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Rehearsal Roundabouts.

A funny this happened this week at Fodens.  Due to the nature of the Open
test piece (lot's of walking around on stage) it was deemed our bandroom was
too small to rehearse in this week, so we booked our 'backup' rehearsal
room - Sandbach Boys School refectory, about 1 mile from the bandroom.  The
band rehearsed there for about six years, stopping about 4 years ago when
our purpose built bandroom was built.
Anyway, everything was fine until around Thursday of last week.  We had had
a rehearsal at the school and were looking forward to the contest and
continued rehearsals there.  Then we received a phone call from an
embarassed caretaker/admin person from the school.  Apparently another band
(Leyland) had a teacher at the school and he had requested the refectory for
a rehearsal on Friday night - the night before the Open.  It is the schools
policy to give staff first priority in these circumstances so, despite our
firmed up booking, we were chucked out (we are there until Thursday).
So, NJC used his influence and managed (somehow) to book us in at the small,
but adequate, concert hall at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) for
the Friday.  This is a bit of a pain for us Brummies but it's worth the
extra travelling because the hall is a little more like Symphony Hall that
the school canteen is !!  Arrangements were made to get percussion there
etc. and times for sections to turn up set. THEN, yesterday we had another
phone call from an embarassed admin type who told us that " a senior member
of staff has requested that his band rehearse in the concert hall and as the
college always put in-house bookings (I suppose Fairey's are the resident
band in some sense) before private we could not rehearse there on Friday" !!
The morale of this story is that you can't keep a good band down.  That
afternoon Nick (again somehow) managed to organise that we rehearse at the
BRIDGEWATER HALL, a mirror image of Symphony Hall in Birmingham.  It
couldn't have worked out better !!  So while other bands are moving tables
and sitting on spilt custard and others are in a small, college concert hall
we'll be rehearsing in a world class concert hall, as close as is humanly
possible to the hall we'll be judged the next day.  It won't help play any
better on the day (nothing can really do that under contest pressure) but it
helps !!
This isn't a 'gloat' message, I honestly think it's quite funny !

Phil.
Fodens.

Wishing Fairey's and Leyland the best of luck at the Open.


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