Basildon Towngate Theatre Wednesday Nov 21st

The day dawns, cold, grey, wet and miserable as the troops gather to reconvene, and this really is one of those times when the prospect of hauling gear in and out of trucks and venues in the pouring rain seems marginally less appealing than root canal surgery without anaesthetic. The only plus factors today are that a) we’re not travelling all that far and b) Basildon Towngate is a really nice venue. That all still seems like ( literally ) cold comfort as we splash and splosh our way through the teeming downpour, and when we finally pull up outside the theatre after a couple of hours there’s a marked reluctance to actually leave the warmth of the cab and “ assume the position “. This, Faithful Blogreader, is where harsh reality and the perceived glamour of the music business collide head – on, and guess who comes out best ?! Yep. However, we’re nothing if not dedicated professionals ( snort ) so we just grit our teeth, gird our loins, bite the bullet and several other expressions denoting the fact that we’d really rather be tucked up warm in bed, and get on with it. Fortunately, the load – in here is fast and easy, and once we’re inside and the doors are shut, we enter the bizarre twilight world of the road crew. I’ve not really talked about this before, but it’s a strange aspect of our everyday lives. Just as the casinos of Las Vegas have no outside windows and no clocks in the games rooms, thus ensuring that the gamblers lose track of exactly how much time they’ve spent trying to plunge themselves into debt and penury, so it is with us when we go into a theatre to build a show. The only time that has any meaning is the magic hour of five o’clock, when the band will mooch onstage for soundcheck. Otherwise the day is spent in the half – dark, cut off from normal life and with your entire focus on placing that piece of kit, plugging in that cable, focusing that light. Unless you’re the one who has drawn the short straw to do the food run, or you’ve popped out of the stage door for a quick smoke, you don’t see the outside world again until the van is pulling out at the end of the night. No matter where you’re playing, your world shrinks to the stage, the wings, the mixing position and the dressing rooms. It has the effect of homogenising each day, and on a long tour this can become a bit difficult to deal with. You can always tell “ career road crew “ as they’ve got this slightly faraway look in their eyes, caused by too long spent in darkened theatres and tour buses. Or it might be down to huge amounts of drugs, of course. No such worries with our clean team, mind you…..the most rock’n’roll it gets with us is an extra helping of hot sauce on our kebabs. But enough of this blather….back to today’s business. There’s been quite a bit of palaver about this show. We were originally scheduled to play here on the tour in spring, but after the show had been on sale for a while the theatre realised they’d actually double-booked the date, and as the show it clashed with had been confirmed before ours, it took precedence, and we had to move back to now. What we DIDN’T know was that while our agent was putting this tour together, he was doing the usual thing of asking each venue for a few options of available dates so he could try and get the routing to make some sort of geographical sense ( doesn’t always work, of course….our tour routing frequently takes on a pattern so random that it looks like the venues were chosen by a gibbon throwing darts blindfolded at a map of the UK ). One of the two dates they had free was November 8th, so, again, as is usual practise, this was put on hold, until our agent finally plumped for today’s date as it fitted in better with the rest of the dates he’s negotiated. It was really only as this current tour was starting that we realised the theatre had, far from just putting November 8th on hold, actually advertised our show and put it on sale for that night ! The only way we found out was that we started getting miffed messages from fans who’d bought tickets for the 8th and rocked up to the Towngate, expecting a night of Sixties mayhem, only to find that they had tickets for “ The best ventriloquist in most of Basildon, Marvello and his puppet Snouty The Dolphin “ .( actually I may have made that up…..whatever, it definitely wasn’t us on that night ). All of this does give us a slightly queasy feeling about tonight….this will be the THIRD advertised date for our show. Will people still come, or will they be so cheesed off at all the chopping and changing malarkey that they stay home and decide to sort out their sock drawers instead ? In the end, the turnout is actually healthy, but I can’t help feeling we’ll still have lost SOME people along the way….and not only was this not our fault, we weren’t even aware of the problem !!!! We’re reasonable chaps, but someone really does need to be shot at dawn for this, or at least be beaten to within an inch of their lives. I’ll have a word with the local council….The show itself is a gig of two halves, Gary. Although we’ve been here before and gone down brilliantly, the reaction to the first half is definitely appreciative, but somewhat muted. The band aren’t doing anything differently… if anything they’re playing better tonight that they did at the last gig….but there’s no real vibe coming back from the auditorium, and everyone remarks on it at the interval. The venue management must have put something in the half-time drinks, though, because after that it changes totally. I know I’ve mentioned this before but it often seems to be Light My Fire that’s the tipping point. You’d think that the smacked-out maunderings of a hippy drug monkey coupled with the sheer length of the song and the keyboard and guitar histrionics that it features would have the audience reaching for the smelling salts, but every night, almost without fail, they’re a – whoopin’ and a – hollerin’. So it is tonight, and from here on in it’s in the bag. It’s actually quite a remarkable thing to be onstage and to see and feel the palpable change in an audience reaction….at the risk of sounding clichéd , it really IS the magic of rock’n’roll music. It’s been another great success tonight, and the euphoria lasts right up until the EXACT moment that the loading bay doors are opened, revealing a black, stormy, wet Essex night. I feel a sharp pain in my buttocks and whirl around. Yes, it’s reality biting me on the arse again…….