Wavendon Stables Sunday Sept 5th

Something of a local gig for many of the crew today. Wavendon is a tiny pimple on the bum of the urban sprawl that makes up Milton Keynes, a city memorably described by comedian Bill Bailey as " Satan's lay-by ", and we've worked at the Stables many times over the years with various productions. The whole shebang was started here ages ago by the late, great jazzer Johnny Dankworth and his wife Cleo Laine, and the original Stables was a stable block attached to their house ( see what they did there ? ) but this purpose - built theatre is spanky and new and smells of carpet, as opposed to horseshit, which somewhat blighted the vibe of the original place. Although the theatre is pretty small, it hosts some excellent and high profile acts, and has a fiercely loyal regular audience, known as Stablemates ( it just keeps getting better, doesn't it ? ). It's a little bit of a weird one for the Booties show as the greater part of the stage space is what's know as a thrust ( oo-er missus ) which sticks way out into the audience. It means there isn't a flat area behind the stage big enough to take all three of our screens, so we've had to fanny around hanging screens from the ceiling. Only problem is, there are no actual bars or fixtures to hang them from. Oh no. What we have instead is a mesh of metal cable which also acts as a floor which the lighting technicians can walk on when they move lights and cables around. From underneath it looks like a giant net, and when you're just walking on it, it's fine. However, when you have to lie or kneel on it when tying off the hanging bars and cables for the projector, it suddenly tskes on the properties of a cheesegrater. Clive is manfully clambering around up there, his efforts punctuated by yelps of pain and the occasional scream of actual agony, and when he finally gets back down to ground level his body has been imprinted with a fascinating tattoo of indendation marks where he's been sliced and diced by the mesh, but there's no actual blood, so that's alright then. Girl. Today is an odd one for another reason, too...Arthur and Clive are only here for the build and soundcheck, then they are jumping on a tour bus to go off on a short series of dates for Yamaha, starting in Dublin tomorrow. As such there's a bit of an " all change " feel about the show, with Pug moving to front of house engineer and our old mucker Ben Dorrington coming in on monitors. Ben has actually been on a transatlantic voyage with the Queen Mary II, so he will arrive back in Heathrow this morning, having flown in overnight from New York. No doubt he'll be as fresh as a daisy and not in the LEAST jetlagged.....Because there isn't enough space behind the stage for the screens we've had to move everything forward, and as such it's quite cramped up there. Steve's access to his drumkit is so tight we seriously consider the option of him abseiling down from the wire mesh above, and there's no way the band can get on from stage right at all, so this is going to be tres cosy, especially when Nick performs Le Danse IKEA, getting the stools on and off for the acoustic section. One REALLY good thing about tonight, though, is that it's sold very well. We know we have a good number of fans coming up from our home areas, but the Stablemates have been buying their tickets too, by the looks of it. We've done a couple of sold-out shows in the past here when we were working with Peter Green Splinter Group, so we know the intimacy of the venue can produce a great atmosphere, and the level of noise we get at the end of opener From Me To You tells us all we want to know...tonight's going to be a belter. Some nights we have some strange things happen, like the audience will respond most strongly to things like the Simon and Garfunkel song, and then they're with us all the way. Other nights it's Light My Fire that really breaks down the barriers, and sometimes we've got them from the first number. That's definitely the case tonight, and the fact that the audience are so close makes their response seem even louder and more powerful. Nick does indeed have to do an obstacle course to get the stools on and off, and we discover that one of the moving lights is actually pointing straight at a lady in the balcony ( we only really noticed when her eyebrows finally burst into flames ) but other than that it's a stonking gig. When the crowd sing back at the band on things like Sunny Afternoon and I'm A Believer it pretty much takes the roof off. In fact, it feels very much like the Marlborough gig last tour where we absolutely ripped the place up and did an unscheduled second encore for the only time on the whole jaunt. Part of me's hoping that Den will call Spirit In The Sky again, but he does the sensible thing and "leaves them wanting more ", as the showbiz maxim goes. There are loads of friends and fans wanting to speak to everyone afterwards, and everyone's totally buzzing. It's definitely going to be one that we'll talk about for a long time to come, and for all the right reasons. There might not have been any weird stuff like dive-bombing bats here tonight ( though Damian DID have a moth fly down his shirtfront ) ...it was all about the music, the band and the audience. Wavendon is now officially the Rock & Roll Capital of The Civilized Western World....