Cranmog - Morgan Sports Car Club

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The CranMog Plus 5 Page

Party at Le Moulin
This year, (2007) David and Karen Redfern are both half a century old, David first (cradle snatcher), and then Karen, so of course they organised a party, and what a party it was. The venue was their place in France, Le Moulin which is an old water mill originally used to generate electricity for the locals, but now its a second home for the Redferns and on this occasion, a party venue for us. +5 of course were asked to play, well it was a three line whip really, but who'd want to miss the opportunity of being well fed, watered and entertained all weekend in the middle of France. David and Karen had invited family and friends, both French and English and so over 130 people were there. The weather was fantastic and to look after the band David and his strong men had a purpose built stage erected and fitted out in a very professional manner, curtains, power, lights and all the trimmings. +5 played three 1 hr sets during the day and evening, with Caitlin and Leanne doing celebrity spots for us, plus Jackie and Helen provided vocal backing where needed. The rest of the time was spent drinking and eating, although the band couldn't do too much drinking until after we'd finished playing, otherwise there would have been some very funny noises comming from the stage.
Mouseover to Pause

The band all stayed together at an Auberge nearby and so next day, Sunday, was spend recuperating and sight seeing around the area. It was a long drive there and back so thank heavens we didn't go in the Morgan and try to fit the children and all my bass gear in as well. Malcolm and Avril were made of sterner stuff though and they took their recently procured +8, to the gig and went on holiday in it immediately afterwards. Gooders and Jackie arrived on their Harley and then went off to the south coast on Sunday - nice little round trip.

I think we can say we are truly CranMog +5 International now, so perhaps we will get another gig abroad.

Birthday Party 2007

As you all know, Plus 5 play a short session at the Birthday party at The Dolphin every January. Its a tight schedule on the night as we have to fit in a silver service dinner, Plus 5, Crackers and or Knackers, Disco Dancing, Annual Awards, Raffle and of course we have to catch up on aquaintances we havn't seen for 12 months and try to squeese in a pint or two.

Each year Plus 5 play a song in keeping with the theme and as this year's (2007) theme was "In the Pink" we decided to play Lily The Pink by the Scaffold, well can you think of a more appropriate song relating to Pink? Karen changed the lyrics somewhat, so Click Here to see our version of the song. In previous years we have played Red Red Wine for "A Touch of Red" in 2005, Pearl's a Singer for our 25^th anniversary in 2003, and so on.

Top gig at Mog 2006

Mog 2006 was one of the highly successsful Mog events we have from time to time. In my opinion, that was mainly down to the proximity of Mallory Park where the main event was held, but all the indoor festivities and a lot of accommodation were at The Hinkley Hall Hotel, and that is where CranMog +5 played after dinner on the Saturday Night, a posh event for us, top gig.

We were playing for the first hour, immediately after coffee, or perhaps even a little bit before, eager beavers that we are. I must say how delighted we are as a band to have people up dancing from the first number on and after only two or three songs the floor was crowded for the rest of our set. CranMog members give us great support like that and we are eternally gratefull, but of course the event was MSCC not just CranMog and so most of the people dancing were from other centres, so thank you all for your support.

Live at Reydon 2003

In 2003, +5 performed live at Reydon for the first time. The band was now established as The CrabMog +plus 5 and Jim Barham was a permanent memeber blowing his own trumpet and what a difference this makes on those funky numbers.

Malcolm has rushed out and bought himself a new Fender amp plus two new guitars, a Fender Stratocaster and an Epiphone Les Paul and these compliment Gary's Fender Stratocaster and his Gibson ES-335. Laura has a new set of drums that sound ten times better, Karen has a new microphone and I've bought myself an electric upright bass (EUB), yes that's the funny looking instrument you see me with here.

We chose a repertoire of sixteen numbers and played for about seventy five minutes. The only trouble we had was that dinner was very late and us musicians had to stay relatively sober otherwise there would have been all sorts of horrible noises coming out of us (and the instruments).

We are still getting volunteers to join in as part of the plus bit so who knows, we may get a backing girls choir next time you see us which will probably be our Diamond Birthday party.

In the meantime we're playing a jam session for Gary's birthday party but there's a bit of a gap from February to October when we should be keeping in practice with one or two more gigs.

"The Party In The Pavillion" 2005

Of course we do a few other gigs from time to time, not just CranMog raveups. Here is a picture of us playing at The Party In The Pavilion in Bishop's Stortford which was a charity fund raising event for two senior schools in the town. There were two performing stages and I believe about 23 bands in all - what a hectic day for the organisers.

Plus 5 at the party In The Pavillion at Bishop's Stortford in 2005

The forming of CranMog Plus 5, aka +5

This is the true story of the forming of CranMog Plus 5, not the Pearls not the Strummers, nor Andrew's band, not The Slappers, and definitly not The Plus Fives or 5s, just a democratically run Cranmog band doing it for fun. The whole thing really started 10 or 12 years ago when Sharpe, Gooders & I were having a bachelor's pint at some pub or other and the conversation steered around to music, John suggested that we had enough talent in Cranmog to form a band, so there you are, credit where credit's due, its all John Sharp's fault.
It took some years and just a few more pints to actually get started. In fact it was November 2002 at the Harbour Inn, Southwold that things took off. I was sat next to Colin Fergusson chatting about the idea when he said, why not ask Laura and Gary, they live for music; well no sooner said than done, I spoke to Laura and Gary and they were keen, not only that they have space in their house for rehearsals and they have lots of equipment such as a PA. So far so good. The next thing was who to press gang into the band; well having heard Karen Redfern sing unaccompanied a few times I knew she was the one for us and when I asked if she'd be interested she gave a casual "yeah sure", as if she gets invitations to play with famous bands every week and carried on eating Caitlin's chips, motherhood ain't wot it used to be.
Colin had serious doubts about making it down from Leicestershire for band practices so I approached Malcolm MacArthur to see if he was interested, yes he had a guitar or two and yes he was interested and Gary could lend him an amplifier - great. That's as far as we got at Reydon. On this basis I went out and bought a bass guitar and a bass amplifier etc, and started to learn bass then promptly joined another local band to justify the outlay.

Malcolm sings Rock'n Roll

I then proceeded to nag everybody by email to get them to commit and it worked, we had our first rehearsal a month or so later and vowed to do a few songs for the Pearl Birthday party, which was now only two short months away. But we still had no drummer! We considered borrowing a drummer from Laura and Gary's blues band but he wasn't a Cranmogger and anyway Laura and Gary's daughter had a drum kit so we sat Laura on it, said "hit those round things with these long sticks" and she learned to play from scratch just for us - fantastic. Now Laura has taken some drumming lessons and can play very well, she keeps time and makes the right sounds and keeps the band together nicely, and she sings vocal backing at the same time. Its interesting (well it is to me) that Gary, Malcolm and I had all played in bands in our youth, they called them groups in those days, and had all taken a few years off, 30 in my case, to bring up a family. Now we are back playing again and its great fun. I've since learned that Malcolm Fountain turned down playing bass for The Hollies in his youth and Paul Bloomfield played drums in a band and did The Cavern in Liverpool!!

The last but most important thing we needed was a name. Well, the precedence was set by Jane Goodman with the Cranmog Crackers and the Cranmog Knackers: we thought of a few ideas such as Cranmog Smackers and so on but it was Karen who suggested Slappers and well, it did seem to have that certain je ne cest quoi, so we started out as The Slappers. It didn't last long, the girls decided Slappers was sexist or something and we eventually agreed on Plus 5.

As you know the Pearl Birthday party at the Dolphin went very well and our debut was enthusiastically applauded by Cranmog, what a wonderful audience you all are. We only sang seven songs, we could have done more but the consensus of opinion was that seven would be more than enough.

So there we have it, the CranMog Plus 5 to date, but don't think it stops there. We started having practices with Jim Barham, he's blowing his trumpet for us now and fits in very well indeed but of course we didn't change the name to Plus 6 as we thought that was what the new Roadster would be called. Jim & Vanessaa were new members then who had joined in 2001 so they have not appeared on the membership list yet. They had a chocolate brown 4/4 four seater with cream bonnet and trim. Actually Jim is an accomplished musician, he plays trumpet, cornet, classical guitar, banjo and repairs and tunes pianos for a living. Graham Evans didn't escape my attention either, but unfortunately he turned us down! so no trombone from him. If anybody else can play a brass instrument, including blues harp, please let me know, there is room in the brass section for you.