Worthing Assembly Hall Fri Feb 19th

PAH ! Call that winter ?? I SPIT on your winter !!!! In that uniquely British way most of the snow which made last night's journey home such a nailbiter has totally gone, and though it's cold there's nothing that's going to stop us getting to Worthing now. Or so we thought. We'd reckoned without NCP's largest car park, the Stationary Ring Of Steel, or as it's known to the Highways Agency, the M25. We even tried to pull a clever flanker on it, with Rodders going around in a widdershins direction in the truck and Arthur trying to distract it on the clockwise side. This is no ordinary motorway, though. It saw through our cunning plan in an instant, and threw miles of roadworks in front of one vehicle while stacking up pre- weekend traffic in front of the other. DENIED !! We just have to go with the flow ( or lack ot it, to be more precise ) and we thus get to Worthing an hour late. We're up against it from the word go here. Unlike theatres with their fly roof structures, giving you loads of bars to drop in and hang bits off, or even Bedford with it's it's Incredible Descending Lighting Rig, there are only two lighting trusses here, one at the back and one at the front. The fact that we can get our projectors and moving lights up at all is amazing in itself, but the projectors are so far from the screens that the image is shagged out by the time it gets there and so it's bleached out by the stage lighting. It's a big, cold, austere hall, and not one we have especially fond memories of from our last visit, but the local crew are friendly and welcoming. THey need to be, too, because we're all stressy, snappy tosspots. Building a show like this is pretty sequential work, so if your schedule gets knocked off course things start going all Spanish very quickly. Everyone's trying to get things done at the same time, so Arthur's shouting to Pug about PA things while Rodders is shouting to the house lads about lights, and it's bit like a market with rival stallholders trying to out - yell each other. Nothing can be done onstage until the projectors are set and lined up but we can't afford to hang about and wait for this, so Steve and I start to assemble the instruments and things on the floor. This then causes friction as it's in the way, so you can't win. To relieve the tension and frustration I go outside and murder a passing pedestrian before whaling the tar out of some old rubbish bags with a big piece of wood I found by the stage door. I'm nothing if not totally mature, me.....Back inside the projectors are finally in the air and things can crack on. The band are due for soundcheck at any minute and we haven't even set up the drumkit yet, but we must have just been at that crucial tipping point with the whole thing because twenty minutes later we're plugging in the last cables, setting out the last guitars, toting the last barge and lifting the last bale. Something's missing , though....ah yes...the band. Having opted for the clockwise option round Satan's By-Pass they'd been snarled up for ages, plus Nick's sat-nav seems to have an innate " take them the pretty way " function, so it's about five when they finally tip up. Chris and his wife Sherry had made their own way here much earlier, and so while they were out sampling the delights of Worhing's attractions we'd been wondering how we were going to tell him that tonight there was a good chance that he'd be playing the entire show by himself. When the others finally get there they're straight into it and we're seeing another of the benefits of touring...the band know what they need to do and hear and Arthur and Pug know what THEY need, so soundchecks are getting shorter and more efficient. A more in-depth description of the vile process known as The Soundcheeck will follow in a later post ( bet you can't wait....! ). There are quite a lot of friends and guests here tonight, which is always nice, but the other big news is that we've literally doubled the attendance figure we achieved here last time, and let me tell you, all four audience members really enjoyed the show.....When the band kick off the first set the size and decor of the place really does seem to create an atmosphere vacuum, and the crowd are very much in keeping with Worthing itsef...genteel and polite. We can't get any haze to stay onstage, so the lights look cold and flat, and when we fire in the smoke machine for the Golden Box of Wonderment skit it belches out of the machine before instantly doing a sharp left offstage and suffocating the front three rows. People in the rest of the theatre are going " what's the guitarist doing with that weird box ? "while the people in the fron three rows are going " Where's the stage ?" " Who put the lights out ? " and " OhgodohgodIcan'tbreatheI'mgoingtosueyoubastards". The second half is much more the ticket, however. The "psychedelic " section seems to be the catalyst, and as the band shift up into top gear for the run-in it's a done deal. There's a momentary wobble when it looks like no-one's going to respond to Den's exhortatios to get up and dance for Mony Mony but then the first brave soul stands and everyone else follows. You'll Never Walk Alone is proper terrace anthem time...arms aloft and bricklayer's choruses...and once again the management ask us when they can book us again. This is getting to be a habit, and we're really starting to accept that we've got something special happening here. We head off into the Sussex night bound for our hotel in Dorking ( Do you like Dorking ? I don't know...I've never Dorked....) with spirits high, and even the obligatory daily sting in the tail doesn't faze us. When we reach the hotel we're told that apparently we are meant to request bedding for the second person in each room ahead of our stay, and that they haven't got any left. My suggestion that they put some frssh straw in the stable for us doesn't go down too well with the hotel staff, but the boys are made of stern stuff these days and avert this potential disaster with a bit of good old - fashioned bed-sharing a la Morecambe and Wise. Remember...the band that sleeps together, keeps together.....