We rehearse Karma Police, Sparks, Cigarette daydreams, blackbird, Fake Plastic Trees and Half the world away for this performance, however we ended up not doing fake plastic trees as it would put too much strain on Faye’s voice as we had been practicing all day.
I feel the performance went fairly well as we had only done 3 days of rehearsal before hand. The song Blackbird we massively messed up on though as it is a much more technical song for me to play and the structure is a lot harder to understand and so Faye ended up messing up when she comes in for vocals as well as I messed up playing the chorus. We just need to do more rehearsals of that song so we can ensure we don’t mess up again.
For the rest of the songs, we did really well and barely messed up. I feel we could definitely work on dynamics and range so make the set more interesting but apart from that I feel all we need to do is just rehearse more which we will definitely be doing. I will also be doing a lot of solo practice, as well as Faye, to make sure we are able to do the songs when it comes to rehearsing.
For this performance we rehearsed Fake Plastic Trees, Here Comes Your Man, Zombie and Hey Ya! However for the actual performance we ended up missing out Hey Ya as Faye felt like she couldn’t sing it as she had a really bad cold. This did upset me as she didn’t want to do all the songs last time either although I understand that the circumstances were difficult and she didn’t want to overwork herself.
I am really happy with the results of the performance, every song we did was performed well with little to no mistakes and it seemed like the audience really enjoyed the performance.
I do think we really need to work on stage presence though because at the moment we are looking very dead on stage, I need to start playing standing up and Faye needs to start interacting with the audience more as if we were stiff for an actual paid gig, the audience wouldn’t be very happy and would think we are being unprofessional. Apart from that we did a really good job.
I feel like we played all the songs really well with little mistakes made. The only song we really messed up was Drive but even then it wasn’t that bad, Faye just forgot the lyrics at the start however it wasn’t that obvious.
I think the main problem we have and need to focus on is stage presence. I did want to play standing up this time however the guitar had no strap so had to sit down again. Next time I’ll make sure it has a strap so I can get used to playing standing up. Also, Faye really needs to work on stage presence as a lot of the times she kept looking back at me during songs and it gave off the impression that she was always confused as to where we were in songs, I think next time she just needs to be confident looking at the crowd and engaging more during songs with them. Also, after and before songs there were a lot of times where she’d say thank you but looking down and away from the microphone as when the song finishes she always hides away from the microphone so she needs to get used to saying things into the microphone and being confident about it. It was trickier at this performance as it was a really small crowd in a cafe however she will work on crowd engagement more so when we do the actual paid gig, we sound like we know what we are doing.