Wimborne Tivoli Sat March 26th

Shades of last year’s tour this morning as Tomps comes to my house at silly o’clock to pick up me and Rodders. Although we didn’t get in TOO late from Dunstable it’s still a nasty shock to the system to have to get up early knowing you’ve got a three hour drive followed by a working day followed by the drive back again, and it just brings home even more the sense of having a tour bus. At least we don’t have a show to get up for tomorrow as we’re about to have ANOTHER break. This was the three days we’d originally scheduled when the tour was first put together and we had twelve shows back to back, but in the light of the cancellations it now means we’ll have only played two shows in eight days, which isn’t great. Still, last night was fine, and there’s nothing to suggest tonight will be any different. Wimborne Minster is a very pretty little town in Dorset, and the Tivoli was one of the better shows of the last tour. It’s an odd little place….from the outside it just looks like a big old warehouse or something with a pitched, corrugated asbestos-style roof, but inside it’s all quirky seat-colours, bizarre friezes on the walls and little nooks and crannies everywhere. The stage is quite deep but not especially wide, so the band will be holding hands up there tonight as we’ll have to squash them together a bit. I must admit that Steve not having a drum riser has made a big difference…on some of the bigger stages it CAN look a bit weird but aesthetically it’s generally better, and we’ve got much more room to manoeuvre. The house tech here, Phil, is a really good lad, and we’re made to feel like old friends coming back to visit a favourite place, so there’s a very good mood about the place despite the drive we’ve had to do. This mood lasts right up to soundcheck, where things start to get narky. There are some problems with sound levels, we have to re-patch the stage box, one of the keyboards keeps buzzing which takes a while to sort out, and it’s all just a bit edgy. No real specific reason why….could be that everyone’s getting tired, could be that the moon is in the wrong phase, could be anything, but it’s just a bit of a downer, and the end of soundcheck gives us a welcome hour to go off and do our own things for a while. Arthur, Tomps, Junior and I revisit last year’s pre-show routine by getting in some very nice Chinese and scoffing it in the big Green Room upstairs, while the other crew and band members head to various parts of the town and venue for food, drink, or just a head-clear. By showtime everyone’s back and ready to go, and we’ve got Steve’s wife, the lovely Jill, here to document the proceedings with her trusty camera. The lights go down, the spoken intro rolls, the video montage starts…..and then stops. Dead. As a dodo. Darkness and silence onstage. A few embarrassed titters come from the audience, as they know something’s gone very, very wrong. Den rises to the occasion and leads the band onstage, gives a great little welcoming speech and then kicks into Please Please Me. Meanwhile, it’s mayhem at stage right. The show computer that carries all the moving images and audio has totally died and frozen, so we’re just running with the slides for now. We NEED the moving stuff, though, especially in the second half, so this has to be fixed. Tomps tries a few things with no success and the next thing I know the computer’s out of the rack and he’s performing open – heart surgery on it next to me. Onstage the lads are gamely going for it but they’re clearly discomfited and one ending gets messed up….it’s as though they can’t concentrate because they’re waiting for something else to go wrong. We’ve missed one video insert already, but then I see the computer screen light up out of the corner of my eye, and Tomps tells me we’re back on line. HUGE sigh of relief Apparently the RAM had worked itself loose, and when the connection finally failed everything came to a standstill. The interval seems to come after only about five minutes as we’re been running on adrenaline, but we’ve got away with it, and there’s a definite sense of making up for the start as the lads go back on for the second half. In fact, they make up for it in spades…..it’s one of the most dynamic performances of the tour, and the audience, never shy to start with, pick up on this and start to raise the roof. A rabid Light My Fire elicits major whooping and cheering despite Jamie’s best efforts to, bring it to an premature end while Pinball Wizard is as unbridled and wild as ever played by The Who themselves. By the end of Daydream Believer it’s full on mayhem, and Arthur makes the suggestion on the comms that this may be a perfect Spirit In The Sky moment. Den concurs, and we are treated to five of the most exciting minutes of the entire time I’ve known the band. They absolutely MURDER the song, and at the end Phil even strides forward, unleashes his inner Guitar God and shamelessly throws shapes on the forestage while firing off an incendiary solo. It’s moments like these when I truly think that on this form the guys could live with any band on the planet, and it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be here seeing this. After this megalithic slab of rock I half expect Walk Alone to be a bit of an anticlimax, but it’s anything but…..in fact it looks an inspired song selection, and we get some community singing to rival Dumfries in it’s volume and unabashed joyousness. Simply magnificent, and the best turnaround of fortunes in a show I’ve ever seen. It even takes the edge off the long drive home ( not that I was actually driving ! ) but each time I go to nod off I hear THAT guitar riff and my feet start tapping. Altogether now….”When I die and they lay me to rest, gonna go to the place that’s the best…...."