Derby Assembly Rooms Fri March 11th

The bus arrived at about 5.15am this morning, but as the load in isn’t until 1 o’clock everyone catches up on their sleep. The Assembly Rooms is a familiar old friend to Arthur, Rodders and myself through our days doing the Bloodstock Festival here
for several years. Despite it’s name the festival was nothing to do with horse breeding or racing; instead it was two days of dodgy metal bands, often German, with singers that sounded like they’d either got an intimate part of their anatomy stuck in a mangle or else that they were trying to vomit up the soles of their own feet. It was a vista of denim. leather, unwashed hair and acne, and we loved it, every last nut-shrivelling, eardrum-buggering, horns-ablaze, Teutonic posturing moment of it. Sadly the festival no longer comes here, having been hijacked by corporate hyenas in Germany, and the whole seat of the pants, could collapse at any minute thrill of the thing has been replaced by a homogenised, sanitized, just-add-water bog standard festival. Oh, the same bands play, of course, but now they all have separate dressing rooms instead of a semi-communal backstage area, and the gear is moved on and off stage by unsmiling, efficient Aryan robots instead of being manhandled through the backstage kitchens of the Assembly Rooms by some untrained but very willing Derbyshire oiks. On the face of it the new regime sounds infinitely preferable, but Bloodstock at Derby was real, and a bit chaotic, and a bit frustrating, and bloody hard work, and a lot of fun. Sadly I don’t think we’ll see it’s like again, as music, like so much else, is increasingly sponsored, branded, and neutered within an inch of it’s life until it finally disappears into the voracious maw of the corporate beast. Bloodstock’s founder could be something of a clot at times, and he gave us some classic moments like the occasion he realised on the morning of the show that he hadn’t ordered a safety barrier to keep the seething hordes of metalheads from inundating the stage, but he was a genuine, flesh and blood person, essentially a fan who decided he’d like to stage his own event, rather than some faceless number-cruncher in an anodyne office somewhere talking of gross potentials, per capita merchandise spends and magnifying the marginals. I spit on them all and hope they get electrocuted by their bloody calculators. RANT ALERT----HE’S NOT FINSHED YET !!!! I mean, what have T Mobile, Nat West or sodding Volkswagen got to do with music ? And I don’t want to go to the Labatt’s Ice Export Double Filtered Special Wonderbrew Apollo…it’s the bloody Hammy Odeon, you soulless, bloodsucking numpties !!! RANT OVER-----ALL CLEAR. So….Derby Assembly Rooms, then. They’ve got a nice PA system of their own here, so Arthur decides he’ll use that, which means less poo to bring in from the vans, and we get all the kit on one load of the lift. It’s an impressive edifice, is this lift…it’s actually the whole width of the stage and takes you up either to floor level or else it can be added as a forestage to the main structure, but what .it DOES mean is that those happy, hernia-inducing moments of hoiking flight cases up steps and so on are a thing of the past. We do a nice fast build again while the band make use of the showers ( quick footnote…the shower pressure is so strong and the needles of water so sharp that it felt like I was being pinned to the wall by an unrelenting wave of tiny demons wielding little pitchforks….it gets the dirt off but it also removes at least two layers of skin ). One of the things we always love about working here is the crew….unfortunately head tech Nigel is on holiday but Chrissie from the tech crew is like a little mascot to us….when we first met her she was about three years old and doing a kind of work experience thing, but now she’s all grown up and dominant and masterful and things ( or is that just me…?) and it’s a real pleasure to work with her again. It’s another fast build as a result and by four o’clock we’re sitting in the Green Room chomping fish and chips as befits our status as rufty-tufty rock pigs. Soundcheck is a bit of a narky affair as there are little squeaks, whistles and bleats coming out of the monitors that Junior( oh, that’s the name we decided on for Young Chris, by the way ) is manfully trying to eradicate, and there’s a bit of snappishness around that luckily I know by now will be totally forgotten about after about two minutes on the bus tonight. As ever, by the time showtime comes around everyone’s up for it and ready to go. You can usually tell from the audience reaction to the opening sequence whether or not it’s going to be a good night, and by that measure all the signs are in our favour….they laugh at Pinky and Perky and Batman, cheer the Beatles, and clap along to Ready Steady Go, so by the time Den’s “ Good evening everbody ! “ booms out of the darkness, it’s game on. I know I’ve already mentioned that it’s the rock numbers that seem to be getting the best response on this tour, but it’s true…when the lads kick in with the intro to You Really Got Me, people actually scream, they go wild at the end of the Light My Fire wig-out, and they even cheer my pyrotechnics ( I thangyoo, I thangyoo ) at the start of Pinball Wizard. It’s not a geographical thing, either…it seems to be happening everywhere we play. That’s not to say they don’t bellow along with gusto to Daydream Believer or Sunny Afternoon, of course, but it’s as though the rockier songs act as some sort of temporary conduit back to the rebellious days of their youth, and it’s almost as though we have a different audience for those particular numbers.Weird, but in a good way ! After the show we have another chinwag with occasional Bootlegger and all round good buddy Ben Dorrington, who has come along with his lovely lady Kirsty to be an actual audient tonight, giving him an advantage over most of the crew and all of the band….apart from Arthur, none of us have actually seen the show from the front still, so Ben joins a select little group of people who have been on both sides of the curtain, so to speak, and whose opinions we actually care about. The good news is that he, too thinks the show is better and slicker and tells everyone so, and that’s pretty gratifying coming from a respected fellow pro. I slip him his brown envelope full of cash, and’ job done, he and Kirsty melt away into the night……!