So, after the raffle and the competition prizes had been awarded, the band took the stage. There was a projector next to the stage, showing game footage and some very funny animations. It started off with Guess what? It’s us again! and showed Pac-Man making his way to Frome, picking up a 40,000 bonus point beer along the way. Various games (not related to the music) were also played, and at one point the full-screen caption told us to stop laughing, they were only asked to provide game footage and weren’t very good at the games…

The set lasted about forty-five minutes and included the following tracks, which will be familiar to SID’80S fans:

Spellbound (Rob Hubbard)
Paperboy featuring Arcade Classics (Mark Cooksey/Rob Hubbard)
Deflektor (Ben Daglish)
Way of the Exploding Fist featuring International Karate (Neil Brennan/Rob Hubbard)
Rasputin (traditional, arranged Rob Hubbard)

Spellbound was excellent, and Paperboy managed to be funky even though it was acoustic. Those in the audience who had seen previous performances were alarmed to discover there were to be no Day Oh’s in the Deflektor rendition, which Ben described as more blissed-out than ever before. Way of the Exploding Fist took on a South American/Incantation feel with Ben on the penny whistle. And Rasputin was as good as ever, despite the lack of room onstage for Mark to move around.

Ben kept up the jokes throughout, asking the band What’s next, shabbies? and pointing out it was strange performing with a microphone aimed below his belt… He called the audience geeks for watching the projector footage, saying it was the first time he’d had an audience whose heads were all at 30 degrees to the stage. Jon suggested they try playing in a heavy metal style, which led to a rather cruel comment from Ben. Dressed like that, with a ponytail, playing a Spanish acoustic guitar, no matter how hard you play it, you are never going to look like a rock god! Chris was tapping his foot so much to keep the rhythm he got a cramp in his leg. Afterwards Jon admitted it was hard to hear through the monitors on stage, making it difficult to get any dynamics into his playing, but he’d really enjoyed performing with the band again.

When the band left the stage, the thoughts of the audience turned back to the bar and the games machines. However, the evening was not quite over yet… Mark Rayson put some techno music on the PA, and then suddenly, Jon, Mark and Ben returned to the stage and started jamming along! It was great to see the musicians enjoying themselves, taking the chance to improvise. There was also a constant supply of drinks from the bar to keep them performing.

When the techno was switched off, the jam continued for nearly an hour in total. As well as jamming, they did play a few proper tracks. One was Drag Racer, commonly known in the UK as the BBC’s snooker theme. Later in the set Electronic Arts coder Mark Stacey joined them on the drum.

An audience suggestion prompted them to try Monty on the Run, which the band had never played together, but which turned out rather well. Ben made a comment about it being written by Jean-Michel Jarre, which led the band to play Oxygene 4. The constant background sound of the weekend had been Magical Sound Shower from the Xbox game Outrun 2, so the band improvised a version of that as well. (Ben made another joke about calling it Golden Sound Shower!)

The evening was rounded off by a surprise presentation from Jeff Minter of Llamasoft, a world exclusive for Retrovision. It’s not giving much away to say that it is his latest light-synth (VLM5), which left me wondering how AMAZING a combination of live music from a band like SID’80S and a light-synth performance from Jeff would look…

Plans are already under way for a larger stage for Retrovision 6 in 2006, so keep an eye on www.retrovision.org.uk for more information.