Beautiful Autumn day. We had a few hours to spend so we walked around the city. Firstly we had breakfast at Espresso which we knew about from their sponsorship of Sizzletown podcast. We had some granola and muesli and some great coffee and chatted with Nick, the owner.
We then walked around one of the many parks in Orange, a city of roughly 50,000 people. We also visited a couple of op shops and I bought Tim Buckleys Greetings From LA and a double jazz compilation. I noticed a street named Byng. Byng street. In Mount Gambier, SA, where I grew up, the first hotel was opened by an African American man called John Byng. This was before the American Civil War. I did some googling but I don’t think the Mt Gambier Byng came to Orange.
We set up our gear at the venue at around 4pm and then went back to the motel to dress. we returned to the club at 6pm and had a bowl of pumpkin soup before beginning to play at 7pm.
The Agrestic Grocer is out of the city centre and is a quite beautiful post industrial stone building with a lot of organic fruit and vegetables on display in the middle of the corrugated iron and white washed stone walls. Some of the walls contain straw within cladding which seems to go some way to explain how extraordinarily great the room sounds. All hard surfaces, wood and stone and iron, should make for a horrible, reverberation in the room but it sounds great! The sound engineer being an old school pro who when not checking us just sat and read an autobiography by Black Sabbaths Geezer Butler.
We played a lot of new material and a lot we had never played before, as a duo or as a band. The first set went for an hour and the second for about 50 minutes.
I love playing music in regional cities and towns. They appreciate weirdness and let you get your freak on.
For this date I was wearing a beige suit I last wore a decade ago with a black turtle neck jumper and a pair of two tone brown shoes with round toes.
Clare wore a shiny multi coloured top with navy trousers and two tone shoes with a red trench coat.
We talked with some nice people after the show. A couple who moved to Orange from Adelaide and a woman who was moving to Newcastle. Another woman was from Poland and her partner casually told a story of working for Sydney colourful identity Abe Saffron on some of his interests in Perth in the 70s. He wasn’t paid but could claim expenses. “So I ran up some pretty fierce expenses and then after a few months I was invited to meet Abe in this disco. He was sitting on a chair in the middle of the empty dance floor and had another chair for me there. He asked how the job was going and I said I was pretty much finished and could leave town right now if that was what he wanted….”
We loaded up our gear and went back to the motel taking a night time drive through the streets of Orange to get a bottle of wine for Clare.
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