when we play other people's songs but we're really good when we play our own. I just keep having little happy moments when I think of it. We wrote a song and people really like it! Anyway, the journey home was me snuggled up in Big Sis's scarf and a feeling of achievement in Mrs DA's car while she and Jaaams belted out showtunes and I just giggled and occasionally joined in. Better get writing me some more lyrics.