White Rock Theatre Hastings Wednesday Nov 28th

Before I start today’s ramblings, I’d like to draw your attention to our whizzy new-look website, which has been put together by design guru and band pal Ian Haley. It’s all very splendid, so get yerselves on to www.thebootlegsixties.com and have a gander. Cheers Ian…..much appreciated !!! So……Hastings, then. New ground not just for this show, but for most of the touring party as well. On the way down we manage to exhaust the “ Careful, Harold, you’ll have your eye out with that “ jokes fairly quickly, which is probably just as well….I imagine the house tech lads here have heard just about every permutation. One interesting factoid for you, though…..the White Rock Theatre here in Hastings has 1066 seats. See what they did there ? It’s a cool place, too…despite the fact that it can hold a lot of people, it’s one of those wide and quite shallow buildings, so unlike Aylesbury, which seemed to reach back to the very horizon, this is actually pretty intimate, so we should be OK. Hastings itself seems to be built on several steep hills sloping down to the sea, and oddly, there seems to be one everywhere we need to be. There’s a VERY long, steep slope down to the venue itself, which causes a moment of buttock-clenching fear at the bottom when I put my foot on the brakes and nothing happens for a second apart from a deep sighing sound from under the bonnet, and then we’re labouring up the other side of this incline to get to the load-in doors. The load-in has the geometrical distinction of sloping both up and down AND side to side, with the net result that the centre of gravity of all the gear goes all Spanish, and stuff starts wanting to run away down the hill, crush us beneath it’s wheels or plummet off the side of the goods lift that takes you down to stage level. And whilst the good folks at the White Rock are both friendly and very helpful, there’s a little part of me that can’t help railing at the fact that I need to provide theatre managements with risk assessments so detailed that they even have to take into account potential injury caused by blowing our noses or blinking rapidly, yet here we are on a metal lift with a ten-foot drop on one side with not so much as a gossamer thread to stop us plunging to the floor below. The world of Elf ‘n’ Safety is a strange and twisted one, right enough……There’s yet another new experience for us tonight as well, because for the first time ever we’re actually being introduced onstage by a Real Person, and not the “ voice of God “ intro tape. We’ve been running a ticket competition with the good people of Arrow FM, and as such presenter Simon Osborne ( 10.00am until 2.00pm weekdays on 107.8, or listen online at www.arrowfm.co.uk, people. ….check his show out NOW !! ), has kindly agreed to come along and do a whoop – up intro for us ! Simon’s been a friend of the band for a long time now, and is a totally top bloke. His support for tonight’s show has certainly made a big difference to sales, which had been a bit slow until he and Arrow FM got on board, so arise, Sir Simon Of Osborne ! Your Brothers in Rock salute you ! We also need to say a huge Bootleg Sixties thanks to Shirley Knowles and all the other presenters at Arrow FM for their help too….we’ll be back, folks, and next time it’ll be even bigger !!! Simon really sets the tone for the evening, getting the audience onside right from the off, and the band smoothly slip into gear like a smooth, gear-slipping thing. Everything looks and sounds particularly good tonight, too…the colours of the lights seem brighter and stronger, and the sound is rich and sharp. Damian’s even found a mirror ball to use, although the motor rotates it so fast that protracted viewing of the wee white spots of light as they scoot across the roof and walls of the theatre induces a kind of paralysis, swiftly followed by a loosening of the bowels and, eventually, death. Steve also has a bit of a problem with some lighting tonight. Damian normally fires the moving lights at the drumkit during the solos in Wipeout and Pretty Woman, but tonight the front movers have had to be moved slightly to avoid the curtains as they swish in, and the result is that they now fire straight into his fizzog with retina-scorching intensity. Usually it all just uplights the chrome on the drumkit so everything’s spangly and sparkly, but there’s a full-on strobing effect going on here, and Steve falls into a kind of fugue state as his mind is scrambled by the lancing beams, It’s when he starts to dribble that we realise we might be in trouble, but luckily the solo ends, normal lighting is resumed, and Steve, dazed and confused but still keeping the beat, has made it through, and they’re in to Catch Us If You Can as though nothing had ever happened. Tonight is another one of those shows where the first half, in particular, seems to just fly by, but the up side of this is that they sell stem ginger ice cream here at the interval and it’s, quite frankly, good in a way that really should be made illegal. As the show was an 8pm start we do a swift interval turnaround in order to make sure that we finish and are out of the theatre some time before next Friday, and I must confess to a slight concern as the boys ease into the “ Psychedelic Section “ in the second half. This is because I’ve noticed we have a slightly higher than normal quotient of folks in tonight above a certain age, some of whom are sporting walking sticks and other perambulation aids. Surely the twin – axe – and keyboard assault of Light My Fire is going to have them reaching for the panic button ?? And how about Hole In My Shoe, with it’s bonkers tale of giant albatrosses flying through a crack in the clouds ? We may get a visit from Social Services…..but no, they’re lapping it up, and it’s in this same section that possibly the weirdest thing of the whole tour happens. Just as Jamie starts the opening chords to Eleanor Rigby, a chap who really IS old enough to know better leaps to his feet, runs to the front of stage right and proceeds to do some kind of bizarre frug, oblivious to all around him. He’s totally in a world of his own, and it makes you wonder what colour the sky is in that world.. Now, Eleanor Rigby may be many things, but a dancefloor filler isn’t one of them. One can only assume that it either has some intensely personal resonance for him which necessitates this skewed display of enthusiasm, or he’s got, as our Antipodean cousins like to say “ A couple of ‘roos loose in the top meadow “. The fact that he sits back down afterwards and doesn’t get up or dance again for the rest of the show does tend to lean towards the second option, but I don’t wish to be uncharitable, as tonight really is a very good show with a lovely crowd, so let’s just assume he got a little fatigued. Walk Alone ( again, the right choice for the crowd ) brings proceedings to a close, and then it’s into the breakdown. The prospect of the three-hour drive home isn’t really very appealing, but we’ve just got to get on with it. All is going fine until we’re JUST about out of Hastings, and then a snorting great ASDA artic pulls out from a side road, right in front of me. Immediately my Pissedoffometer swings into the red. Not only has this mental midget consigned me to a crawl for the whole run all the way to the M25, THERE WAS NOT A SINGLE CAR BEHIND ME FOR MILES !!! All he had to do was look, wait a bit, let me go, then follow, but no. As I’m driving along staring at the back of his bloody truck I’m aware of my right thumb twitching on the steering wheel, and it takes a while to realise that once again I think I’m playing Call Of Duty and am about to unleash the full might of the weaponry of my Apache attack helicopter on this dork. It’s with a sense of genuine regret that I realise I can’t after all, despatch him to a fiery demise by the side of the A21, so I grit my teeth and drop back. There’s nowhere safe to overtake, and thus for the next half an hour I’m confronted with the back of this white truck and it’s green “ Why Pay More ?” slogan. I’ll tell you why I’ll pay more, Mr ASDA, because your careless, thoughtless prannet of a driver has ensured that I will never again enter one of your supermarkets. Unless it’s to raze it to the ground, of course. From now on it’s top – class all the way for me. Hello Aldi and Lidl….