With only a day and a half to go before the Escobar gig, we had a bit of a mad panic: Dan had been diagnosed with glandular fever and probably wouldn’t be able to play guitar… oh bollocks! Someone’s definitely out to get us on this one. We went to-and-fro for a few hours yesterday trying to work out whether Dan was infectious, or whether we could do the show without him; eventually about 4pm we confirmed that no, Dan wasn’t going to be able to play.

Salvation came in the form of Jim “The Grynn” Emmerson, a friend of ours who plays with Shrood. Jim’s a pretty decent funky lead guitarist, and in an emergency rehearsal last night he cottoned on to most of the songs quickly allaying any fears I had about our competence to do the performance despite the last-minute stand-in. The thing is, the sound isn’t “better” or “worse”, it’s “different” – Obvious Pseudonym like you’ve not heard before. After discussion we’ve not altered the set list either so you can expect renditions of songs including Disco Sauce, Coming Up On Empty and Westgate Run.

So then… tonight we will still be playing at Escobar in Wakefield, just down Queen Street! We’re on from 9:15pm (doors open at 9pm). It’s £3 in and there’s tickets available on the door (or collar one of us before the gig).

Mind, it must be serious: Leeds Gig Guide has a listing for us and our friend Neal’s taking pics for us too, yay!

See you there

Something to remember two days before you’re due to go on for the most important gig of your career so far:

Forgetting to tighten the safety bolt on your keyboard stand before putting a fully-weighted Roland XV-88 keyboard on top, so it collapses and slams down onto your wrist is really stupid.

I could have come off a lot worse – thankfully I’ve just got a bit of bruising and a few scratches; it could easily have put paid to Thursday’s gig.

Good rehearsal last night though. It’s going to be a good one – yell if you want advance tickets, they’re £3 each and there’s more info over on the band website.

Four days to go until the Escobar gig. Soundcheck at 8pm, doors 9pm, on at 9:15pm.

Anxious? Moi? You don’t know the half of it: I had a bit of a crisis of confidence last week when I managed to convince myself someone was taking the piss and we were the victims of a practical joke. That doubt disappeared when Si saw posters at the venue on Saturday night advertising us, and I opened Wakefield Express to find us listed in the gig guide on page 47. Good times.

This is the first live performance where I’m using the full keyboard rig comprising the Roland XV-88 alongside the MicroKorg XL+ and Apple Mainstage setup (it’s a heavy setup for which we probably need roadies – you can see a pic of the rig here). To be fair, the Roland is taking on the most work because extra sensitivity of a fully-weighted keyboard makes a hell of a difference, relegating the Mainstage/laptop combo to parts I haven’t worked out how to synthesise in the Roland (yet). The drawback is that I’ve got so many inputs coming from the keyboards that I’ve been advised by a friend to use a submixer local to the rig (with the converse advantages I can run a monitor so I can hear myself, and mix in the backing track as well).

What are we performing on Thursday? We’ll be doing the three new songs we performed the other Monday at Open Mic – Westgate Run, Coming Up On Empty and Sex Noises, plus Disco Sauce and a few others. If you scream loudly enough we might be persuaded to do Keith Chegwin For A Day too, but you’ll really have to demand that.

Buy tickets! They’re £3 each. Although they’re available on the door please try to get them from us direct – it means you don’t have to queue and it really does make a difference for us (not financially, but in terms of whether we’re asked back because the promoters can track sales). If you’re coming please do collar us even if it’s just via Paypal, you collect them from us on the night (or at the pub before then) – click here to drop us a line.

Any budding photographers out there? Feel free to show up with a camera and take some pics, but check with us before using flash photography please: you’ll probably need f/1.8 or better at ISO800, Escobar is a low-light venue.

What next? I guess we’ve finally stopped treating Obvious Pseudonym as a joke. I’m exceedingly proud of what we’ve accomplished so far: Dan’s much more confident in his abilities as a guitarist to the point of experimenting with small stabs and stings without overriding the mix (Thursday marks his return to Disco Sauce for instance); Si and Nicky’s vocals are much steadier, and we can comfortably run through our entire repertoire at rehearsal without too much hassle. Maybe we’re growing up – our battle has become a self-perpetuated one in that we’ve said we’re crap for so long, everyone’s believed us. Take note, we’re not rubbish any more.

Next steps: lighting plans (and photos) in the run up to the album launch gig which will probably be on Thursday 17th December. If you can’t make it on Thursday keep an eye on our gig guide – all scarey stuff. But let’s just get over Thursday first

We played a set again at The Hop in Wakefield last night, invading Open Mic Monday to do a few new songs. This counted as public gig #3, although Col will probably remind me it’s actually #4. Aaaanyway…

Quite an interesting experience because we weren’t being engineered by Ryan, and instead bowed to the talents of local singer-songwriter Matt Burton. It was also interesting because when we showed up at the prearranged time, nobody else was there – what to do? We chucked stuff in a corner, set a few stands up, and went off to get a pint: as a consequence we didn’t even check if the desk had the right bits plugged in until about 2 minutes before we went on. We’re getting fairly practiced at setup/teardown so it wasn’t too much of a hassle although I still visited the loo far too many times due to nerves before we went on (especially early on when the feedback was kicking in – Jim and Seb helped Matt to sort that).

First song: Westgate Run. This is a disco track and one of our new ones, a good thumping beat with funky guitar. We launched into it (just about), the backing track seemed quiet, I stabbed the iPod doing the percussion track and… silence. Oops, paused it by accident. Silly Joel. Let’s start again!

Apart from that minor disaster which we laughed off (and trust me, I’ve seen worse disasters from accomplished musicians) the setlist comprised: Westgate Run, Coming Up On Empty, Credit Crunch, Sex Noises and the ubiquitous Keith Chegwin For A Day. We decided to skip Take Away The Tears as it was a busy night for other performers and it’s not a very strong song anyway compared to our other music.

The night also debuted our first ‘acoustic’ song Coming Up On Empty which Dan wrote while we were away on hols – admirably played, no backing track, and Nicky held the pitch reasonably well despite the nerves. Sex Noises (which you can download from our website) caused some lovely giggles and Nicky slinked her way up and down the mic stand. Hurrah for songs about sex!

We had to wait at the venue for quite a while until we could tear down, eventually driving home at about 12:15am. Both myself and Dan were coming down with some sort of flu (indeed, I’d spent the afternoon sleeping, having a bath, chugging Beechams, all that sort of stuff) but we managed it fine and I was exceptionally glad I took today off work.

We arrived home to find some lovely comments on Facebook including one chap saying ‘you’ve outgrown The Hop’. High praise indeed. I’d also post links to photos and video, but nobody took any.

I think this will probably be the last time we’ll hijack the Open Mic Monday at The Hop – it’s stressy, we rely on our friends too much and take advantage, and we’ve got some larger gigs in the offing. Three out of the four promoters I invited showed up so I’m hoping, fingers crossed, that something will come of it. Ideally I’d like to find a drummer next, and an engineer who will help and coach us but we shall indeed see what the future holds. We’re definitely not stopping here.

See you in Escobar, 15th October. That’s going to be an important one, out of our comfort zone.