Festive Greetings from State of Undress!

Well, since our last blog, I have to say we've had a run of fabulous gigs: we played the Tudor Rose on 10th November and almost lifted the roof off the place - what a great evening that was. The following week, we played at The Railway Hotel in Blandford; then The Salisbury Arms in Purewell; The Plough in Tiptoe and The Hobbit in Southampton on 1st December. All of these were just fantastic. We had a wonderful response from the audience at all of them - I have to just mention a guy called Robbo who lives way over in Dorchester and still came all the way to Tiptoe to see us. At The Hobbit, there was a group of students who'd seen us there in the summer and as soon as we walked in they asked 'Have you brought your eggs?'Fortunately, I had, indeed, brought my shaky eggs - extra supplies in fact - which was just as well because we started the evening off with sixteen eggs and came home with four and minus two feather boas as well - bloody students!! Just a great night.We're looking forward to playing back at all these places next year (see our gigs list on www.stateofundress.com/gigs) We did have a small blip when we travelled all the way to Leicester to play at a great venue, The Musician, and hardly anyone turned up. A combination of wet, windy weather, a Wednesday gig and the fact we were unknown conspired against us. However, we played well and put on a good show and the few people who were there really enjoyed it. It hasn't put us off travelling for gigs and we'd love to be invited back to The Musician but we have decided that long ditance, mid-week is just not an option at the moment. Anyway, whilst all these gigs were going on, we'd been rehearsing like crazy for our festive concert at Highcliffe Castle. This took place on Wednesday 13th December. This was a really important evening for us. We wanted to do something really special and a little different from our usual fare.With such a glorious setting, we knew we had to put on a bit of a show. Anyway, we decided to put some of our own songs into a festive context such as reading an extract from A Christmas Carol, the wondrous bit where Marley's ghost warns Scrooge not to waste life's opportunities and then we went into our own song 'Ghosts of Wasted Chances'; or a poem by Eleanor Farjean called 'For Them' about remembering those who were on their own at Christmas and then went into The Lonely Ones; and a particular highlight was reading a piece from The Christmas Truce into Stille Nacht/Silent Night and then into Take Me to the Leader - a really tingly moment when Keith our drummer walked to the front of the stage playing a traditional military drum. (photo: Richie Brown www.richiebrownphotography.com)
In addition to all of that, we did our own version of some festive favourites - Chris Rea's Driving Home For Christmas and The Pogues Fairytale of New York and we debuted our own Christmas song written specially for the occasion Christmas Round Ours! Anyway, we had a terrific time. (And we had a bit of an apres-gig round ours - finally fell into bed at about 3.00am!)A brilliant way to round off the year. We're having a month off now - but we're back for our first gig of 2007 at The Salisbury Arms on 12th January.


(photo: Richie Brown www.richiebrownphotography.com)

Merry Christmas to you all and a happy, healthy and happening New Year!
Charlie x