Waterside Theatre Aylesbury Monday Nov 26th

Another new one for us today, in more ways than one. We haven’t played Aylesbury before, and the Waterside is a brand new theatre. As we set out for deepest Buckinghamshire a scary thought suddenly strikes us…..Hang on, it’s called the WATERside, and half the bloody country is submerged by floods. It’s a fairly safe bet that somewhere called the Waterside is going to be beside water, wouldn’t you say, Faithful Blogreader ? That being the case, and given the fact that swathes of Milton Keynes have been turned into something from The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau, could it be that our show may be in danger of a little moistness ?? It’s with a degree of trepidation that we nose our way into the streets of Aylesbury, but when we finally see the Waterside we realise our fears are groundless. The place is MASSIVE, looking like a great big ocean liner marooned on some suburban road. It’s going to take a bit more than some casual flooding to shut THIS place down, I can tell you. It’s all proper as well, with a big old loading dock and everything, but when we get inside it’s breathtaking. Not only is it huge, but it’s got the most amazing architecture…every fascia on every wall and balcony looks as if it’s made of wooden blocks of differing colours, and it has the odd effect of being both ultra-modern and somehow like the inside of a tropical forest at the same time. It’s also oddly reminiscent of a giant Jenga game, and Tomps idly muses on the potential effect of removing the bottom block…..The place is vast, though, with a stage the size of some of the venues we’ve played, and it’s so high even Felix Baumgartner would think twice about going up to the lighting grid. When the gear is all out onstage we occupy about a hundredth of the room available to us, and stage left is so far away from my spot at stage right that it has it’s own postcode and weather system. Time to face facts and be pragmatic….this venue is way too big for where we are at in our stage of development right now, but they’d wanted the show, and as the place is owned by entertainment Grand Poobah the Ambassador Theatre Group, it won’t do us any harm to lay down a few markers. We’ve also had the word that some other movers and shakers from the industry may be in the crowd tonight to run the rule over the show, and whilst we’d much prefer to have people see us at a more intimate ( and well-populated ! ) venue, we’ve got nothing to fear from anyone or anywhere. The word’s come through that Steve and Phil may be late getting here as Steve’s car has had to go to the doctors for a radiatorectomy, so we push the soundcheck back. Whenever we have a big stage we can get the show set up in record time, so we end up about an hour and half ahead of ourselves, and once again the incipient fatigue, never far away, creeps up again. I’m not the oldest on the crew, but I AM fifty-five, with a skeleton full of arthritis and two knackered knees, and the day when I start sitting on a flight case with my slippers and some Werther’s Original mints, telling the younger lads what to do looms ever closer. At the minute I’m just struggling with the drives, the late nights and the being involved in the physical build and de-rig, and I don’t seem to be able to catch up on my rest…..with the tour bus we don’t have this, even if we’re driving the vans after a show, because we can pretty much go and crash out in our bunks for a while when we need to and recharge our batteries, but there’s no such option this time. I decide the best plan is to have a quick “power nap”, so I tuck myself away on the stage just in front of our control position, and within seconds I’m off. I’m only going to need fifteen minutes or so….which is all I get. I’m vaguely aware of a voice calling “ bar coming in “ through my dream, but then suddenly I’m being attached by a huge black boa constrictor which is trying to wrap me in it’s coils and squeeze the life out of me……with a start I wake up to find the black constrictor is actually the cable running off the end of a lighting bar, and it’s all over me, because the “ bar coming in “ was the one right above where I was lying, and it’s now poised six inches above my head. I mean, what are the chances ? This stage is about half a mile deep and I only take up about….what, two feet when I’m lying on my side, yet the one bloody bar that has to come down does so right on my nut. Sleepy time over, then….We’ve actually done about the same number of people here as we did last night, but in the wide open spaces of the Waterside’s seating they’re, quite frankly, a bit lost. They’re not going to be intimidated, though, and they set out from the very first number to make their presence felt as loudly and enthusiastically as they can. There’s a really interesting mix of ages in tonight, including three young girls of no more than sixteen who go mental down the front during the “ party “ section and the encore, and that’s always really good to see. There’s no doubt that the music of the Sixties is going to live on for ever, because this was Ground Zero for pretty much everything that came since, right up to the present day, but the more younger people we can start attracting to the show the better. Because the stage is so big, it’s as though the band inherently know that they have to magnify their gestures and movements to fill the void, and this gives them an almost visceral impact at times, especially on the big guitar numbers like Pinball Wizard and You Really Got Me. I’ve said before that the guys would make a fantastic, heads-down, foot-on-the-monitors, twirly-drumsticks, leather-strides-and-bullet-belts rock band, and this is never more apparent than when they’re rampaging through Spirit In The Sky at the end of the set. It’s totally uninhibited and yet still fully disciplined, and take it from me, THAT’S a hard one to nail down properly. Best band of their kind in the world, Sir Elton ? No doubt whatsoever. That’s another town and another theatre well and truly in the bag, chaps. The size of the place works to our advantage again on the way out , and soon enough we’re back in the car and heading home. We have begun to feel a little esurient, and in order to satisfy our hunger pangs, decide that we will patronise Ronald McDonald’s fine emporium of burger-related comestibles. We don’t really need the sat nav for this, as I can actually smell it from about nineteen miles away, but Pug and I decide we’ll set it up anyway. The ensuing inability of two able, supposedly intelligent human beings to carry out the simple task of attaching the bloody thing to the windscreen is the stuff of slapstick movies, however, so we eventually give up and go analogue ( also known as roadsigns, folks ). Our cravings will have to wait, though…..due to a combination of floods and ( unannounced, of course ) roadworks, we end up taking a diversion. This involves a narrow track through woods that Hollywood horror film directors would have rejected as being “ unrealistically creepy”, and the three of us in the car make a pact that if she DOES break down for any reason, we’re staying RIGHT here with the doors locked, and no-one’s going to do that mental “ I’ll go and see if I can get help “ thing that some hapless youth always does in a horror movie, and which inevitably ends in dismemberment by something hairy and with enormous teeth. Eventually we reach civilization again, to find that luckily our scare hasn’t taken the edge off our appetites…..though if Carol is reading this, I had a bottle of water and a very small portion of fruit, honest……