Is it that time already ???

You know how people say those annoying things like " My, hasn't he grown ? " when meeting a child they've not seen for, like, twenty years ? Or how about " I don't know where the year has gone " The obvious answer, of course, is " Into the, dark, voracious maw of The Past, thus taking you another inexorable year closer to your eternal oblivion " but as the question is normally asked by an elderly friend or relative it's probably not too diplomatic to use this particular riposte. Any road, it's only four weeks until the start of the next tour now, and it really DOES seem like just last week that I chasing theatres trying to get payment from the last tour...oh, hang on...it WAS just last week... Since the last tour we've got a new government ( not that I've noticed any difference ), had a World Cup ( we were in it, apparently...must have missed that bit ) seen Katie Price get married again ( I give it a year, tops ) and groaned as Andy Murray failed to reach the final of Wimbledon ( again ), so what could possibly cheer the country up more than a new Bootleg Sixties tour ?? OK, OK, you don't have to answer that...Things have been pretty good for The Overtures since the last tour, as it happens.....you may recall from the last blogs that the band were asked to do a big German TV show, and it went brilliantly. As a result of that success they got invited to do another German TV show, this time in Majorca, where amongst other things they backed Lionel Richie ( he says Hello, by the way ). We're now talking about a German theatre tour next year, as well as following up interest from Australia and America, so it's all going in the right direction. This little tour is a bit of an odd one for us, actually. The Overtures have played the Beatles Festival in Liverpool every August Bank Holiday weekend for about a grillion years now, and have done pretty much every slot on every stage at some point. This year, though, the Festival Grand Fromage, Billy Heckle, has invited the lads to bring the Bootleg Sixties show to Liverpool Philharmonic and headline the opening night ( that's Friday August 27th for those of you who still haven't bought their tickets ). This is a big honour for us, and we're really looking forward to it. We thought it'd be a good plan to do a warm-up show or two on the way up there, so we mentioned this to our gigmeisters Alan and Nick, and next thing we know we're got a whole little tour built around the date...result ! Apart from Liverpool it'll be the first time we'll have played all the other places, so although there isn't quite the same " waking up sweating in the middle of the night going Ohmygodohmygodohmygod " level of pressure that we had on the LAST tour, we've still got to deliver if we want the project to keep building. Because the budgets are smaller we won't be taking out some of the toys we used on the last dates, plus some of the familiar crew faces will be missing or flitting in and out of the tour, and although the show will essentially be the same there are a LOT of other variations. We've been very calm about all this, and have just reassured ourselves that " It'll be fine ", with the inevitable result that the tour has now earned itself that particular soubriquet. The
" It'll Be Fine Tour 2010 " it is, then....As we're going to be touring again I thought it'd be nice to dust off the laptop, crank up the brain, and do another, smaller blog for this tour; a "blogette", if you will. I also need to tell you about something else that happened with the last blogs which fair made me squeak with joy. At the end of the tour I went off on a wee holiday, and when I cam back our megadrummer Steve and his lovely wife Jill had got all the blogs together, along with some of Jill's photos, and had them published in a Real, Actual, Book, with pages and a cover and everything. You know...like a book. A real one. As in not a pamphlet or leaflet. As in not a load of sheets of A4 stapled together. As in a Real Book. Like the things you buy in shops and read. Now, had they done just the one as a kind of keepsake, my little tail feathers would still have quivered with love and gratitude, but it gets even better.....THERE IS MORE THAN ONE COPY OF THE BOOK !!!! Oh yes, thanks to Jill and Steve and the nice people at Blurb.com your humble scribe can now call himself a Published Author ! Now, I appreciate that Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stephen King are unlikely to be looking nervously over their shoulders at this point, nor have WH Smith's or Waterstone's been inundating me with pleading phone calls, but should you wish to have all of the cyber-ramblings from the last tour encapsulated in Real Actual Book form for ALL ETERNITY so you can then pass it on to your grandchildren as an invaluable family heirloom etc etc etc, then you can actually buy one of these bad boys by using the following link : http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/860732/13ad3acdb65fcea9947a27b94f85fc44
Snappy, huh ? And who knows...by the time we finish NEXT year's tour we might have moved on from Real Actual Books to " Tourblogs - The Musical " or at the very least a " Talking Book " CD. Hang on....that's actually not a bad idea....Where's my agent's phone number.....??