My Blue Heaven

Rock On

Its finally over. I can’t believe it. *sigh* The official Saltlight Productions “This Way Up” CD launch came and went (with nearly 500 people in attendance) on Saturday 8th November, 2003 at the Newtown Theatre.

What an experience it was. I’m still reeling from the vibe.. the excitement of it all. It was great! I’ll try not to do a blow-by-blow account of what happened on the day. In summary, I arrived pretty early at around 9:15am (though not as early as the poor tech guys who arrived at 8am, and worked non-stop the whole day to set the place up with professional sound and lighting). I then had my hair and makeup done in the city (the makeup with a free napoleon makeover voucher!) and headed back to the Newtown Theatre to setup, sound check and have our final rehearsal before the performance.



The night itself went by in a blur. I can’t believe how fast it went.. before I knew it, it was intermission. Then we were bumping out. Woah. I was pretty nervous beforehand, filled with all this pent-up nervous energy. I had to fight the urge to scream every few minutes to let it all out. 🙂

Some observations on my part, and things I learnt on the night:

• Sound and lighting is of utmost importance. Screw that up, and the performance is pretty much screwed. Our tech guys were awesome! They worked so so hard all day from 8am till midnight to set up, run the show and pack up. You guys rock!
• On a similar note, smoke machines are way cool. (Esp when combined with pretty lights.) Except when you’re onstage and enveloped in a cloud of smoke… breathing becomes a tad difficult.
• Five songs go by really fast.
• I almost tripped when first going onstage at the beginning of the show. Anyone notice?
• Playing with live brass (in the first song, “Nobody Else”) is great! Really makes a difference to the song!
• “Rearrange” rawked! 🙂 Tim made an impromptu call for all moshers to come forward, and all these youth (mostly from our youth group) came rushing forward screaming and jumping around. It was sooo funny! Me and Vron were in the stage wings cacking ourselves!! The only downer was the massive amounts of feedback coming from somewhere.
• My star moment – playing lead piano on the Ben-Folds-Like song “In Gods Eyes” went great! It was amazing… the best I’d ever played the song… it all just fell together for me. We were really tight as a band, and the incredibly hard syncapated rhythm was a breeze for me. Amazing.
• I had no idea my organ solo in “80 Years” was deafening everyone in a 100 metre radius of the speakers. Oops my bad!
• We had the sound mix and levels right by about the last song of the night. :\
• Even though I didn’t do any of the setup (other than my own keyboard and sound check/rehearsal), I was somehow really tired by the time of the performance, and afterwards, well, I was absolutely exhausted.. though exuberant too.
• Both Andrew and Tim mastered the “rock strut”. Haha. Tim even did the “crowd pleaser” (playing right up to the moshing crowd at the edge of the stage during his solo… what a rock god :P).

Check out the photos in the gallery of the performance and of people during the night (kindly taken by my bro, using our digital camera). Also, if you didn’t weren’t able to come, go here to download some bootlegs (heh) of the night. (Thanks Fuzzi!)

Current listening :: “Into you”- Fabolous Ft Tamia (damn I love this song.. just makes me wanna bump’n’grind (thats dancing btw)… And I finally found out who it’s by! Darn radio stations never introduce the songs..)

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