So Ran For Cover played a private function at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Auckland CBD
The Auckland CBD is a mess at the moment because they are putting in a city rail loop, many streets are closed / blocked or one way, and the usual direct way to the hotel was blocked, so took us an extra 10 minutes of driving around the city to find a way to get to the hotel
We had to drive up the ramp to the hotel carpark and park outside the payment office and from there it was literally 6 meters walk through the doors to the conference room we were playing in. We had to unload fast and move our cars as we weren't allowed to leave them there - luckily Mrs Bassman was dropping me off so I quickly unloaded so she could leave.
The stage was one of the biggest / longest I've played on, but we still kept it pretty tight
Setup dance well underway
We set up 4:30pm-6:30pm - only issue we had was Griff (guitar) and Bear (vocals acoustic guitar) had plugged their guitars into the wrong DI boxes - took about 5 mins of trying to figure it out before the problem was identified and quickly resolved
This is the room - certainly the biggest I've played in with this band
Steve (keys / PA) took a bit longer than usual to EQ the sound, but everything sounded great on stage and out front by all accounts
We had almost finished setup when we were told that the 'bar was open' - thank you.... a nice cold beer went down a treat
A couple of shots of the setup
Mrs Bassman picked me up about 6:30pm and we grabbed a bite to eat before she dropped me back at the hotel about 8pm (she was going to see a movie while I was doing the gig)
We had been told 9pm - 11:30pm was our playing time, so we shortened out setlist from 3 sets to 2 sets of about 17 songs each
for soundcheck we played a song that we had actually removed from the set list, but one of the organisers said "Gee - That's a great song"! so we decided to open with it. We ended up playing til about 11:45pm?
3 times during the gig, one of the organisers came up to the stage with beers for the band - which was nice, and as Mrs Bassman was driving home I decided to partake in the consumption of approximately 5 beers.
We got a couple of band photos taken at the end of the hight so it will be interesting to see how they turn out
One lady came up to us after the gig and said OMG OMG you played my favourite song ever! (Dakota by Stereophonics)
I found out the back behind the stage there was a big trolley that tilts back and it was big enough to fit all my gear on except my mic stand and guitar stand, so I loaded that up and took it down the carpark ramp to where Mrs Bassman was waiting outside. I loaded it into the car and went back up to help the others, but was told I could go if my wife was waiting for me and not to stick around, as they said they could handle it - which was nice.
Overall it was a good gig and we were pretty happy with how it turned out
