Witness a secret gig of a band I am a fan of

To attend a secret gig is a rare delight and is usually just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I have heard stories of huge acts taking on a small venue just to practice the set before they embark on a tour of the arenas. I have heard of REM playing a show to 250 people in London under an assumed name in the past. My experience wasn’t of a band on this scale but I had avidly followed them for a couple of years and had all of their albums. The band in question were Wolfsbane, they had just released the album “All hell’s breaking loose at little Kathy Wilsons’s place”. The Title track is homage to the Sci-Fi movie “Invaders from Mars”. So, when I arrived at my usual drinking hole one Saturday evening and saw posters advertising a band called “The Wilsons” using the tag line “All hell’s breaking loose at the cock Inn” I had my suspicions that the Tamworth Terrors were coming to “Paint the town red” so on the day of the gig I went to check it out. For those that have never been, “The Cock” was just a pub, of a weekend the back room was used for Rock Nights and could probably cram in about 200 people. This particular night there was no cramming, the room had about 50 -60 people milling about but that didn’t stop the band from delivering an epic performance.
The stage was only about 6 inches high so we were watching a band that is used to being on an actual stage rather than just slightly elevated but this gave them the chance to fully utilise the floor area and to actually join the people on the dance floor. Above the stage area was a reinforced iron girder, this has been fitted with a few clamps and the vocalist, Blaze, would use these to perform Chin ups during the instrumental parts of some of the songs. He was always a very active front man and even the restrictive stage would not prevent the normal energetic performance. Although the turn out for this evening show was poor I still class this “Secret” gig as one of my favourite performances by this powerhouse of a band as it gave me the chance to see them up close and personal. Shortly after the show Wolfsbane split up as Blaze went on the replace Bruce Dickinson as the vocalist for Iron maiden. They have recently reformed and have performed at a few festivals around the Midlands; I hope to catch them live again one day soon.