It's about time the whole live show got its own blog post. Of all the technical things surrounding Eat More Cake, it's the live set-up that I'm most proud of. It's almost become a labour of love...
Not that I'm going to take all the credit - we've got to this position after plenty of advice, plenty of mistakes, and plenty of on-stage disasters.
But first (as always), some history.
Andy and I played our first gig as Eat More Cake way back in 2003 (I think), at the Trinity Bar, Harrow. It was a wildly ambitious set that involved me dragging my entire studio down to Trinity. It featured something like 5 different singers and a good couple of hours of music, alternating between an original track, then a cover for the entire set. Some of the covers included Portishead 'It Could Be Sweet', Tasmin Archer 'Sleeping Satellite', Kosheen 'Hungry' and Faithless 'Insomnia'. In the end, the overly complicated set-up got the better of us, and my laptop gave up a few songs into the second half.
Now we were really proud of the fact that we'd managed to even get close to pulling this show off although, in honesty, it must have sounded terrible...
This was clearly NOT the way to go about playing live. The only difference between my studio kit list and the on-stage one, was that I took a laptop instead of my studio PC. Some refinements were needed.
Our next big gig was our 'album launch party' to celebrate completing our first full-length demo album. We held this at Ginglik, Shepherd's Bush in August 2004. This was still amazingly ambitious, but at least we had learnt how to pare things down a bit. We only used two singers this time - one male, one female - plus Andy, then me doing some backing. We managed to take a lot less stuff as well - just a few sound modules, two keyboards, a laptop, soundcard, mixing desk, some guitars, amps, etc. I seem to remember that during a couple of dance tracks, I made the singers wear headphones so they could sing along to the click track! Somewhere, there exists a really bad recording of this gig which, once again, demonstrates that we weren't actually that good on the night! How depressing...
We played Ginglik again the following week, performing an acoustic set. This was much easier - two guitars, one electric piano (well, not quite acoustic then...) and a djembe. I think we finally started learning that 'less is more' after this gig.
Our next experiment was to go for a completely live band - no computers/sequencing/click tracks. We recruited our drummer friend Roland Trimmer (who played v-drums - this meant we could continue to provide a variation of sound between tracks), added a bassist (Andy Potter), a new female vocalist (Jenny Moore) and kept our existing male vocalist/second guitarist Baby Dave. Andy still provided guitars and more vocal while I played keys and sang backing.
There were lots of pros for this set up - rehearsals were much more fun, my life was a hell of a lot easier and everyone seemed to be in good spirits about the whole thing. However, without the original samples some tracks lost their impact, and the lack of click track meant that we were not always quite as tight as we were used to.
After a few gigs, we took another break from playing live until we finished 'The Red Sky EP' - our second self-produced demo. We knew we were going to put on a big event for the launch of this CD, so we took it back to the drawing board. This was the first gig that Owen did with us, as a kind of on-stage sound man. We also managed to blag two session musicians for free (by advertising on Gumtree) - Xan Blacq on percussion, and Wun Chan on bass. Both of these guys were amazing - quite how they put up with us I'll never know! We recruited a new female singer, Lisa Lee and a new male vocalist, but after a couple of rehearsals we had to ditch him due to - ahem - 'irreconcilable musical differences'. Baby Dave came back in to deputise.
For this, we brought back the computer - running Cubase on stage. Where possible, songs were set up in 4- or 8-bar loops, with each part running through a separate output of my soundcard. These outputs ran into a mixing desk which Owen had control of, so he could mute and fade tracks as necessary. Kind of like a primitive, manual Ableton Live.
This was a great show - probably the first time we'd ever managed to sound remotely professional on stage. The launch party itself was held at TenWest in Ladbroke Grove in March, 2006 and was a truly memorable event.
We downsized this set-up a bit to just Owen, Andy, myself and Lisa and played a number of gigs throughout the rest of 2006 and beginning of 2007.
When we signed to Urbantorque, we once again decided to redefine the live show, and that is where the history becomes the present...
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