Play

I don’t know how long Play (aka PlugnPlay studios) have been around – their main role seems to be as a rehearsal studio – but it looks as though they have begun branching out recently. According to their website they are running Weekend Warrior sessions for ‘lapsed musicians’, and now they have started this initiative of a tribute/covers band evening on the first Friday of the month.

Play are based in Milford Road (actually in one of the precincts branching off it) – there is a map on their website, which is probably essential unless you are already familiar with that maze of streets behind Caversham Road. Note that the map is on their home page, not the ‘Venue Info’ page, which confused me. Burying further into their somewhat confusing website (probably ’cause I’m getting old and easily confused), it seems they also have an established Saturday evening concert slot featuring local bands, titled Club Velocity.

The publicity said the evening was 7:30 ’til midnight; I turned up at 8:20 to hear an excellent rendition of Pink Floyd’s Money, which turned out to be part of the sound check. At 9pm the support band came on, Floydian Doors, playing a mix of Pink Floyd and Doors songs. Their music was extremely good, although – for most of the set – not that exciting. Pink Floyd, of course, are not particularly noted for their high-energy heavy-rockin’ style, and Doors music tends to the poetry-centric, so maybe that’s not so surprising, but still …

Near the end of their set they did The Great Gig In The Sky – the ‘screamy’ bit from Dark Sde of the Moon. Their female singer, who had been little used up to then, started a bit tentatively then gained confidence; you could see her presence growing along with her voice. For the remaining two songs, whenever she sang the band suddenly found a focus and a centre, and the music started to have passion and feeling. It was a pity it was so late in the set, really.

It took a while to break down and set up for the headliners: the size of the speakers they brought had me wondering whether I’d be blasted through the back wall of the small venue, but actually the volume was fairly restrained. Then the band opened with Black Dog – a good song for warming everyone up and getting a bit of ‘call and response’ going with the audience.

The essential question about a Led Zep tribute band is ‘which Led Zep are they paying tribute to’? Boot Led Zeppelin are very much an early-seventies, fourth-album-era, version. It’s not just that they played more songs from that album, but the vocal style was very much from then – without the smoothly soaring flight of the first two albums – as were the mannerisms and idiosyncracies. I guess that’s the nature of a ‘tribute band’.

The band really began to warm up through the Jake Holmes/Yardbirds/Led Zeppelin I monster Dazed & Confused, complete with bowed guitar – of course – and followed up with the big classics from II, III, IV and Physical Graffiti. Inevitably, but entertainingly, we had the double-neck guitar for Stairway to Heaven, the theremin on (I think) Whole Lotta Love, and the Middle-Eastern-sounding chord progressions on Kashmir.

It was all great fun, finishing with Rock and Roll some time after midnight. It was an enjoyable evening’s music, and I look forward to the Deep Purple tribute, Purple Project, next month.

King’s Meadow Swimming Baths Campaign have organised THE SAVE THE SWIMMING POOL CHARITY BALL.

The Ball will start at 7.00pm, will feature a Three Course Dinner and a dance to the popular Reading band Tequila Mockingbird.

Tickets £45.00 Black Tie

For more information or to book tickets, please email Kay Matthews or phone on 07899992651.

For more information on The Kings Meadow Swimmings Bath Campaign click here.

Celebrate the final days of summer with the sweet summer sounds of the Smith Spranger Sessions.  Their subtly slapdash music offers the perfect antidote to bland, personality free and highly produced music that pervades our daily lives.

With an emphasis on the recreational rather than rehearsal, the band aims to enjoy themselves and have some fun.  This quickly rubs off on the audience as they join in on well loved songs spanning the decades; the Stones and Lynrd Skynrd for the rockers; the Undertones and The Clash for the new wavers; Radiohead, Kaiser Chiefs, Kinds of Leon, Arctic Monkeys for the ‘kids’. 

The Gateway pub in Greyfriars Road in central Reading offers a good pint and classic hospitality.  For seasoned Reading drinkers, its the former Scruffy Murphys.   Again, its a refreshing change from the high street chain bar.

So if you like your music with energy and guts (you should see the belly on the Caversham bass player!) you will enjoy a night with The Smith Spranger Sessions. 

As the summer draws to a close and with the kids back at school, it seems like a good time for a night out on the pop.  So enjoy music the way it should be -  live, loud and with a pint jiggling away in your hand.

There’s no admission, so see you at the front.

They have identified that there’s little for under 18′s in the area to do after school hours. Currently a lot of local kids ranging in age from 10 early 20s hang around the local shops and fields with nothing to entertain them or no where they can go without being moved on by the local PSCO or shop owners. They are gathering a petition from the local residents in Caversham and parents of the kids.

They are concerned that the generation gap is growing bigger with neither generation understanding the other. They believe that people older than age 30 are scared of the kids and the kids don’t understand they are doing anything wrong in hanging out as there is nowhere else to go. Also there is a problem in that the kids have talents, whether in music or art or just supporting each other but have no opportunity to develop or show these talents. If they could get a venue, their plan would be to arrange themed nights, such as a night where kids can learn form average people about life after school (e.g. college work, jobs, business, relationships, managing their finances etc.) things that you aren’t taught at school but need to learn.

They want to help reduce negative situation with local kids, such as teenage pregnancies and kids getting in trouble with the police. They have said there is a local boy aged 14 with a retraining tag, which is exactly what they want to avoid. They want parents to be able to come and talk to the kids. They have a vision of no social workers, no counsellors, just kids expressing themselves, having open discussions about things in life such as sex, drugs and relationships. Older people such Rebecca and Grace, will be there to offer advice from their own experiences as they think the younger kids will be able to connect with them better than older adults. They think this is a problem that has been going on for generations and want to make people aware of what they are doing and any advice or ideas people want to suggest would be greatly appreciated. They think that the kids of today need a chance to prove they are smart and talented people, a chance to help them better their situation and help them achieve the best they can.

If anyone can help in anyway possible, please in the first instance email Rebecca: Beckylouise17@hotmail.com.

We at Caversham.Info, your local Caversham website supports the idea and will update you on their progress.

Their food menu is not over-ambitious, but looks reasonable: Thai curry, chilli, child-friendly standards like bangers and mash or scampi and chips, lots of pizzas, and various snacks. I think there’s something there for the whole of my family – who tend to like different things, which can be a problem – so I guess we’ll need to pop over to try them out in the next few days.

If you live in that part of Caversham/Emmer Green, why not pop over yourself and give them a go.

Registration opens in mid-July but please contact henleyandmarlowstride@live.co.uk for further information or to be put on the mailing list for the event.

Registration will be £6 per adult in advance, or £10 on the day, children under 16 can walk for £3. The route is approximately 7 miles.

The Public Vote is in progress and closes July 4th after which the winner will be decided.

Please may I ask my Caversham friends, families and associates to offer their support by voting for us?
If you care to do so, you can by visiting the Barclays Website -  For better information on our first product Ecoflap – which provides a gateway for other energy efficient products please look on our website http://www.ecoflap.co.uk.
We launched Ecoflap, a new concept in letter box design and the first radical change since the Penny Post – on the market at the Ecobuild Exhibition 2009. Ecoflap is an interior draught reducing letter plate. We’ve had an encouraging first yearso please help us progress onto our next steps at a quicker pace to benefit the community and showing support for British Invention.
Tomorrow there will be 10 more days to get your vote in before closure on July 4th. Why not vote today? Up until now we have been totally self supporting – a Partnership, husband and wife team. Be part of our achievement so far, and ….click! No log-ons, registration is voluntary, no catches – just like our Ecoflap!  I urge you to support a local Reading Inventor Richard!

Vote on http://www.takeonesmallstep.co.uk and click on South West Region. The 3 finalists will show. I then leave it up to you to decide!  Our pages is here: https://www.takeonesmallstep.co.uk/Entry/View/764/Page.

Thank you all.  Anne

If you run a website for a non-profit organisation and would like free website hosting, please contact us at Gator Web Design in Reading Berkshire.

Local organisations recently to benefit are Caversham Baptist Church and 47th Reading Scouts Group.

Get in touch and save your organisation some money!

The festival is on Thursday, Friday and Saturday 15-17^th July 2010. Full details of the performers, opening times, ticket and other useful information can be found here on the official Raaj website.

Caversham.info has kindly been donated 4 pairs of tickets for the Friday evening and you could win these in our free to enter competition. All you have to do is one or more of the following before the completion closes at noon on 8^th July 2010:

1. Follow Caversham.info on twitter;
2. Sign up your email address to our newsletter from the box in the bottom right corner of our homepage;
3. Register to Caversham.info;
4. Submit your business, club, society or other organisation to our free online directory.

Winners will be announced and notified on 9^th July 2010.

Good luck!!!

There is a company ringing people up in the Caversham area. When you reply they tell you, in broken English on a poor line, that they want to help to fix your computer, as they have detected that it has viruses. They first rang me a couple of months ago. Because my job is helping people with computers I let them take me through their spiel – it is very scarey. They tell you all sorts of intimidating stuff about viruses, then get you to go into obscure bits of Windows and tell you that what you see is a result of virus infections. The first time they rang they implied that they had been asked to contact me by Microsoft, which is clearly nonsense: Microsoft just don’t do that sort of thing. After trying to scare me for a while, the initial caller then passed me over to a second person, supposedly because of the seriousness of my infection. This second person, who spoke better English, started heading toward the sales pitch, but they must have spotted that I knew a bit too much about the computer’s internals, because the line suddenly disconnected.

Since then I have been rung twice more by them, each time with a different company name, and I have spoken to several of my Caversham customers who have also been rung and are (understandably) worried. It looks as though they are working their way through the local phone books. This scam has been around for about eighteen months, apparently, in different parts of the world; although I hadn’t come across it locally until recently.

I suppose I ought to qualify this by saying that it is theoretically possible that your Internet Service Provider might contact you, as they do have the tools to detect some types of viruses being sent out by your system. But if they ring you they will clearly say who they are (and you should recognise the name) and they will already know your name. I’ve never actually heard of an ISP doing this, but it is possible. But they wouldn’t ask some unknown support company to do it for them.

Fear sells: there are also pop-ups that might appear when you are online that pretend that you are infected, and I have recently seen scam emails purporting to be from BT (but which actually came from elsewhere) which said the same thing. Apparently the online scams have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for the perpetrators, so it is no wonder others are trying variations on the same approach.

If you are worried about your PC being infected, firstly make sure that you have an up-to-date antivirus program on your PC and go into it to properly check its status. Run a full computer scan to check nothing nasty is there (except cookies, they are not a worry). If you are still worried contact a reputable local computer engineer, there are at least two in the caversham.info directory.