February, Birthday, Holiday Camps and Slush Puppies

Here we are at the end of February! This month has felt like one massive blur to be honest. Never knowing which way is up, this month has been busy, hectic and productive!

I started the month with a covers gig in Bulith Wells in Mid Wales with Tom Stott, and Ollie and Martyn Harding. This gig was a lot of fun and well worth the 3 hour car journey from Wigan that morning! In this month, I also turned 20! On the 4th of February I officially stopped being a teenager! And what better way is there to do that than singing karaoke in our local pub and falling over? I can't think of one.

Anyway, to business! This month I enjoyed my first holiday camp gig! This was with Spinoffs at Holiday Resort Unity Brean, which is at Burnham on Sea. The gig was a lot of fun, everyone had a great time and we were well received by customers, and members of staff! A fantastic gig, another hell of a drive in the van, and I'm looking forward to returning later this year! Oh yeah, and I relived memories of being about 10 by drinking slush puppies all day. I am going to consider this a quarter life crisis?

Enjoying a Slush Puppy at HRU Brean

Another gig for Spinoffs took place at Barnsley Central Working Men's Club! Another appreciative audience, and another absolutely electric gig. Again, I'm looking forward to returning to Barnsley later on this year for another show.

In other news, I went down to Loughborough earlier this month to purchase some in ear monitors! This is a very exciting part new part of my gear as this should help my live backing vocal singing and overall musicianship! For anyone wondering, the company who are making them are Minerva Hearing Protection and 3/5ths of Spinoffs now support them! Fantastic gear, and I'm really looking forward to using them!

And finally, it is with great joy that I announce that I am going to be playing bass in the next RNCM Session Orchestra project! I'm very excited for our upcoming gig, which I'll post more info about a little bit closer to the time! Needless to say, attendance is mandatory.

I'd better go just now as I am gigging in Glasgow tomorrow and I need to be up bright and early! But until then, that was February. See you in March.

Alasdair

January, Blackpool's more than just the Pleasure Beach

Ok, so 2014. I've been back at college a little while now! Apologies for the lateness of this blog as things have been a bit hectic with the end of January start of February type of time. But here is what's been going in January.

Last time I mentioned doing a showcase with Spinoffs it was the Keeping it Live Showcase in Coventry back in November. I did a lot of talking about Session Orchestra that month, so I'll go into the showcase itself a bit more this time. The showcase is an opportunity for acts to perform in front of agents who book acts for Holiday Camps and Venues across the UK, so if you do a good job, you get lots of gigs! Quite simple really.

Spinoffs Performing at Keeping it Live Coventry

This time, we performed at a venue along Blackpool's Seafront called The Horseshoe. Each act performed for 10 minutes. Through the whole session, we saw a whole variety of acts including Jessie J Tribute Acts, Soul and Motown Experience Shows, Ventriloquists, Magic Acts and Comedy Acts. However, what we offered was fairly simple in comparison, a 10 minute medley of pop and soul tunes. In this case, we broke the Keeping it Live record for most songs played in 10 minutes, as we actually played parts of 12 different songs.

The whole experience was a lot of fun, we were last on so naturally we were thankful for all the agents that stayed for our performance! And although it was 11:30, we still gave it our all, running around and dancing and such!

I'm quite pleased to say that the phone has been ringing following our performance which made our trip to Blackpool very successful! The band diary for 2014 is looking very full which is always positive! As a band, we celebrated one year together in January so it is great to be working hard and seeing it all pay off! So hopefully no matter where in the UK you are, you'll see us at some point in the near future!

Spinoffs are on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SpinoffsUk?fref=ts) Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/SpinoffsBand) and finally, we have our website (http://www.spinoffs.co.uk) So check us out if you fancy! We could do with likes / followers / views! So that's it for January! Check back in February where I might talk about something else!

Alasdair