Sunday Drivers - Retreat Hotel

January is the Perico's birthday month. Not only do we all celebarte our birthdays in January but Perico itself had it's its first ever gig on january 26th 2005. So the "Sunday Drivers" gig at the Retreat, our first ever gig at our own local, was a birthday celebration of sorts.
We got together with Mark Sinton and the Prefabs (again), who opened up at about 7pm, we played the middle set (about 8.30-9.30) and Thrill City Radio absolutelky rocked out from 10 to 11 pm. When TCR played there was no-one left anywhere else in the pub except those watching the band, so good was their set.
Overall we had 74 payers, with probably another 20-30 people hanging around the pub and listening/watching anyway, so we were pretty happy with that. The Retreat has an awesome PA and if we sounded only half as good a s the Prefabs or TCR I would have been happy.

Sean's Wedding

We headed up to Woodend Saturday morning to play at the wedding of my friend and work mate, Sean Payne. While I attended the ceremony, the rest of the boys set up the PA etc upstairs in the Victoria Hotel.

Weddings aren't our usual thing, and even though Sean wanted "Pure Perico", we thought we'd better get some covers together to better suit the expectations of all the guests. In the end we mixed about 30% original material with old faves from Paul Kelly to the Pogues, but, as is always the case at weddings, we went down an absolute treat, even when playing our original stuff.

Afterwards, we played accoustic guitars and snare drum/brushes way into the early hours of the morning back in the B & B.

Criterion Hotel - Yarrawonga

This was our first ever gig out of Melbourne and was set up primarily so we could have a holiday up on the Murray River over new year and combine it with a gig in Yarrawonga where we had a friend's house to stay at. The night before we set everything up for a party and played everything we had plus more until after midnight. With us was Sean Payne, whose wedding we're playing at on january 13th, so it was a good time to practice some of the "wedding material" and to get Sean up to play some songs with us.

It was a beautiful, warm and calm night and we played 4 sets between 7:15pm and 10:30pm. Though it was only our frineds there early on, the beer garden had swelled to around 30 or so people by 9:30 or so. Sean played 5 songs, of which we played along with 3 of those (all covers). The locals were all screaming for covers and they really seemed to get into Sean's set, so we're thankful he came along.

Still, the overall response was positive and I'm sure that the pub will have us back again.

Video footage from party at Yarrawonga