Live Music and Free Beer

The night after Corp, we were all pretty tired, but still wanted to do something. Joey mentioned how some friends of his from class were in a band, and were playing at Bar One. Thinking that this would be fun (and at the very least, a chance to meet some more English people to reinforce which country we were actually in), a bunch of us agreed to go. Just before 9, we (being Joey, Patrick, Fiona, Elizabeth, Lise, Shannon, Elizabeth O, Zac, Karsten, Stephi and myself) headed over. Thinking that the band started at 9, we were worried that we would be late and miss them play - but when we got there, and met Tom and Aaron from the band, they told us that they were actually performing as a part of a Battle of the Bands competition, but they wouldn't be playing until around 11. So then we had a few hours to kill!

We managed to find a booth (strangely enough, the same one we'd found at Super Bowl. I now think of this as "our booth", even though odds are we won't get to sit there again!), and all got a couple of drinks and sat chatting for a while. After about 20 minutes, this middle-aged guy comes up to us and wants to know if he can have a chat to us about our drinking habits. We were all a bit sceptical at first, but then he mentioned that he would "give us a couple of quid", so we decided to take the risk of coming across as young alcoholics.

The guy comes back with a voice recorder, and tells us that he's doing some independent market research on people's drinking. He asks us questions like, what makes a beer and cider night different from a spirits night? Do we mix our spirits, or take them neat? Why do we pick any particular cider or beer? Do we pay attention to the specials boards? Does the brand advertising behind the bar have any part in what we end up buying? Because we're all poor international students, I don't know whether he was happy or not to find out that a lot of our drinking habits are based around price... I mean, I enjoy more expensive brands occasionally, but usually I'll just ask for the house bourbon (or [insert spirit here]), and I know of several people here who ask at the bar what the cheepest beer is and go for that. However, I do think we gave him something to work with, because he thanked us, and as he was leaving, pulled out forty pounds from his wallet. Forty pounds!! That's about $65-70 Australian. And he just left it for us. It was amazing.

Joey and Zac were elected to be the Spenders of the Money, and came back with three huge pitchers of beer for us to share. They were enormous (and really heavy), so Fiona, Elizabeth and I immediately took the opportunity to take photos with them (which annoyed Zac no end, who just wanted to drink the stuff). It was very exciting. I had a pint of it before I remembered that I don't really like beer, so I gifted the rest of mine to Karsten (who accused me of trying to get him drunk. It wasn't my intention, but if it happened, I would be entertained, so I couldn't really deny that!). It was around this time as well that Stephi came back with some hot chips, which smelled so good that the rest of us couldn't stop thinking about them for the rest of the evening.

Finally, 11pm rolled around and we got up to hear Joey's friends play. Their band is called 'Kettle o' Fish', and they're actually really good. They're a bit folky, and have a double bass, acoustic guitar, keyboard, vocals and a tambourine, and were fun and easy to listen to. I would definitely go and see them again. After that, we went back and indulged in chips and onion rings - which were amazing - and chatted to Tom and Aaron from the band while we waited to be able to vote for them. We did that, then somehow managed to lose Elizabeth and then find her again before heading home at about 1am. I'm still not sure how Kettle o' Fish ended up going in the competition, but I hope they did well!