Crewe Lyceum Tuesday March 27th

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but Crewe Lyceum was the place we did the very first “ official” out of town Bootleg Sixties show three years back, so it’s always been a bit special for us. It’s a lovely old theatre, and these buildings are great to play anyway, but this particular one is a belter. It’s not as though the facilities are especially great….you offload the gear onto a cobbled street, so even just getting it inside the building would test the endurance and inscrutability of the toughest Sherpa. After that it’s a long push up a corridor, and finally you’re onto the stage, where the rake is so steep you have to lash yourself to something solid to stop you hurtling off the edge and into the front row. It’s cosy and intimate, though, and the staff there are great, ( even if they’d forgotten to rig up the lights the way we needed them before we got here ! ) Last time around we had lunch in the pub next door, which after a few minutes we realised was a gay bar, and that pretty much set the tone for the day. Today, however, we find the pub’s been refurbished, though like the pub we, too, are smart, efficient and businesslike this time !! There is, I must add, a brieft period where I find myself amassing all of the profanities known to the English – speaking world, reassembling them into even more fruity compounds and phrases, and unleashing them all at two small, innocent pieces of metal. These pieces of metal are the plates from which our two poorly projectors normally hang. Today, thanks to the assistance of one Mr Ian Robson of TechPro Services in Castle Ashby ( cheers Robbo…that’ll be a tenner ) we have two spanky new LED projectors. Problem is, they come with a bracket that looks like a cross between a stage prop from Star Wars and an instrument of torture. It’s all knobs and knurled grunion rods and swivel clamps and weird sticky – out bits, and despite the collected efforts of the Bootleg Sixties crew Brains Trust, it steadfastly refuses to attach in any way to the drop-poles we use to hang the projectors from the lighting bars. Time to call in…DIY Man !! Yes, I’ve brought along a selection of tools to help maintain ( or permanently maim ) our gear. “ How hard can this be ?”, I thought to myself…place a piece of paper over the new projector, pop a pencil through the screw-holes in the top of it where the weird-arse bracket is meant to go, and…Hey Presto ! A perfect template with which to mark out three holes on our existing plates, drill ‘em out, fit them onto the poles, and the jobs a good ‘un. But no. Firstly, a piece of advice. Paper does not a good template make. It’s bendy. And foldy. Second problem…the plate is made of a metal, presumably of alien origin, that will not allow a pen to make a mark on it. No, really. Whatever I try, there’s no visible result. I then have to scrape some kind of mark with a sharp object instead, but it soon becomes clear that I’m going to need a tungsten – carbide – tipped megatool, ( and I left THAT one at home…). I finally manage to etch some kind of vague scratch on the metal, but sadly this doesn’t really lend itself to precision engineering, as I find to my cost when I try to line up the holes I’ve drilled with the holes on the projector. The Space Metal or whatever the bloody thing’s made of is resistant to my drill, too, with the result that far from smartly drilling a little hole, the drill bit skitters across the surface and I narrowly avoid skewering my own leg. It’s at this point that the aforementioned tirade of sweariness was unleashed, and I have to tell you that the plates ended up looking like especially hard pieces of Gouda, they had so many bloody holes in them, No matter though…..it worked in the end, even if this five-minute job ended up taking about the same length of time as the gestation period of an elephant. We were still in “ dead efficient and businesslike “ mode ( apart from DIY Man, of course ), so the build and soundcheck scoot by without mishap. To my relief, the projectors don’t fall out of the roof due to my crappy handiwork, either. One of the other things we really like about the Lyceum is that the audience are right on top of you, and as such, there’s a really good energy connection with band right from the start ( God, that sounds SO much like Californian bullshit, doesn’t it ? ). Only real curveball of the day was when the band arrived for soundcheck and announced that they were going to drop in a totally new medley and change the setlist around a bit. Long-term Faithful Blogreaders may well recall me describing the sheer scrotum-shrivelling terror we used to experience in the early days when even the slightest element of deviation from the show occurred. These days, though, we’re made of MUCH sterner stuff. In fact, far from hurling myself to the ground and drumming my heels in a fir of pique, my main concern is that the changes to the show visuals we have to make could well cut into the time allotted for our fish and chips, and that just WON’T do !! Next to me, Tomps serenely re-jigs all the computerised inserts as though he was doing nothing more challenging than playing Solitaire, whilst Rodders and Arthur take on board the changes and make the necessary programming amendments with nary a whisper of protest. Pug doesn’t know what’s going on during the set anyway, so it’s no big deal to him…..! The show itself goes pretty seamlessly, too, and the duty manager later tells the band that the feedback he’s been getting from tonight’s audience is the best he’s had for many months. The big frustration is that we keep hearing this, but it’s not always being reflected in audience numbers. Just got to plug away, I suppose….Tonight’s the first night of the tour that we’re all in the same hotel overnight, so Den, Steve, Arthur and myself grab the opportunity to have a “ State Of The Union” meeting. After a couple of hours, we conclude that we all hate each other and would rather be working in Morrison’s, so THAT’S all right, then….Anyway, my poor old mother – in – law’s not been well. She had terrible hayfever, and then they told her she was diabetic. So I sent her some flowers and chocolates……