Harlow Playhouse Thurs Feb 25th

After the nerve - mangling fartitudiness of yesterday, a bit of calm and normality is definitely called for today, and thanks be to Sooty, tonight's show is in Harlow, so we will be back in business. You only have to walk in and have a quick look around to know that this is a Real Theatre. There are no excuses today....we've got everything we need and we know we've almost sold out, so if we can't deliver a top - notch show tonight then the Scales of Justice will weigh against us and we really SHOULD be taken out and beaten over the head with a wet mackerel ( see what we did there ? Scales ? Mackerel ? Y'know, fish and all that......never mind).This is one of those shows that just goes together like a dream and we even have time to experiment a bit with some lighting and audio-visual ideas. This is doubly useful because we've got another person on board today, lighting dude Damian, who will be taking over for a while while Rodders scoots off to Germany to hook up with Runrig on a short tour of Europe. In the bad old days, when we had to use the theatre's lighting folks as we couldn't afford to have our own lighting person and lighting " specials ", this wouldn't have been an issue, but the difference having a dedicated lighting engineer makes is immense. We've always put on a good show, but now we're putting on a good SHOW, and the impact it's having on our audiences can't be underestimated, especially on those seing us for the first time. The core production values are as good as anything you'll see on tour right now and even the effects with a whiff of gorgonzola about them, such as the Golden Box of Wonderment, are winning people over largely because of that very " cheese " factor and also because of the comedy element the band have brought to things. There's only one bit that we're not totally convinced about, and that's the " flowers gag " at the end of Jamie's solo stint on Handbags & Gladrags. It's a good idea in principle but the props themselves aren't great and for me it devalues Jamie's performance somehow. We need to have a bit of a chat about this one, I think. Another thing we need to have a look at is Steve's onstage sound monitoring. Without wandering TOO far off the beaten track of Plain English and into the Forest of Technical Gobbledegook, each band member has a monitor speaker, or " wedge ", through which they get their own mix of sound in order to be able to hear what they and everyone else is playing onstage. Pug is the person in charge of sorting this out, a kind of Monitors Monitor, if you will, and he sits behind his mixer in the shadows of stage left, watching over his charges like....well, like a monitor engineer. The monitor engineer on any tour has a bit of a thankless task, to be honest; if he does his job perfectly and everyone can hear themselves just fine, no-one mentions it, but if he gets it arse - upwards for any reason, or if a band has a bad night because they're hung over, tired, or just plumb talentless, it's always the monitor guy's fault. Fortunately Pug has the demeanour of Magic Roundabout's Dylan, and almost defines the phrase " chilled out ", but even he's getting a tad tense about things at the minute. One of the problems with sorting monitors for Steve is that he's a LOUD player, so to get the sound levels he needs we've been using bigger monitor speakers than the other guys have. The one he's currently got is the Canary Wharf of monitors, a skyscraper of sound that looms up on his left like some great monolith. It's big and it's powerful but it's not ideal; it may deliver several hundred decibels of sound right into his lughole but it's also pointing past him and across the stage, so it throws a great swathe of noise to stage right like some sonic death ray, stunning all in it's path. I'd always thought Phil took the circuitous route to his microphone that he does to avoid treading on cables or something; turns out he's dancing around using Den as some kind of human shield against the aural assault ! Anyhoo...on the big, open stage at Harlow the sound swirls around a bit and tends to go upwards as well as outwards, so within a couple of numbers it's clear Steve's struggling to hear what he needs, and Pug's manfully twiddling knobs and pushing faders to try and put things right. They're not happy. From a gig point of view, though, tonight's going great, juat as we'd hoped it would....this is very much a partisan crowd and we see a lot of faces that have been at gigs earlier in the tour, so unless the band suddenly take leave of their senses and opt to perform their long - lost freeform jazz opus " My Teacup's Got Bits In It Where The Varnish Fell Off ", then tonight is done and dusted. They stick to the normal set, of course, and as the cliche goes, duly rock the house. Den's got his family with him tonight and as I look at them I wonder what it must be like to see your Dad, husband, brother or boyfriend up there onstage at the centre of all this adulation. Of course, they've seen him play many times before, but there's definitely a sense of this tour being different, of being a turning point, and I wonder again if in years to come his kids will say they were there on the tour when it all really took off for Dad. In fact I'd love it if ALL our children could say that, to be honest...we've been in this business a long time and given it everything we've got, so it would be fantastic for it to finally give us something back. Backstage afterwards all is happy happy joy joy, but as we break down the gear we can see Pug's not feeling the same vibe. He just wants to do the best job and is frustrated that he's still having problems with Steve's situation. These are the kind of issues that can grow into major problems on a tour, so Arthur and I make a mental note to talk to the guys and see what can be done. Arthur has also come up with a potential Plan B which we can try at the next show, so we hope we can head this issue off at the pass. Tonight, though, Harlow belongs to us. OK, so it might not have the same ring to it as " Hollywood " but you've got to start SOMEWHERE.......