Again, a long time has passed since my last post. The Shadowers have had a small break since Shadowmania, but we're now back on the road backing Jet Harris, Brian "Licorice" Locking and Mike Berry in the show "Hit Parade Heroes".
With this show we're presented with a new challenge. We are performing in our capacity as a Shadows band, but with so many performing on the bill (including - for some shows - John Leyton and the Flames) there's very little time to play the music that we've been used to performing for all our previous performances. We've had to heavily condense the Shadows material to an abridged version of our usual show and not be the main feature of the performance. There's no space for ego. Time is limited and we have to think of the overall show.
Backing Mike Berry though, is fun, but very different to playing Shadows music. I personally found it difficult, at first, to play something that fits without cluttering the overall sound of the band, not least because for much of the set we have Matt on the keyboards and a second rhythm player in Mike himself. I've seen the Rapiers back Mike before, and Colin Pryce-Jones impressed me with his playing, but most of the time he was filling in for an absent keyboard player. I've decided to only play lead guitar on the tunes that call for it, and for the rest of the time I'm finding it much easier to take a back seat and drop my volume back into the mix to a non-dominant level to play rhythm: mostly different inversions of whatever chord Steve is playing at the time. Colin often plays arpeggios and very flowery phrases with the Rapiers, and it looks and sounds mightily impressive, but having a keyboard player just doesn't allow me to do the same as he does. We're becoming well known for just about replicating whatever tune we're playing, and that often means some quite intricate keyboard work from Matt. It would be a shame to overdo my playing. In so doing, I would end up overpowering Matt and detracting from the accuracy of the piece.
What we're doing must be working though: the first time we appeared in "Hit Parade Heroes" was less than a week ago as I write this, and there were multiple standing ovations during the night.
The details of future performances of "Hit Parade Heroes" can be found at http://www.theshadowers.com/.
Ciao for now...
J
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