Wednesday 27 April 2011

Taking the lead

Last night was pretty fun and I wasn't really prepared for what happened. As I do on a Tuesday in Liverpool, I went down to Beatlife for the session at Elm Hall, and after telling Chris I'm headed back to Leeds at the weekend, I was asked if I wanted to do some singing with the group. As you may guess, I was more than happy to do so since they'd heard a bit of what we do during the weekend workshop last month when Honeydrum came to Liverpool for the weekend.

So we got together, and did some warm ups as well after the ball was passed from Matthew to Emma to Harley and then to me (despite Matthew and Harley not wanting to actually do some leading). Singing went pretty well and I think I taught it as well as I could do on 20 minutes notice. I got the guys singing and they started to get a bit more confidence with it. Being pretty impressed with what we achieved, I did some explanation on the sequence saying that we'd done two songs from a longer sequence and it could go with Batucada and we moved on to the drums...

It gets better though! Chris and Al seemed quite happy to see if I wanted to run the rest of the session and put Batucada with the singing and see how that went. So I did, and I probably realised that it's never a good idea to try and run a workshop without any planning whatsoever because I was thinking of things on the fly and changing little things as we went. Regardless, I got them playing, taught them a new break and managed to get people singing and playing!

I tell you something, that was difficult and my respect for people leading has gone up enormously because I now see how tricky it can be. But...and I think this is the most important thing, I had so much fun taking charge and running things. Maybe, just maybe, I'll get another chance to do it again in the future.

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