Street Performing

Today Novacane did our first street performance in Oxford town and we performed our first original song “Conscience Alley”. I think our performance went quite well, considering I wasn’t very confident about performing because of our garden performance in preparation for it yesterday. Although, we have rehearsed conscience alley excessively in pods. As this was a street performance, we wanted to strip the song back and make it as acoustic as we possibly could. So, we had Will playing acoustic guitar instead of electric and Jack playing a cajon instead of a full drum kit. When we performed it in the garden yesterday it sounded really boring and empty, and I felt the song lacked substance. However, we changed our minds and got Will to play electric guitar for our street performance and this sounded so much better.

We weren’t expecting the instrumentation to sound perfect as we were limited to plugging the guitar, bass and microphones into a street cube, rather than a full PA. However, the levels of the overall sound, were great and we could all each other well, and hear ourselves individually. I feel we were all confident about performing the song, but there wasn’t much band interaction. I think this is because we were playing in a completely different scenery than we usually do, so everyone was just focused on playing the song rather than playing and performing the song.

I wouldn’t say there were any weaknesses within the performance, but I did feel as though we were playing it quite slowly. This may have been because we didn’t have a full drum kit though, so it sounded different and felt different to play. About halfway through the performance, a baby started screaming really loudly, and it was difficult to play the song with that going on right behind us, but we persevered and carried on playing, and it went well.

I think our target for next time, is to definitely play some more of our original material. Hopefully, next time we street perform we will have at least three songs.

Here is a video of our performance: