Battle Of The Bands and Free-Fest
Ok I have absolutely no idea where to start with this blogging lark so I guess I’ll introduce myself. I’m Smileymic and I’m a one-man band. I used to play singer songwriter stuff and had a great time doing it but after suffering a chronic case of writers block I bought a loop pedal to stimulate some creativity and that’s where all this multi instrumental stuff began.
The last 2 months have been a crazy time for me. Playing the Battle Of The Bands and being the first ever solo act to win it was just insane. I only ever really intended to use it as a showcase for my new material as I knew that the entire local music scene would be in attendance. I never thought for a minute that I would go down so well yet alone get into the semis, the final and then win it.
For winning the competition I was given £500 and £500 worth of vouchers for flightcase warehouse. Both of these are massive blessings, I’m spending some of the cash on improving my rig with a better mixing desk to improve the sound going into the pedal. The vouchers are going to be used on making a custom built case to house all the gear I usually have on a table which will hopefully cut my set up time of live shows in half. The third thing that came with winning the comp was headlining Tamworth’s music festival Free-Fest.
The Free Fest was the event that the Battle of the Bands had been building towards. It’s been going for years and has had its ups and downs but has always been about people coming together to enjoy music.
The local scene had experienced a slump caused by a number of factors, competing venues, too many gigs; poor attendance there was a kind of lethargy bug going round. This year had been a completely different story. All of the bands involved were working hard on promo and there was very little actual “competition” involved it was more of a series of showcase events. The attendance had been fantastic and the there was this supportive attitude that flowed through everyone involved from the players on stage to the people in the audience. So everything had been building towards this festival it was organised by Tamworth Borough Council and was sponsored by Kerrang radio who were bringing 2 bands who had been on the Emma Scott presents show (The New Statesmen safe radio friendly soft rock and The Gundogs. bad attitudes). Now I was really happy to be playing this event but I had reservations about headlining. I was quite happy to let The Gundogs do it as they were scheduled to have an hour long set and I really wasn’t sure if people would stick around in the rain to see a one man show but the powers that be wanted the winner of the comp to do it. So at about 10.30 I took to the stage and I was pleasantly surprised to find a substantial crowd waiting to see me play what’s more they were pleased to see me! They gave me a massive cheer, the rain had stopped and the general vibe was a good one. I started with Smiley-skit and we were go. My set list blew away, was returned to me, I played a new cover I had been working on, Blue Monday by New Order and played and played Rappers Delight later on. The only bad thing that happened was some F*&$%@G TW@T threw a pint of beer on stage soaking the power adaptor of my loop pedal which as some of you will appreciate is the hub of my show. It didn’t blow up I played my show it went down well. Finishing on intro-galactic and getting a crowd of people to chant the imperial march was awesome!!!
I packed my stuff down and somewhere between the stage and my car my Dad managed to lose one of the notes on my Glockenspiel. So there we were me my dad and some poor kid from the events staff looking for this bar on the grass of the castle grounds only for me to get home to rearrange the remaining notes on the Glock to realise there was no missing note and it had just slipped out of place. Gear dumped back at the house, I went back to town to get drunk at Club V as always I crashed at Sunny the owners at the end of the night which involves waiting for the club to empty, get mopped and then we walk the barmaids home as it is late in the day (or early in the morning) so by the time we’ve got in, had some food, a cup of tea and decent conversation it was 4am. Work the next day was not fun…
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