I haven’t posted anything for quite a while now because the site wouldn’t let me. Kieran has promised to investigate and, I hope, rectify the situation. In the meantime, however, the band now has a YouTube channel (as a sort of audition piece for a festival we’d like to play at in the summer), so I’ll try to put a link to that at the end of this post. There are three videos of the evening at Bassercles; the sound is poor, but you can get an idea of what we do.

The young wrinklies

December 2nd marked the band’s first performance with Mika, our new bass player. The event was the inauguration of the new bar in the salle des fêtes at Bassercles, a tiny village in Pyrénées Atlantiques.

We arrived at 3pm for the setting up and sound check; Michel, the singer and front man, was streaming with cold, Mika had a bad back and Adrian hadn’t eaten for the last 48 hours, following a gastric bug. Not the greatest of starts. The afternoon’s rehearsal was disastrous; nothing went right and we ended up doing one, normally easy, song five times before we were satisfied with it. We’d never played so badly, everyone was on edge.

Michel had decided that the evening would have a theme – that of an aeroplane flight; he dressed as a pilot, while I was an air stewardess. We had a recording of take off noises and the safety announcement; I did the safety demonstration, using a mock up seat belt and oxygen mask and, when it came to the life jacket, a child’s inflatable swim ring, equipped with light, whistle and, just in case, a St. Christopher medal.

Michel’s a great front man and found his form, as well as incredible energy, from somewhere, bouncing around the stage, making sorties into the audience with his microphone, to encourage them to sing along.

In the event, it went very well, everyone seemed to enjoy it. I was thrilled to see two of my neighbours from Caupenne, who’d driven an hour and a half to be there, as well as three friends from the cycle club in Dax.

Hopefully this will lead to more gigs as the maires of several neighbouring villages were there.

The link to the YouTube channel is below; if you’d subscribe to it, we’d be very grateful, we need as many subscribers as possible. Thank you.

https://youtube.com/@CarpetDragons?si=0IIu4vWpqNS4Q35g