Members Blogs
Katy Gardiner's RNCM Percussion Camp Weblog
Katy is in her 4th year as a member of the Senators Drum and Bugle Corps. She is 22 this year and plays in the Pit Percussion Section.
Saturday January 29th 2005
9.20am We left Sandy in Bedfordshire for the long trip up North to Preston, in the car apart from me obviously, was Tim Gardiner (my husband and Senators Brass Arranger), Tom Shepherd (A Tenor player with the Corps and minor DC celebrity),and Jo Treverton (A fellow Keyboard player with me and Tom’s girlfriend).
The guys from Eastleigh were travelling up by minibus and had set off on their journey at about 8:00am, not particularly early, but early enough! – John McNamara the Corps Percussion Caption Head and Director of the Indoor Drumline Ensemble had already been on the phone checking we had all set off on time – Do you know we get fined for not having our phones on for journeys away!!! lol
11:45am We decided to stop for a bite to eat as we weren’t sure when we were next going to get the chance once we arrived in Preston. We stopped at Knutsford Services on the M6 and decided to go with a Burger King. I had one of those new Chicken Burger things and it was lovely!
12:33pm Southampton v Portsmouth match just kicked off! As an avid Saints fan, Tim was listening closely to the radio, waiting for Saints to score. I bet the guys in the minibus were doing the same thing, only some of them are Pompey fans too! Boo!
12:43pm – We entered ‘The City of Preston’. Just before this we had been travelling on the motorway and it had been grey and dismal and the sky had been full of thick black clouds. No word of a lie, as soon as we turned off the motorway and onto the road that lead into Preston, the sky was a glorious blue colour and the sun was shining. I have always thought John was good at his job – he now seemed to be working miracles!!!!
1:30pm – We arrived at St David’s Church Hall which is the headquarters of the Avengers. It was quite an old building with a long hall where we going to sleep that evening – and had a kitchen and various other rooms.
Tim and a few of the lads had gone to the bowling alley (which was round the corner) to watch the rest of the match. Score update: Saints 1 Pompey 0. Yes!! – the Saints had taken the lead! No sooner had I told everyone that, then Pompey had a penalty and the score was 1-1! It’s ok though no need to panic, there’s still time!
1:45pm The pit and guard took a walk down the road to the Sports Hall (A brand new building with loads of facilities) that was to be our base for the rehearsal and ultimately the Performance we were to do later that evening. The drums stayed behind at St David’s as they had some new toys – they have just received some stands for the Instruments and were trying to figure out how to put them up!!!!
After about half an hour or so, the drums joined us at the hall. John’s father had organised for the local paper “The Lancashire Evening Post” to come and take some photos of us which would hopefully help the Avengers attract some local members. Score update: Southampton 2 Portsmouth 1. Wahoooo! the match has just finished excellent news.
2.30pm Before we got the rehearsal into full steam John introduced us all to our latest addition to the Senators Staff and family – Ben Collins. This is Ben’s first visit to the UK and he is a Former Marching Member of the DCI World Champions, the Cavaliers. Ben is over in the UK studying at Manchester University and had contacted John prior to arriving here to see if he could help the Corps out whilst he is in England.
Ben had marched 4 years in the Tenor line of the Cavaliers and 2004 was his age out and he was also the Section leader of the Tenors and Drum Sergeant of the Percussion Section, he seemed really friendly.
As we were running our performance section by section to clean it , Ben had is first bit of input, he wanted to make sure that we were performing to our full potential and unlike on the Drum Corps field with shako’s hiding the members faces, we had to project ourselves up into the stands. Facial Expressions play an important part of any production on stage and we had to make sure that we had got to grips with this in order to project our performance to the audience.
6:00pm Rehearsal finished. Things seemed to have gone really well and I think most of us were really looking forward to our first public performance, but now it was time for dinner.
During our dinner break, the Pit decided to customise our costumes. As we are portraying evil throughout the show, we didn’t think that pristine jeans and top fitted with our theme. Out came the scissors, sand paper and some safety pins, and hey presto, our very own customised evil costumes! I think we all did a really good job. In fact, I like my top so much I might even consider wearing it out on the town!
7:15pm We headed back to the Sports Hall to give our first public performance of the Indoor Drumline Show. We were also to give a “Clinic” on Marching Percussion. In the audience were local school children from Preston, current and former members of the Avengers, and also some Staff and members of the Cheshire Cadets from Warrington.
7.29pm Percussion and Guard loving time!!!! We all gathered round John who gave us a pre show pep talk – not even February and out performing – how cool is that!!!! As part of our performance at the Royal Northern College of Music tomorrow, we are required to put a Showcase on Marching Percussion and John wanted us to use the performance in Preston to “rehearse” it.
John kicked off the show by explaining what Drum Corps is and what exactly we do, by introducing each Section and talking through the Percussion Warm Ups in detail, with the Battery providing the proof. As we finished off the first section of the evening John invited a member of the audience to come up and join us – a young lad called Christian from Cheshire Cadets jumped and did really well, he got a big round of applause from the audience and ourselves!!
Lee Nelson was next up (Lee is the Pit Arranger for the Corps) and he explained to the audience how we approach playing Concert instruments outdoors and show our basic Warm Up’s that we do to stretch out our arms and build up our chops. Next up John introduced the Colour guard and explained a bit about their equipment especially the rifles. They did a few spins and throws and looked really impressive!! Finally we got chance to perform the show, although a little nervous I was determined to give it my all – thankfully it went really well and we got a great audience response. It was definitely good to get the first public performance out of the way. Hopefully I won’t be so nervous tomorrow now.
9:00pm Back to the hall to get changed, then it was off to the bowling alley down the road, affectionately nick-named Bowlarama. It was a good night with a great bunch of people, there was a few games of pool being played and a few people dancing on the old favourite of mine . . . the Dance Machine. Our Amercian friend Ben jumped on straight away without hesitation, unfortunately I missed this, but John obviously felt he had to defend the UK’s honour and used poor little Tommy (his son) as an excuse to get on the machine himself. He was rubbish (sorry John, but its true) and I think Tommy agreed! ;0)
11:20pm After a few beers (we were under orders!!) the walk back to the hall was very funny indeed. “Watch out everyone, I think John is checking up on us in that taxi”. If I saw a gang of 30 people walking through the streets of Preston, I’d be scared!
I got ready for bed straight away and tucked myself in, but that wasn’t the plan for everybody. A few members of the drum line being typical drummers, decided to tap the night away. At midnight, a few of us had decided that enough was enough, and Sophie Baker (guard) threatened to confiscate their sticks if they didn’t stop. They stopped! Nice one Bonnet! So not to be denied, Christian Daly (snare) decided he couldn’t wait till tomorrow to perform on stage. He was so excited, that he put the stage lights on and proceeded to sing, dance and generally entertain the campers. It was like an episode of Phoenix Nights on that little stage. Very Funny!
Sunday January 30th 2005
7:00am Time to wake up! Off to the bathroom, where there was one cold tap only! Hey Ho, there’s nothing quite like a face full of cold water to wake you up in the morning. Thank the lord for facial wipes! Everybody bundled into the café directly opposite for breakfast.
8:30am Everyone was packed up and ready to go. First, John had a little chat with everyone. I think he was the first to admit that he was probably more nervous than the rest of us about the day ahead and by 8:45am we were on our way to Manchester.
10:00am We all arrived safely at the RNCM in Manchester and waited outside in the drizzle for about ½ hour. We girls kept ourselves warm by singing songs and pretending to busk in the streets.
10:30am Bruce Parry one of the events organisers came outside to meet us and gave the drum line permission to warm up outside the College halls of residence and said that it would be a good thing to get some of the students out of bed! He said, and I quote “If there’s any trouble, just tell them that Bruce said it was ok - The short tw** in a jacket!” Go Brucey! Definitely quote of the weekend!
As it was raining outside the Pit were given some free time to visit the Trade Stands, I got chance to play on a Yamaha 5 Octave Marimba which was lovely, but the electronic Marimba was pretty cool too. We also got chance to meet our friends from JAM Percussion who also had a stand at the event.
12:00pm We unloaded the truck and got all of the instruments inside. We then got changed and had chance to warm up on the stage and also run some parts of the Show to get ourselves ready for the performance at 1.30pm. We were all glad of this as it gave us chance to sound check everything. The acoustics on stage was so much better than where we’d rehearsed the show before.
2:30pm Back off the stage now, with the show neatly tucked under our belts - it went really well. John had kicked off the gig as the night before and as he got further into the drum’s warm ups, the crowd got more and more involved! By the time the drum line played their warm up ‘stick control’, the audience were really warming to us.
When we got to the end of the warm ups, John once again asked for a volunteer from the audience. This time John Stovin a young lad from Concord got on stage - he was really good and the audience really took to him (I’m sure John organises these things beforehand as both audience ‘volunteers’ were from Corps!!!) John gave him some goodies kindly donated by Innovative Percussion as a thank you for joining them which I am sure he was pleased about.
As the night before, the Pit played through our warm up and then the Colour Guard took the stage. The audience were really appreciative of both efforts and this led to the moment of truth…………would they like the show or not? We needn’t have worried - they loved it!!! I could hear shouts for “More!! More!!” from them which was really pleasing to hear.
John finished the performance off by thanking our Sponsors and Endorsers and most importantly thanking the audience for their appreciation. He then held a Question and Answer session at the front of the stage from an enthusiastic throng of new found DC fans!!!
3:00pm With the truck all packed up and everybody changed back into their normal attire, the minibus heading back to Eastleigh was ready for departure. With a five hour drive back down to the South Coast looming over them, these guys decided to hit the road. The rest of us, with not quite so far to travel, decided to hang back for a couple of quick drinks.
John had disappeared with Joe Fitzpatrick and persons unknown, for some high level meetings which I am sure will benefit us all some time in the future J.
As we were leaving, a lady approached Tim, Jo and myself and started asking questions about Drum Corps - she had watched are performance and was very interested. She explained to us, that she had lived in the states for a while and the children of some friends she had out there were in High School marching bands and went on to play with ATM, one of the US’s top college marching bands.
We spoke with her for about 10 minutes as she told us about her little boy of about 6 who had been watching too. She said that it was the highlight of his day and that he loved every minute of our performance. She enquired as to whether there was a local corps to her and we gave her both DCUK and BYBA web address so that she could check them out for herself.
That for me was one of the best parts of the weekend, because even if that's just one new member to the activity, with plenty of years ahead of him, then we have been a success!
5:15pm Finally on the motorway, I am tired and ready for a McDonalds, a nice hot bath, and my super king sized bed!!!!
To sum up
It was an honour to share a brilliant weekend with a great bunch of people. Thanks to everybody from the Avengers for allowing us to use your facilities, especially the Sports Hall which was ace! Thanks to Bruce Parry and everybody at the Royal Northern College of Music for kindly inviting us to perform at a wonderful event, thanks to Cheshire Cadets and Concord for supporting us at the events and the 2 members who “joined us on stage” and finally thanks to Joe, Nigel and John for making this thing happen, we can’t wait to show it to a truly DC/WG audience.
Katy Gardiner
