broken strings and forgotten words!!!

Well, Spiny played a gig last night and I guess it was ok. Here's the venue:
The Butchers Arms in Mountain Ash South Wales.

Not the biggest place in the World but the people are nice and friendly there, we played there about a year ago and it was good then too, trouble is, last year all the posters they put up advertising the gig had our name spelt wrong, they called us Spikey Norman!! This year they got it a little closer but still not quite there!! lol. Here's this years poster! (sorry it's a bit blurred, I'm not used to my new toy yet!!)

We weren't quite sure if it was an advert or a statement!! Next time we'll make the poster ouselves with SPINY spelt correctly and send it too them!!

Here's a photo of the stage, it's a tiny little place so there's wasnt much room for us to move about, plus, the stage had 2 very hot heaters on it wich promted the comment "it's too fucking hot in this fucking place" by our very own Delbut. He wasnt wrong! We turned them off but they did take a while to cool down!

As for the gig, well, we were shite!!!! My bro (Big-Al) bust his E string on his bass guitar (how hard is it to do that???) And I played like a man with severe amnesia for most of the gig!!

I forgot most of my solos and even forgot the opening line to Dancing In the Moonlight (Lizzy) and there was an embarassingly long pause before Big-Al shouted "I passed her in the doorway!!" and then we were away! The punters didnt seem to notice tho, and they gave us some nice applause after each song and we eventually ended up doing 3 encores and the management gave us some extra money too so we must have been doing something right!!

Needless to say this long break inbetween gigs because of my knee operation has made us a little bit rusty! 2007 will be good tho, we're ready to upgrade some of our equipment and soon we'll be rocking South Wales to the rafters!

There was no one at the gig to take photos of us while we played but Delbut did set up a video camera behind his head and got some footage of us playing. Hopefully he'll either send me the footage and I'll post it on here or he'll post it himself on a new Blog he's thinking of starting called "the drummers view" or something like that! Watch this space!

10 years of photos!!! A Photographic History of Spiny Norman.

At long last here are some photos of Spiny Norman in action!! I've put some of our very first gig back in 1996 and there are some of the various line-ups we've had over the years. I think it is a very strange phenomenon, but it is obvious to see that whilst all the other band members have aged quite badly, I have remained as beautiful and as charming as ever!! Strange eh?

That's me on the Left, Big-Al in the middle and Egg on the end. There's a drummer in there somewhere too, honest! She was a 16 year old girl!! A good drummer with talent but 16 year olds will be 16 year olds and it didnt quite work out! (Although one of her mates once asked me "what is a groupie?" ooooooh was I tempted!!!!!!!??)

Not so "Big-Al" in the early days! He had hair then too!!

The baby-faced Egg!

And so we'll move forward a few years to a new era and a new drummer. This time it was Pete, another fantastic drummer and he was with us for a few years and it was a good time, alas that relationship didnt quite last but we had a good time while it did. The photo above is the back cover of our only CD!!!!

We recorded a rehearsal session about 5 years ago and burnt some CD's. Here's the front cover.

This is Pete, as you can see, he was a huge WHO fan. Our next drummer turned out to be the same!! ENTER DELBUT!!!!!!!!

Above is the current (and best) line-up during a gig.

Here's the famouse Delbut looking as if he wants to kill someone. Why do ALL drummers have that mad glint in their eyes???)

Here's Big-Al! This gig was a wedding and the theme was an Hawiian one, we all had to wear Hawiian shirts etc.

Now you might think that the look on my face in this photo is your average "face pulled whilst playing a rip-roaring guitar solo" look that some guitarist have when bending dem strings! But NO, I actually leaned against one of the stage lights and burnt my arse!! ;-)

The Egg, always plays with a smile on his face and frog in his throat! We've just given him a microphone for the first time in ten years!! He makes Sid Viscious sound like a choir boy! Bless.

So there you go, Spiny through the ages! The hair styles have changed but the set remains the same!!