This past Saturday, after a 4-year hiatus, I shared a stage once again with Chris, Stu and Al as The Royal Pains and it was a great time! I thought I’d write a little about how we got here.
The Royal Pains is a band I started back in 2012 via a Craigslist ad. We played all over southern Ontario in bars, music festivals, corporate events, even weddings if the couple were cool enough :). We were a busy band. We could have played multiple times a week if we really wanted to. Then the pandemic hit and all that playing stopped. Bars weren’t open, festivals took the year off.
We tried to play some socially distanced shows. One was played on my driveway…
…another at our drummer’s cottage…
…another was at a friend’s street party…
…another was at the home of Shelly and Dan. They and their group of friends were our biggest supporters! They came out to most of our shows and we played many private events for them. Including what turned out to be one of our last shows as a band.
Fast-forward to 2022. Things were starting to get back to normal. Bars were having live bands again…although there were fewer bars—thanks to the pandemic—and the same number of bands…if not more. I was looking at the prospect of starting back up with a band, but I wasn’t really interested in being as busy as I was with The Pains. I wanted something more part-time and…well…easier.
Just before the pandemic I was playing with a second band called The Week Ends which featured members that lived near me and had a female co-lead singer, which meant we could play different songs, we could duet, and I could take a breather now and then. This appealed to me. So I made the tough call to end it with The Royal Pains. It wasn’t an easy decision. 10 years is a long time to be in a band. The guys understood and we went our separate ways.
Then this past December we (The Royal Pains) started chatting about the past and such. We had all moved on to other projects but, as I said before, 10 years is a long time to be with the same 4 people. We decided to get together for a pre-Christmas dinner. It was a great time of catching up and reminiscing! After our dinner, I dusted off our old Instagram account and posted the following picture:
As you can see by the comments and the number of likes, there was some interest in a Pains reunion. But we continued to insist that a reunion was not imminent.
Then we received the following picture from Dan and Shelly and their friends. We forgot we left our banner at their house when we played that last show for them back in 2020. They not only kept it, they MOVED to a new house and took it with them!
At this point the question was no longer IF there would be a reunion, it was WHEN and WHERE? We got on a group chat with Dan and Shelly to hammer out the details. They were more than happy to host and we set upon an agreed date. So then it came down to Allen Iverson’s favourite thing to do…practice.
We assembled down at Cherry Jam Rehearsal Studios in Etobicoke and got to work shaking off 3 years worth of rust. That first practice went well. Muscle-memory was the catch-phrase of the night as we stumbled through songs we hadn’t played in a few years.
We documented each practice with an ‘us-ie’ and posted to instagram receiving encouragement from friends and supporters. Then after 6 practices, we were as ready as we were gonna be!
The day finally came. What a great setting with a great group of people! We couldn’t have asked for more! Here are some highlights from the day:
It was a great day! We had a LOT of fun and we owe it all to our hosts Shelly and Dan and their friends! Thank you so much for all of your support and for pushing us to make it happen.
Will there be another show? I don’t know, but I will tell you this…I think we left our banner at their place.
What are you thinking?