Bell Bash 2007

What an excellent weekend! The Bell Bash arrived on a brilliant Sunny weekend and became the busiest ever festival at the Bell Inn with entertainment on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Plenty of "Undies" came up to see us on Saturday and many of the local following came to cheer us on too. Undercover went down an absolute storm and the front of the stage looked like a mosh pit at times. With a charge on entry this year the donations to local charity, MEDICS is in excess of £2,700.
There was a big increase in those camping too which only encouraged us to stay up later than we should, it all added to the fun but we felt a bit rough for our day time gig in Sawbridgeworth on Sunday.
A big thanks to everyone who supported us and thanks to the Undies for travelling up and camping the night away.

There's a number of pix on the website and I'll be adding more over the weekend but here's some specifically for the blog.


Two pix before the event, glorious sunshine but not a pint passed my lips yet!




The Undies show their appreciation



Jill shows she means business



The Undies are off



BBQ time for the hungry ones



Nigel brings out his litre bottle which sank before the sun rose

Mick is on the mend

Last weekend we had to cancel our performance at the White Horse Beer & Music Festival, Coxtie Green due to Drummer Mick's knee problems and a lack of singing voice from Pete. Mick has a recurring injury to his leg where his knee pops out causing quite a bit of pain. He was recently admitted to hospital and was operated on earlier this week. We're glad to say he's now on the mend and we hope to see him behind the drums for the Crown, Hornchurch gig on 27th July, however we have our old drummer Dennis on the sidelines just in case.

On Sat 14th July we entertained for Daren's 40th Birthday with Gavin on the drums. Gavin has previously depped for exposé and had his own band, Cactus Jack. The gig went well considering we hadn't rehearsed with Gav for over 5 years! There's a few pix on our website for you to have a look at Band Photos

This week we have the drummer from The Doctors entertaining the guests for a wedding near Saffron Walden. The Doctors are supporting us at the Bell Bash so we're looking forward to meeting at least one of them although Mick's had enough of doctors for the moment :-)

Sat 23rd Pelican 10th Birthday Party

Saturday evening we were invited to entertain the parents to celebrate the 10th Birthday of the Pelican Prep School in Cambridge. With everyone dressed to impress in dinner suits and ball gowns the evening started with a champagne reception and dinner in a superb marquee. Undercover took to the stage at 9.45 as the guests were "itching to get on the dance floor". 2 sets of over an hour each were not enough and as our rendition of Teenage Kicks went down so well we gave Blur and the Clash an airing. They demanded more so we heated the evening up with Pretty Vacant and finally finished at nearly 12.30 with Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit.
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, so a big thanks goes out to the parents some of whom couldn't miss a photo opportunity. Congratulations on your 10 years and long may it continue.

Festival Fun

I had a great time at the Thurrock Beer Festival. One of the few times this year that I can put the UHF link on my guitar and run around almost as much as Pete! Great gig and a great crowd.

Straight after the gig I drove up to Nottingham getting to Jill's house (my g/f) at 2.30am and the next day we hit the DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL.

What a day! Bowling for Soup were the most entertaining band of the day but others we saw were Marilyn Manson, Slayer and the mighty Motley Crue.

Still getting over the hangover!

Lets see some of your festival pics on here

Undercover at Thurrock Beer Festival

Thanks to everyone who attended the Thurrock Beer Festival last night, a fantastic gig with nearly 1,000 drinkers in attendance, drinking most of the barrels dry. It was hot, the air was thin, the monitors over heated but the punters rocked their asses off. It was our first Friday attendance after appearing on Saturday on the 2 previous years but as a result of this performance we've been booked again for next year. We've got a ton of photo's to sort, some we'll put on here and others will go on the website and our Undercover MySpace site. Thanks to all those who came up and congratulated us, makes it all the more worthwhile, hope to see you at another gig or next year for some more classics and trashics.

Pubs change payment scheme to bands

For the purposes of clearing up an issue with payments at a number of venues I thought I'd create a blog open for discussion for bands and anyone wishing to comment.

Recently the paying arrangements at various pubs, including the Coopers Arms in Chadwell Heath, Towngate in Basildon and Fatling & Firkin at Hornchurch were changed as the head office has chosen to use a company called EVENT UK as paymaster. Whilst a company taking care of the finances is a good move there were concerns that the payments to the bands would be delayed by 4 weeks, paid by cheque and there were initial concerns that Event UK would take commission from those payments. A number of bands were not happy with this arrangement and cancelled gigs because of it. However, tonight I received the agreement forms detailing the new arrangement.

Bands are required to complete details of address, identification, bank account details and declaration by signed agreement and are to invoice Event UK direct. The band will be paid the usual fee direct to their bank account the Friday following the received invoice (assuming the agreement has been received by Event UK). All bookings will continue through the pub management.

On Friday 25th May Undercover play the Fatling & Firkin, Hornchurch, under the new arrangements and we will be reporting how the system worked for us in the assurance it may inform others.

We're hoping that the venues don't suffer as a result of this new arrangement but as we frequent some of these pubs we feel there's a loss to all if some of the top bands decide no longer to play at these venues. It's noticeable from livebandphotos that perhaps that has already become the case.

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Bass player Terry hits 50

Friday 27th April saw Undercover descend on the Coach and Horses in Newport, Essex to celebrate bass player Terry the Tooth's 50th birthday. The secret gig at the pub where they first started back in 2001 saw the introduction of our new shirts, Andy in his Nun's outfit and Terry get the classic cream pie in the face. The set-list consisted of many of Terry's favourite covers, starting with Fight for Your Right to Party, Teenage Kicks and our first public performance of the Automatic's Monster. After copious amounts of Spitfire, Guinness and nuclear Scrumpy we moved over to Terry's house to see the sun rise whilst singing along to bad ass guitar playing.
My head's still hurting but the words never again didn't cross my lips!

Coxtie Green Beer & Music Festival

We're currently helping to organise the White Horse Beer and Music Festival at Coxtie Green, Brentwood, the biggest FREE festival in the area. Starting Thursday 12th July and continuing til Sunday evening on 15th, there will be a dj on the Friday night plus live music all day Saturday and Sunday.

The line-up for this year's event starts with the NapkinArse, Shakedown, Hell n Back, Reeper, Rusty Sherrifs and finishes with the Fabulous Chocolate Turtles on Saturday. Sunday starts with Stealer, Lobster, Shady Deal, Undercover and finishing with Dave Danger and Beef for Sunday. In addition The White Horse Band are set to entertain within the pub on Friday night and DJ Dansey will hit the decks in the beer garden.

This year's chosen charity is The Little Havens Children's Hospice - offering specialist one on one care for children with life-threatening and life-limiting illnesses.

Timetable, maps and links to band websites appear on the Undercover website.

(09/04/07: edited for full line-up and charity confirmation)

UndercoverPete
w: www.undercover.me.uk

Who you listening to at mo?

What's on your iPod, your car stereo or CD deck? What are you listening to at the moment? I'm cramming my 4gb Nano with some of the latest albums and a few from the past plus quite a few podcasts on web standards, boagworld being a prime example.
Amy Winehouse, Mika, Paul Weller, the Chilis, The Good The Bad & The Queen, Fratellis and of course the Foo Fighters plus the Ramones are all getting a large amount of airplay. Recent additions are Maximo Park and The Gossip although I'm not entirely convinced about either yet, best I boot up iTunes then!

UndercoverPete
w: www.undercover.me.uk

Tried out some new songs

For the last few months we've been looking at adding new songs to our repertoire, some of which we've ditched, others we've now included in our set and some that we're still working on.

Queen's Crazy Little Thing Called Love didn't make the grade so, sorry Freddie.
Slade's C'mon Feel The Noise made an appearance at The Tavern, Rush Green and we observed quite a few people singing along to it. We need some more work on this so expect to see it again.
The Fratellis' Chelsea Dagger got its first airing at The Tavern and is now firmly in the set, ooooh we love it, dah dah dah dah dah dah...
The Prince, by Madness and Boys Will Be Boys by the Ordinary Boys have now been added to our Ska medley and we can't get enough of it, skankin!
We've always wanted to do All These Things That I have Done by the Killers and so we recently tried this in rehearsal. It seems to be working well and we expect to get it involved during the festival gigs.
We also tried What's That Coming Over the Hill by The Automatic which we recon will get plenty of response. It's doing well and we expect to see this in the set for the gigs in May.

If you have some suggestions on songs we could try or opinions on our recent additions then please feel free to add your comments.

UndercoverPete
w: www.undercover.me.uk

Welcome to Undercover Blog

We've arrived, and not before time, in the blogworld, something I've intended for quite a while and only now got around to doing at this strange hour. For those that don't know, a blog (weblog) is a website which allows text, photos and videos to be input and allows for comments from visitors. It's all part of the social media becoming more popular on the web. In contrast to a normal website everything is displayed in chronological order - old news at the bottom, new items at the top. The idea of Undercover's blog is purely to provide more up-to-date information about the band and invite some response, so come on folks lets hear views.

Best I introduce myself then, I'm Pete from Undercover, an Essex band playing in a variety of pubs in Essex, Herts, Beds and London plus parties within a 1&1/2hr drive from Hornchurch, our base!

We recently played the Tavern in Rush Green, Fatling & Firkin in Hornchurch and the Shark in Harlow but we're now taking a break for holidays - John's in Thailand, Terry's in Tenerife - plus there's a lot of birthdays in April. So, unless your lucky enough to see us at Big Dave's wedding or you have your ear to the ground on Terry's 50th you're not likely to see us until we return to the same 3 pubs in May.

The rehearsing is continuing as much as possible and we're keeping our dep guitarist, Adam, up to speed with our range of songs so he can help cover us for a number of gigs during the year. He's already played with us a few times including the gig at the George 2nd in Luton during March.

I've got more to say, but I need to collect my thoughts and make sure this works, so thanks for reading and please feel free to give us some feedback.


UndercoverPete
w: www.undercover.me.uk