Seattle?! Don’t mention Seattle!! Last night was by general agreement (at least within the band) the worst gig any of us have ever had. We should have realized things weren’t entirely wonderful when the promoter hadn’t shown up by show time (or at all!), and when the sound guy clearly thought a sound check was a totally strange idea – and didn’t have any stage monitors. And then there were four bands, all doing 30 minutes or so, with only 15 minutes between for teardown and setup. And we got into a standoff with another band about who was headlining and would get the prime spot at 11pm – we won but in retrospect it wasn’t worth the effort.

Nevertheless, we’re professional musicians, or like to think we are, so by 11pm we’ve scrambled to set up (to the extent that Shawna and Marilyn forget to change into their high stage shoes) and we’re ready to roll. We launch into “I won’t go” – and there’s no vocals – not just on stage (which you’d expect with no stage monitors) but also out in the audience – people in the audience are doing the “no vocals” signal! So the first song goes pretty well – with us all singing - but effectively comes out as an instrumental. Then the vocals seem to come back after the song – and we decide to try “I won’t go” again – with exactly the same result! And so it goes for three or four songs – the sound guy can get us some vocals in between songs – but not while we’re actually playing. And I discover that, at least in some places, we rely on the vocals far more than we’d thought. And then, magically, the sound guy spends 2-3 minutes tweaking stuff, and Emme unplugs a drum channel (probably irrelevant?) and we get vocals for the last four songs. Which actually go quite well considering… Sheesh…

So afterwards… the other bands (especially Anubian Lights – who we really liked) were being really nice about how we played and supportive about the sound issues – but we’re just frazzled and upset… and just want to go home. But we have to hang around until 2am before we load the van and then once that’s done, Tori discovers she’s lost her car keys (!). So… we have to do a sweep of the whole club, with no luck, and then (as a last resort) unload most of the van before finding them on the floor. Phew…

So… a truly awful night… and a truly horrible start to the mini-tour. About the only saving grace is that the whole experience was so dreadful, it passed beyond bad into surreal black comedy. And, whatever happens on the rest of the tour just has to be tons better…