The Maltings, Farnham - 03/10/08. Kat's Tour Diary.

After a long and stressful day of daytime TV and snoozing, Mark arrived to pick me up. We headed off to Sid's, managed to avoid being spotted by his stalker and headed over to The Maltings. We took a 'short cut' that all but Mark agreed took a lot longer than a normal persons route, but still arrived in plenty of time. By some minor miracle we weren't the first band there, but the other band were hiding in the bar, so we could pretend!

We sound checked first, since the bar was still closed. Ben managed to avoid the temptation to use his new song 'She's a bitch, she's a bitch and I hate her' to check his mic. That's two gigs in a row now. I think this is progress.

We sat around trading insults until the first act started, (well, Ben and I traded insults, the rest of the band just sat there with their heads in their hands), via an argument about where we'd come across the '2nd Movement of the Sun' before. Or maybe it was the '1st Movement'… the guy introducing confused me! The first act was amazingly brave and sang unaccompanied, and tried to persuade us all we were at a folk session, the audience participation mostly worked, lead by a drunk girl on the other side of the room. I never quite worked out what the flute was for though!! We then had the moment of brilliance that was 'Elmy the racist dragon'. 'Nuff said. It was hilarious.

We finally made it on stage, after a stern warning from the evenings host not to over-run our set time we, had a brief discussion about how long our set actually was, with all of us shouting out random combinations of times, until we agreed to just play the set as planned. Another successful team decision from Brassneck! I sneezed my way through the set, managing to ensure that most of the audience will be suffering from my cold by the end of the week. It went pretty well, I'm not sure whether the screams from the onlookers were because we were so good, or they were so drunk. I was too busy sneezing….! Still we enjoyed it, and that's what counts!

Kat.