Keston Cobblers Club – PRESHOW RITUALS

In this Preshow Rituals segment, the folk pop band, Keston Cobblers Club, share what they do before every show. You can check out their rituals, after the break.

It definitely helps when you’re gigging night after night on tour to work out some pre-gig priories and rituals to help focus you for performance, whether you’re gigging new songs, nervous about a particular venue, or just had a really awful drive through hours of traffic the previous few hours!

Whatever was on your mind that morning or on the drive in, getting into a venue is where the focus starts, and it’s important to feel at home straight away – this is after all our ‘office’ for the night! Locating/making a round of coffees is a must once we’ve loaded gear in, and since we don’t currently travel with an engineer it’s great to take the time to chat to the house techies – about the set-up, the room, the great pizza place around the corner – all relevant! Depending on how early we are pre-soundcheck we often nip out to the nearest charity shop for a rummage – on more than one occasion we’ve found that day’s gig outfit or some extra stage props lurking in a second-hand pile somewhere!

Our touring venues can be incredibly diverse which is great – converted churches, folk clubs, a village hall or university theatre – and which means we do make the most of our soundcheck time to get the sound just right for us and out front. It’s a slightly unusual combination of instruments (what do you mean you’ve never seen a banjo play with a tuba…) and often quite dense group vocals so it can take a while to sit right. It’s also a great time to run any new songs in the set just to polish them up.

In-between soundcheck and performance, all five us tend to have quite different vibes and I think it’s especially important when you’re in a group to identify what makes you personally tick, so you’re able to get gig-ready without worrying about what anyone else is doing – if you need to miss out on an hour’s chat in the pub to nail some pre-show yoga then so be it!! There’s also usually a documentary or TV series knocking around on someone’s laptop which is a nice low-maintenance option for some communal chill time. And we’ll definitely try and catch whoever’s supporting us – one of my favourite things about touring is meeting other musicians and finding new music! Throw in a glass of wine, a couple of outfit swaps (the girls usually, not the boys…) and some often fairly strange vocal/instrument warm-ups and it’s showtime!

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