Let’s start with Friday, I bought myself a cheap printer to print out promotional material for Alternation on Wednesdays, which wasn’t a bad deal, 31 pounds for the printer, ink cartridge and 1000 sheets of A4 paper. Obviously it’s not the best quality printer in the world, but it’ll suit my needs, it’s not like I will be printing out photo’s or anything that requires laser quality print. Although just using standard quality print I used up 1/3rd of the ink cartridge for 20 prints, and at 15 quid at time for replacement ink cartridges I won’t be printing more than I need to. I took the prints down to Voodoo in the evening and wallpapered the inside of Voodoo with posters, they needed to be up for the weekend as it’s the busiest time for Voodoo to get maximum exposure for the night! I was working on the night as well, easy money really, one band followed by a club night, although the band was very good, I have liked the band (Cretinous Breed) for some time going back to the Phoenix days. But things are different now, I have a decent sound system to use, back in the Phoenix days I struggled to get the sound right as the system didn’t have the overhead to make it sound as good as it could. Anyway, Cretinous Breed were brilliant, playing a 20 song set in 45 minutes. The club night that followed wasn’t exactly great, everyone came to see the band and most left afterwards, it seems to me that there isn’t a market for extreme metal club nights in Plymouth, this is the second night that has failed to attract anyone at Voodoo, so it looks like the night has no future, at least not at Voodoo, it’s not worth opening if Voodoo are barely making their money back at the bar. Now this is where things get interesting, I lost it just before Voodoo closing tipping a guy off his chair onto the floor that was harassing a female friend of mine and made him leave after my friend asked him to leave, but he persisted, so I took action. I am not proud of what I did but he was asking for it for being a cock. Later he turned up at my friends place and broke into her house, hiding in the loft and attacking her housemates and was later arrested for drink driving, that boy has serious problems, anyway charges are being pressed, so he is likely to be spending some time at her majesties pleasure very soon. As you can see I am not mentioning any names as I don’t want to irritate the situation any further. But the thing that worries me is my temper, I know I have a temper but for the most part I either walk away or keep my temper in check, this is the first time in years that my temper has emerged in a violent manner. It’s part of my personality, but it’s not a part of me I like, I just glad that he didn’t persist afterwards as I am not sure how far I would have taken it, even the bouncers Ian and Jay were surprised by my actions, it’s the first time they have seen me act in this sort of way.
Oh, just remembered, Hi to Mark from Bristol, seriously dude, you need to get out more, my life isn’t that interesting, Miss Williams asked me to mention you as you’ve been such a loyal reader for so long! By the way how did you find out about my insignificant rants?
Saturday was another work day, arrived at work turned on the system, went through my usual system checks. Making sure everything is working as it should be and I find that I have no sub bass at all in the system. The remaining two usable subwoofers cones had stopped working, luckily it was something simple to fix (screwdriver and soldering iron job) or else we’d be struggling on the night. It does prove that having powerful amps driving only one cone when it should be driving two cones in each cabinet is counter productive. All it would take is a power spike while fully loaded to take out the two remaining cones, it needs to be fixed for sound and technical reasons. This always seems to happen after we have had guest engineers in for private promotions at the venue, although I can’t believe that Rob would have ragged the system, he is even more anal about levels than me and would probably have a heart attack if he saw red lights anywhere on the system. Anyway after the initial panic of not having any low end in the system it turned out to be a decent night, it’s just a shame that the headline act couldn’t headline in the end as most people came to see them play and left afterwards. Which left the ska band on afterwards playing to next to no-one. The act that headlined eventually had a few mates with them, so they had a reasonable crowd to play to, I just wish that their crowd spent the whole night upstairs to support the other bands instead of sitting downstairs. The thing that arose while engineering the ska band was the fact that Voodoo doesn’t have enough stands, we need another two short stands for guitars and a couple of new vocal mic stands, we have enough mics and cables, but that’s next to useless if we don’t have stands to mount the microphones on. I had no intentions of sticking around drinking on the night afterwards, I wanted to get some food and go home, I was asleep by 1:30am only to be awake again at 6:30am.
Sunday I went to my dad’s for roast dinner, which was nice enough, but it seems that I was still feeling tired so after lunch I went home again before 1pm, I ended up sleeping from 2pm through to 4am again, I only intended on having an hours sleep, so much for that idea. Sleeping 19 hours out of 27 1/2 hours can’t be good, I bet I won’t be able to sleep tonight now, my body clock is so fucked up right now. Hopefully it’ll be fine as I need to be up for 8:30am as I am going on a train journey with my dad to his home town of Barnstaple on Tuesday, which will be nice, not been on a train before as odd as it sounds, I have always taken coaches to wherever I wanted to go; hopefully we’ll have some decent weather!
And finally sports stuff, Plymouth Argyle could only manage a 1 – 1 draw with Ipswich at Home Park. Alan Lee put the visitors in the lead just over a minute after kick off with a perfectly guided header past Romain Larrieu. Plymouth may have been caught on the hop, but this awoke the Pilgrims and suddenly it was pretty much one way traffic, but Argyle couldn’t make that vital breakthrough. Argyle must have felt things were going their way when Fabian Wilnis was sent off for hacking down David Norris in the 71st minute, but 10 man Ipswich remained resolute and defended well against Argyle’s pressure until the 84th minute when David Wright brought down Peter Halmosi in the penalty area. Sylvan Ebanks-Blake made no mistake with the spot, powering the ball into the bottom left of goal. On the flow of play, Plymouth will feel that they should have claimed all 3 points, but that’s the way it goes, the best team doesn’t necessarily always win! Argyle boss Ian Holloway was rushed into hospital suffering from a kidney stone just before kick off. We (the Green Army) wish Ian the best and a swift recovery to get back to the touchline where he belongs.
Liverpool were unlucky to not take all three points against Chelsea at Anfield in a rather tempestuous 1 – 1 draw, notching up a total of nine yellow cards between the two teams during the game. New signing Fernando Torres opened his account scoring his maiden goal for the Reds slotting Steven Gerrard’s pinpoint pass past Petr Cech to give the home side the lead in the 16th minute. Chelsea’s Florent Malouda collided with Liverpool’s Steve Finnan in the 18 yard box and the referee somehow adjudged that Finnan had fouled Malouda. Frank Lampard didn’t have any complaints as he powered the spot kick past Pepe Reina. You have to say that the referee got it badly wrong and I am not saying that because it’s gone against my team, it’s plain to see that Malouda jumped into Finnan, it’s was an unfortunate collision not a foul. If Chelsea got a late winner it would have been hell to pay, and it does bring into question the competency of Premiership referees, I think that a fourth official should have power to override the referees decisions if they see something on the TV replays.
Not that I care that much, I just find it amusing that Manchester City are top of the Premier League after three games of the season with their more illustrious local rivals Manchester United languishing down in 16th after their 1 – 0 defeat to City at the City of Manchester Stadium on Sunday. United dominated much of the game, but it’s goals that count and City scored whereas United didn’t. I know my friend Stuart will be over the moon about this win, it’s not often City fans get to cheer about a win over United. Liverpool are currently 9th in the league, but have a game in hand over many of the teams above them, and have Sunderland away this coming Saturday, so have the perfect opportunity to move up the table, but Sunderland could be a potential banana skin; so the Reds will need to be weary!