The Mindy Mash

It was a long drive south, through pouring rain and flooded roads, to the subtropical paradise that is Fareham. There, in the hall of a rather quaint little school, the Mindy Mash took place. A champagne reception, three-course dinner, auction of promises/donations, and then dancing to two of mid-Hampshire finest bands, the Chalk Flowers and the TLOGs.
















Here's the stage just before we started setting up - you can see the fairy castle and toadstool that we did our best to cover up. The castle had to stay. You can also see Mindy looking astonishingly calm and collected, bearing in mind she'd had about eight minutes sleep in the previous 48 hours.

Tod, John and Charlie started at about mid-day to get the PA/instruments set up. Here we see John doing everyone's favourite pre-gig routine: "one, two....one, two..."

By early afternoon, the Chalk Flowers had arrived, and had a bit of a sound check. Very nice they sounded, too. Here we see them in action; John claimed that it was absolutely essential that he spend so much time on his knees alongside the vocalists - something to do with accoustic research, apparently.

A very jolly evening was had by all. The dinner went well, the auction raised thousands, and both the Chalk Flowers and the TLOGS seemed to be happy with their respective performances - one or two sound issues weren't enough to dampen the evening. We kept smiling, which was good, because the photographer from The Field was busy snapping away for a feature on sad middle-agers in rock bands.for a future issue.

Special thanks and praise to Mindy, the brains behind it, and to Tod for the huge amount of hard work and knob-twiddling over a loooooong day...........