Thursday 6 February 2020

It's what Thursday nights are for

As ever, the Primevals gathered at 9pm in Berkeley. We probably have 8 rehearsals to get ready for France - gigs start in Paris on Friday April 3rd, with Lille, Rouen, Blois, Toulouse and Perigueux following on from there.

The core of the set is well-covered ground so tonight we ran through some older ones, some that we have not played for a while, and a new cover. We will probably need about 25 songs that we can do at the drop of a fedora to get through the tour - we find it best to have a core set of about 15 or so and then throw in 3 or 4 others from the long list depending on what we feel like on the night. It's never been our way to have THE SETLIST IN STONE for a tour. To get to that 25, though, we need to try 35 or 40, because sometimes that old one resonates nicely, or conversely that one we thought was a strong candidate doesn't seem to shine the way it should.

Tonight's candidates were Lowdown, See That Skin, Reframe It, Have Some Fun, Stream of Life, Don't Feel Free, and a cover whose name escapes me for now.

Time for a glass of Malbec and to check some notes on structures - there's a couple of slightly odd breaks in See That Skin, which made perfect sense when we played it in 1985, but we just need to feel our way back into that groove.