We enter January with the final ‘badger line-up, the only thing that’s really changed is that Phil has started to bring a guitar along.
I bought the camera along one practice in January to get some new photo’s for the website and Facebook:
We carried on practicing, writing new material and getting gigs booked up, the first one booked was at The Horn Reborn. We were well rehearsed and the poster was even made:
Sadly the weather took a turn for the worse and thick snow fell on the 3rd of Feb so we pulled out of the gig.
The next gig we had lined up was Club 85 on the 7th of March
The gig went well, the lineup was a bit more inline with our style of music instead of putting us on with the usual lot of terrible indie bands with bad shoes and cravats
This brings us to the Green Room gig, definitely Rob’s Angry Badger ‘career highlight’
On the run up to the gig, I’d managed to speak to Chris Evans on Radio 2 (drive time), told him and the listeners about the gig and then requested ‘The boys are back in town’. Further to this, I’d also got in contact with the Welwyn and Hatfield times and got an article about us published including details of the gig
So you’d have thought with a gig this well publicised the Green Room would have been full of people… as it turns out, the pub below (The Doctors Tonic – as featured in ‘The Worlds End’) was very busy, because they had a covers band in for free that night, where as to see us and the two other originals bands upstairs people would have had to pay. Suffice to say, the only people to see us that night, were the people doing the sound and each bands respective friends and partners. We watched the band before us play as if this was their biggest gig to date (ever so slightly cringeworthy), them basically telling no one about their CD etc.. then we decided to treat the gig as a free practice session. The gig organiser himself didn’t even bother to show up, leaving a couple of kids to sort things out (who actually ended up refunding most of the money to the very small number of punters who showed up).
To top the night off, we loaded all the gear back to our cars only to find we were blocked in by the covers band, who were going to be playing for at least another 45 minutes. It was at this point I thought Rob was going to go postal and kill everyone in the bar downstairs. After weighing up the options of trying to move their cars, we decided the only course of action was to go get some pizza’s between us from Domino’s round the corner. The covers band that night got a fairly frosty reception when they finally came out, lucky for them Rob had calmed down by then.
After the disastrous gig at the Green Room, we had another gig at Club 85, once again supporting the Liquid Metal Men
Another good gig apart from ‘Beast On The Bed’ (sorry Phil if you’re reading this) due to the out of tune solo, that after much discussion was declared not out of tune by various friends of Phil’s, I do however remember people particularly enjoying our RATM cover of Bombtrack. Oh, and we also played for the first and last time a new track about the late Michael Jackson, called “The King is dead (the kids are safe)”, nice.
During the year, I’d decided to sell my Gibson Explorer and fund the purchase of some recording gear with the idea of recording the next E.P ourselves. In August (16th I believe) I hired my local village hall for the day and myself and Jon recorded four tracks.
Myself, Phil and Rob then finished off the vocals and bass tracks at my place, using a cupboard lined with foam as a makeshift vocal booth! I named the E.P “Attack of the 50ft Badger”
And here, some 4 years after recording those tracks am I finally happy to share them (after much tweaking, remixing, remastering, re-recording of some guitar parts (including the BOTB solo with something boring, but in tune – again, sorry Phil!)) with you:
After this, things kind of went downhill, I’d certainly started to lose interest, most of us were questioning the point of carrying on, so I decided to call it a day. We’d had a good run, made what I consider to be good tracks (Choking My Ambitions and Beast On the Bed with more work, in my mind could be great tunes), played some gigs and had a lot of fun on the way.
On November the 12th 2009, Angry Badger was officially over.
I’d just like to say thanks to anyone who ever came along to see us, supported us, took photos (which I’ve no doubt pinched for some of these blogs) and got involved. The band was only ever supposed to be fun and most of the time it was!
Myself, Jon and Phil F are now in a covers band called ‘Honey Badger‘ with a new singer we’ve met called Candice (yeah, I know, but the name wasn’t my idea this time ;)), I’m still in touch with Rob and occasionally hear from Phil C too.
Dave.
[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]