Bootleg Sixties On Tour

Skegness Embassy Thurs August 11th

2011-08-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

So while we were slumbering peacefully in our little truckle beds in the Washington Travelodge, the band, we thought, were relaxing in the opulence of the New Ambassador Hotel in Whitley Bay, where we had visions of them sipping cocktails in the Vegas Bar and generally being Rock Stars. It would appear, however, that the reality was a little more prosaic. From the borderline psychotic desk manager with the bottle of Jack Daniels tattooed on his arm and the casual mention that he could no longer sample his favourite tipple as it made him vomit blood, to the totally over- the- border psychotic woman who followed the band from the hotel to Stavros’s Kebab & Salmonella Emporium, all the time flashing various parts of her anatomy, to the attractive smell of damp which pervaded the building, right through to the interesting collection of other people’s pubic hairs which were to be found in most of the beds, the New Ambassador experience seems to have been one which the boys will always remember, but possibly for all the wrong reasons. Still, got to be pragmatic…at £ 20 a room including breakfast ( which none of them, surprisingly, sampled ) it’s a bloody good deal ! In deference to the band and their variety of nasty, itchy little red bites, however, the “ Roach Motel “ has been struck from the list of accommodation. Lightweights…… Now, when you look at a decent – sized map, Washington to Skegness is about…..oooooohh….three inches, say, but when you’re driving there it’s actually bloody miles. About 220 of them, to be precise, many of them winding through the dreary Lincolnshire fens past odd-looking little hamlets with names like Much Trubbling and Lower Splunt. It gets even more jolly when you find yourselves following a house, as Nick, Junior, Arthur and I did for what felt like much of my adult life. OK, so it was just one of those prefab jobbies on the back of a flatbed truck, but it was BIG and it was SLOOOOOOOW. So slow, in fact, that we were an hour late arriving in Skegness, and even the heady aroma of fish, chips, candydfloss and chav couldn’t divert us from our mission. Normally, if you haven’t done a show for a while, it can all get a wee bit rusty and slow, but we were like the proverbial greased lightning today. So greased were we, in fact, that we had the show in, built, soundchecked and finished within three hours, which is pretty bloody good going by anyone’s standards. This gave us a bit of time to consider our options. For a brief moment we thought about riding the Log Flume in the amusement park next to the theatre, which seemed like a wizard wheeze, but one look at the primordial soup which passes for the water that the logs have to go through changed our minds…perhaps if we had our waterproof biohazard suits with us, but not this time, eh ? Although it was raining on and off, the streets of Skegness were pretty much rammed with the very finest type of British holidaymaker, and the difference between now and the last time we were here is remarkable. The place is palpably alive in a kind of kiss-me-quick, all-day-bingo, end-of-the-pier kind of way, and after all the images we’ve seen this week of this country’s cities being laid waste to by a rioting sewer - effluence of feckless hoodie-rats, sink estate scum, wannabe gangsters and other oxygen thieves, it’s somehow comforting to see this tacky display of traditional Britishness in all it’s tawdry glory. In fact I’m SO comforted that I buy two big sticks of rock and a bag of cinder toffee, as I reckon I’ll need something sweet to follow the fish and chips I’m just about to scoff..The other thing that was missing when we were here last was an audience, but the venue’s assertion that a summer season gig would be different is borne out as we see a healthy flow of people making their way to their seats. All is looking on course for another stress-free show, when just five minutes before lights down the main projector starts flashing, then goes off altogether. Tomps is never a man to get his boxers in a bind, but even he has a little bead of sweat on his brow as he wrestles to get the thing working. With a tweak and a tug he gets it up and running again, and we’re off. All is great until the second number, when my computer freezes, and steadfastly refuses to show any more of the slides. I’ve mentioned before that things which would once have had us blubbing with fear are now dealt with almost nonchalantly; there’s a BIT more tension around than normal here, but the feeling is more that we’re annoyed we can’t give people the best show rather than “ It’s all gone wrong and we’re all going to DIE !!!” which was my previous default setting. By the end of the first video insert it’s all happening, though, and from then on we’re in cruise control. The band are even more on it tonight than last night, and more remarkable still is the fact that Phil got some very disturbing news from home in the interval, yet has played the second half as if his greatest care in the world was what colour guitar pick to buy next time he needs some. Strong stuff indeed. There’s a great response again tonight, and once more we get the message that the theatre management are really happy with the way things have gone….this definitely won’t be the last time we play here, and we’re all very, very happy about that. Some places just feel right, just make you so welcome, and this is one of them, from the bar staff to the technical boys. More, please !!! We now come to the weirdest part of the night….we’ve done two shows, we’re in the groove, we’re back on the road…..except we’re not. We’re going home again after this, and it’s sad, frustrating and annoying in equal measure. Oh, we’ll all be seeing each other in Liverpool in a couple of weeks , of course, but I don’t think there’s a single one among us who wouldn’t rather be getting on the bus with Big John, cracking open a brew and heading off into the night to the next show. As it is, Rodders has the drive from hell. He came to Whitley Bay straight from Edinburgh in a one-way rental car, and has told us that he needs to have it back by 10.00am tomorrow morning…..in Penzance. That’s about halfway to the Moon by my reckoning, so we waste no time in hitting the road . He’s very kindly agreed to drop Tomps, Junior and myself off on the way, so we cram into the small Japanese saloon that was only ever intended to carry four little sons or daughters of Nippon and not four big British blokes with enough luggage to sink a battleship, and off we go into the night. So it is that at about 2.30am I’m standing outside my house and watching Rodders’ tail lights disappear into the night , and I’ve got a bit of a “stunned mullet” thing going on. Just forty eight hours ago we were driving up the A1 on the eve of the Whitley Bay show, all excited about starting the shows again…..and now it’s already finished ! I’m definitely left with an air of “ What happened here today…..?” right up until the moment I put my key in the lock and realise that my partner’s put the safety chain on, and I can’t get into the house. Nor can I phone her, as there’s a problem with BT so the landline’s off, and her mobile has no service inside. I can’t climb over the gates and we don’t have a door knocker. Add to that the fact that she sleeps like the dead and the prospects aren’t looking good. I can’t explain why, but somehow it fits…..I’m not on tour, yet I’m not at home. It’s over, but I can’t close the door on it. Through this maelstrom of maudlin musing I gradually become aware that I need to pee, and at my age, when you need to pee you need to pee NOW. Not wanting to upset the neighbours by hosing down their prize azaleas, I try her mobile again….and miraculously it starts ringing. She eventually answers and sleepily slurs “ Thought you said you were coming back Friday ?“ when I tell her I’m standing outside the LOCKED front door with a bladder that feels like it’s a rat’s handbag filled with the contents of a swimming pool. “ It IS f*****g Friday !!” I manage to reply. Eventually doors are opened, bladders are drained, and beds are wearily clambered into. Meanwhile, somewhere on the M6, Rodders is cranking up Saxon on the car’s CD player and trying not to thing about the six hours of driving that still lie ahead of him………

Whitley Bay Playhouse, Wed August 10th

2011-08-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the mini - est of mini – tours !After a gap of a few months we're back treading the boards with a couple of gigs to blow away the cobwebs before we take a completely new show to Liverpool Philharmonic at the end of the month, so we’re all trying to remember what goes where and who does what ! We’ve been asked back here to Whitley Bay Playhouse by the theatre management, which is always nice and not a little flattering, so we’re keen to make a good impression as well as ironing out any kinks.
( See what I did there ? ? Kinks ? Sixties show ?....Oh, never mind…..) Although it’s over four months since we last did this show, however, it’s a bit like riding a bike, and we find that we’re slotting back into the tour routine as if we’d never been away. The crew traveled up the night before to give us a good run at things today, and within minutes of setting up, the prudence of this becomes clear. As Tomps starts to change the settings on the main projector he is rewarded with a bang, a flash and a puff of smoke out of the air vent on the side. Now, I’m no technician, but even I could see that this was a Very Bad Thing. At £ 200 – odd a pop these aren’t the kind of item you carry lots of spares of, but luckily we DO have an older lamp on board that will suffice, and with little more than a curt “ Nothing to see here..step away from the projector !” from Tomps as I wander over to see what’s happened, he and Dr Arthur don the masks and gowns, whip out the scalpels, and soon have the thing working again. We have a few tense moments with a recalcitrant radio microphone rack that clearly needs something more than Impact Therapy to get it working again, but with very little evidence of blood, sweat or tears, soundcheck is soon running smoothly, and we’re treated to one of the new songs the band are playing tonight, The Hollies “ I’m Alive “, which replaces “ Look Through Any Window “. They’re also switching “Wonderful Land” back into the set at the expense of the “ Apache / FBI “ medley, thought they insist this is on musical grounds only, and nothing to do with the shenanigans the crew used to pull during “ FBI" on the last tour. Spoilsports…..We’ve actually increased sales quite nicely from the last time we were here, but you’d never know from walking around the town. Normally when we play seaside towns it's cold, grey, wet and pretty much deserted, so we thought it'd be nice to do some in the summer. Here we are, then, in Whitley Bay in August…..where it's cold, grey wet and pretty much deserted. One place that IS open, however, is Pantrini’s, the fish and chip restaurant, and let me tell you, if we’d played in Whitley Bay on the last tour then Pantrini’s would have been pushing for a top three slot in our top tour grub league table. Light, fresh and crispy with just the right infusion of lard, they truly hit the spot, though they DO have the unfortunate side effect of making the backstage area smell like Billingsgate Fish Market. Still, a man’s gotta chew what a man’s gotta chew. Whether they’re slightly dazed from the effects of the 260 mile drive up here today or whether it’s incipient mellowness, the band hit a really relaxed groove right from the start. Steve in particular is just driving things along beautifully, playing a smart, tight solo in Pretty Woman and generally backing off the general violence and pyrotechnics a little, but they’re all just clicking really nicely. Den and Jamie are in great voice, Phil’s right on the money, and apart from an interesting new intro to “ Whiter Shade Of Pale “ Chris is bang on too. Next to me Tomps is proudly operating his new show computer and dropping in his usual witty asides over the comms system ( though fortunately he is fart-free tonight, to the relief of my little nostril hairs which have only just grown back from being singed off the last time). Nick is next to Tomps doing his hand – jiving and Dad – dancing, and on the other side of the stage I can see Junior, looking more like an eco-warrior than ever, and suddenly I feel a real surge of love for this whole thing, for all these people, and it feels so much like being back on tour that I get a real pang when I realise we’re only doing this for two nights. Luckily this only lasts a second or two before I accept it’s time to MAN UP and stop being such a soft shite. Emotions are for GURLS.
We’ve got a very decent crowd in tonight, and they play their part in turning this into an above – average evening, so by the time the house lights have come up at the end we’ve got a real sense of a job well done. We’ve identified a couple of things we need to look at before Liverpool, which is one of the main reasons for doing these two shows, so all that remains now is to work out what goes into which vehicle and in which order. Thanks to the Playhouse’s splendid bi-van load dock, however, even THIS is accomplished quickly and painlessly, and it’s not even midnight as we pull away and head for our hotel at Washington on the A1. We’ve left the band here in town tonight ( more of which later…..) and are all set for the simple run through the Tyne Tunnel and onto the A1….except that the Tyne Tunnel is shut for roadworks, and the attendant diversion system has been put in place by someone who has failed to grasp the premise that the primary function of a road is to assist you in reaching your destination. Just when you think you’ve worked it out, WALLOP !!!....along comes another “ Road Closed “ sign. Now, I used to live around here, and I have a reasonable grasp of the geography of the place, or so I thought. At one point I was convinced the Roadworks Bastards had even changed the course of the river Tyne as it was most definitely not where it should have been, but eventually we found our way onto the coast road, and without further mishap headed south until we eventually rolled into Washington Birtley services and the delights of the Travelodge. It had taken us nearly an hour to cover 22 miles. We finally hit the hay, grumbling about the “ lucky old band, staying in the nice hotel right around the corner from the gig……”

Oh we do like to be beside the seaside.....

2011-06-22T02:46:00.001-07:00

It's bucket and spade time ! To warm up for our headlining show at Liverpool Philharmonic on Friday August 26th, we're packing our towels and trunks ( and our thermals....this IS England after all ) and heading off to the seaside for two gigs at Whitley Bay Playhouse and Skegness Embassy on Wednesday and Thursday August 10th and 11th. I know they're both " school nights " but what the heck...why not let yourself be lured by the heady smell of candyfloss, fish and chips, sticks of rock and chavs from Dagenham and join us on our two-date East Coast Tour ?! If you're thinking of coming up to Liverpool, that'll be a bit good too, as the Beatles Festival organisers have asked us to put together a special " Cavern Years" Bootlegs show. In fact, why not make a weekend of it ? We are !!

Anorak & Chips, Please.....

2011-04-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve already noted in previous blogs that I get a bit of stick for not having talked about the actual show enough, and as I said before I’m trying to describe the weird, boring, exciting, funny, sad, exhilarating, tiring, invigorating daftness that is life on the road….I’m NOT reviewing the gigs. However, I HAVE been asked to list the songs which were played, so I’ll just don my best anorak and we’ll get started….

Set 1
Please Please Me
Don’t Throw Your Love Away / I’ll Keep You Satisfied
Hippy Hippy Shake
Go Now ( once ! )
Little Deuce Coupe
Not Fade Away
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Pretty Woman
Catch Us If You Can
You’ve Got Your Troubles / Tobacco Road / For Your Love / She’s Not There
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Mr Tambourine Man
Look Through Any Window
Keep On Running
Don’t Ever Change / Walk Right Back / Rhythm Of The Rain / Breaking Up Is Hard To Do / Do You Wanna Dance
You Really Got Me
You Were On My Mind
Apache / FBI
Out Of Time

Set 2
Feelin’ Groovy
What A Day For A Daydream / Happy Together / Mellow Yellow / Lazing On A Sunny Afternoon
Itchycoo Park
Hole In My Shoe
Strawberry Fields
Whiter Shade Of Pale
Light My Fire
California Dreaming
Handbags & Gladrags ( once ! )
Proud Mary / Mighty Quinn / Got To Get A Message To You / Suspicious Minds
Star Spangled Banner
Pinball Wizard
He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother
Green Onions
I Wanna Hold Your Hand / All Day & All Of The Night / When You Walk In The
Room / Gimme Some Lovin’ / Satisfaction / Mony Mony
Daydream Believer
Spirit In The Sky ( twice ! )
You’ll Never Walk Alone.

As the tour progressed, another very important list was made up, too….this was the Bootleg Sixties Crew Top Tour Grub Chart, and competition to make it onto this was fierce indeed, as we know that restaurants, pubs, fast food outlets and blokes with dodgy whelk stalls all over the country avidly await the results each year to see where they’ve come. We HAD considered a sub-chart for fish and chip shops as we had these no less than seven times, but in the end we just incorporated everything into one big smorgasbord of wonderfulness. As a result, we have a tie for the top slot this year, so take a bow Busy Bees ( Bridlington ) and The Gourmet ( Scunthorpe )

Busy Bees is without doubt the best fish & chip shop we’ve ever been in. The fish is all cooked fresh and by weight, the batter is light and crispy and the chips are firm and chunky. The portions are huge ( fnaar fnaar ) and eating there really is an experience not to be missed.

The Gourmet is a very fine Indian restaurant in Scunthorpe. Although billed as the best in the area, prices were very reasonable, and the chicken tikka was especially good, tasting as it did of proper tandoor oven cooking as opposed to being just meat smothered in red tikka sauce to disguise possible feline or canine origins. Even the spices, relishes and raithas were excellent, and the staff were exceptionally polite and helpful given that they were invaded by twelve hairy – arsed pissheads on a quiet Monday night.

Also worthy of mention were :

Dominos in Worthing who delivered our pizzas direct to the bus after all, even though they originally said they wouldn’t

The Golden Ringpiece in Andover who not only supplied us with a mouth-watering array of Chinese dishes, but also plied Arthur with booze as he waited for it to be cooked

The Marlborough fish and chip shop in Weymouth which NEARLY made the top slot had it not been for the fact that I’d almost died of exhaustion by the time I eventually found it

Wetherspoons in Weymouth for their superb, and incredibly good value “ train smash on a plate “ full English breakfasts.

Beales fish and chip shop in Porthcawl, whose delicious fish and copious chips were marred only by a slight excess of grease., most of which I ended up wearing

We must also, unfortunately, give a Golden Raspberry to McDonalds in Scunthorpe High Street for not having realised that it’s supposed to be “ fast food “ ( the clue’s in the name, you morons…) and for employing a cloth-eared bat who managed to get BOTH of my very simple orders totally arse-upwards. May she drown in a vat of ketchup.

A final word of thanks must go to Kay Howell for a seemingly endless supply of carrot cake and the fearsome chocolate confection which goes by the name of “ Tank”, both of which helped the bus travellers ( well, mainly me, to be honest ) to stave off hunger in the middle of the night.

To all of the above, our heartfelt gratitude and appreciation ( except Scunthorpe McDonalds, of course, which needs to be razed to the ground, especially if the soap-dodging, benefit –scrounging , chavvy oxygen-thieves who congregate there are still inside )

As ever, Faithful Blogreader, thankyou for your continued indulgence. We’ll be back in August for tales of Whitley Bay, Skegness and Liverpool……

Geddington, Mon April 4th

2011-04-08T17:25:00.000-07:00

As predicted, I didn’t see the band this morning, apart from Phil, who has opted to travel in the van with Nick and Rodders as he’s going to Stansted to catch a plane home to Sweden. ( a decision he will come to regret ! ) Big John, Rodders, Tomps and Junior have already been up and into town for breakfast, making my creeping about the bus so as not to wake anyone seem a little redundant. Nick, rather unusually, has not surfaced yet, so I’m despatched with the pokey stick to wake him up. As I approach the bus the door opens and a vile monster steps out….oh, hang on…no, it’s just Nick, but he looks like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards AND forwards, and then gone to sleep in it. Sensibly, Rodders takes the first stint at the wheel and Nick is poured into a passenger’s seat until he can finally emerge from his cocoon like a beautiful butterfly. Or something. It really IS parting time now, and so it’s handshakes and hugs all round. As Tomps and I attempt the latter we realise we’re not actually getting much nearer to each other; he looks down at our comfortably capacious stomachs and comments ruefully “ I think we both need longer arms ….” . A last wave and the vans are off, the adventure over and just the last bit of grunt work to do. We’re dropping our kit at our storage facility in Northamptonshire, and due to a peculiarity of the geography on the site even half a centimetre of rain can make the approach to it turn into something from The Somme, but our luck holds today and it stays dry, so everything goes back where it came from with the minimum of fuss and effort. Arthur drops me off at home, and as I walk up the hill towards the house and the recommencement of “normal” life I think back on everything that’s happened, not just over the five weeks of the tour but also of the many months leading up to it. We still don’t know how the tour has done financially, so there’s all that to work out, but whatever happens, one thing DOES shine through, which is that Clive continues to recover from his stroke, and that helps keep things very much in perspective. If HE can keep smiling through all that, then so can we. I think of the stress, the late nights, the logistical nightmares, the budgetary fun and games and all the little foibles and farragoes that accompany the preparation of a tour like this, and as I begin to try and put things in some sort of mental order, one thought burns into my mind……” I wonder if the pub’s still open ?”………..

Tony Henderson
Geddington, Northamptonshire
Tuesday April 5th

Buxton Opera House Sun April 3rd

2011-04-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

Although Buxton is a lovely little town nestling in the Derbyshire Dales, it’s a bit of a bastard to get to, especially in a heavily laden van with coolant problems, but we manage to arrive safely, and even thirty minutes early. To our surprise no-one’s about, but then Tomps makes an appearance. He’s looked fresher, truth be told, and the reason for his somewhat less than chipper demeanour today is down to a combination of a VERY rough drive up in the bus and the hourly pealing of the bells from a church about four and half feet away from where the bus is parked. It would have been uncomfortable enough travelling up these little roads with their twists, turns, dips and hills in a double decker bus under any circumstances, but when you’re trying to sleep on the pitching, rolling upper floor it must have been horrible. When they finally arrived our weary travellers thought a few hours of stationary rest awaited them, but at seven am the bells of the adjacent church suddenly started pealing…..and pealing….and pealing. They weren’t just sounding the hour, of course, it’s Sunday morning, so they’re calling people to services…AND it’s Mother’s Day, so there are special services too. Nightmare. This is potentially bad news…the last thing we want on the final show is for the band and crew to be tired and below par. One by one they get up ( yes, even Jamie….) and either shower or head into town, and to our relief it seems to do the trick….by soundcheck everyone looks almost human and firing on all cylinders. There’s none of the “ end of tour “ blues about today, either, which is VERY odd….normally at the end of a jaunt like this you’re already starting to look to life beyond the twelve people you’ve spent the last few weeks with and wondering how you’ll cope without Nick to take the piss out of., or Rodders to buy crisps and chocolate for you, or Tomps and Junior to have a laugh with during the show each night, but everyone seems very philosophical and matter of fact about things, to the extent that I wonder if it’s only me who feels like this ! There are certainly no weird end – of – tour high jinks to distract the band from their playing….though the Shadows moment tonight is perhaps our best yet, with Junior, Tomps, Nick and myself hurtling across the stage behind the backdrop to take up station at the opposite side to where we normally stand, and where the band normally see us, each night., so that as they do the choreographed turn there’s a confused moment of “ hang on….they should be over THERE…have I turned the wrong way ? “ Possibly the very best part of tonight is the presence of forty – odd eleven year old kids from a local school. No, hang on, I haven’t gone all Gary Glitter on you….we learn that they are studying The Sixties as part of a history project, and as they knew we played all the music and showed all the images from the decade, their teachers thought this would be a good show for them to see. Big hand for the forward thinking of those staff ( mind you, they clearly had a ball themselves, so it wasn’t COMPLETELY altruistic !) but the kids seemed to love it…they dutifully screamed at the end of each song, giving it a nice “ Beatlemania “ feel, and it was just great to see them bopping about. We had a good crowd in tonight too, as Buxton is one of the venues where we road – tested this show a few years back, and they know how to promote us here. In fact, it’s a perfect choice for the last show…great theatre, great crowd, great crew, great place altogether. I’m totally fine for almost the whole set, then for some reason Whiter Shade Of Pale takes on an almost unbearable poignancy and I feel the tears prick my eyes…it suddenly crashes in on me that this really IS the last show, and the adventure’s over until next time. I’ve got a huge amount of personal unpleasantness to deal with when I get back, and the tour has cushioned me from the real world, but now it’s knocking on the door again and I’ve got to deal with it. I have to shake this melancholy, though, because it’s not fair on everyone else, and anyway, we’ve got an end of tour party scheduled for later on, with cakes and jelly and pop and everything. We’ve still got a show to finish, though, so I swallow my unhappiness and the three of us at stage right bellow along with the last two numbers. Again, we’d toyed with the idea of doing Spirit In The Sky but we’re really just reserving that for flat-out mental nights; this has been a huge success but there aren’t people hanging from the rafters or anything, so it’s curtain down, gear off, and into the de-rig. Before we start tearing down the kit I have a brief chat with a couple of regular fans who tell me, in one of the most touching testimonials that I’ll ever hear, that the show “ puts them on a high for days afterwards “. If we can reach people in that way then that’s good enough for me. I see Marilyn and Debbie even more briefly ( Marilyn tonight having ditched her normal jeans and Bootleg’s tour t-shirt combo for a nifty little 60’s number with kinky boots ! ) but then I really DO have to get to work. The crew here are brutally efficient, and whilst they’re standing outside with all our gear going “ What’s next to go in the van ? “ we’re still onstage trying to coil cables into the right piles, as the kit’s all going to different places tomorrow. We manage to catch up with them and avoid any dramas like leaving a key flight case behind, and then it’s a handshake goodbye and we pile on to the bus. Arthur’s done us proud….there’s champers, beer, wine, nibbles and even party bags, and the twelve of us squeeze into the back lounge of the bus and just have a couple of hours of what our Irish brethren call “ the craic “. I’m suddenly aware that this is exactly why we opted for the bus in the first place….there are no outsiders, no relatives, no family, no guests….it’s just the twelve of us, the people who did all this. Living on the bus has made us closer as a unit, and stronger too, and I’m more convinced than ever tonight that with the nucleus of this group there’s no limit to where we can take this show. Even Sunderland. I finally creep off to bed at about half past two, knowing that I’ll probably not see anyone in the morning before I leave with Arthur to take the kit back to Northamptonshire, but unlike last year at Croydon where everyone just melted off into the night after a forty – date tour, we’ve drawn a proper line under this one tonight. Now all we have to do is get back, add the figures up and see if it’s good news, bad news, or a hosepipe up the exhaust in the garage …………….

Porthcawl Grand Pavilion Sat April 2nd

2011-04-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

The plan was to head back to Wetherspoons at 8.00am for breakfast today, but a terrible night’s sleep means that I’m glued to my bunk, and that’s the case pretty much all the way to Porthcawl. I feel as if I’ve been drugged, and just cannot seem to stir myself, at least until I get in the shower. As I slough off the carapace of crud that has enveloped me for the past thirty-odd hours, I feel invigorated and finally ready to face the day. Yet another seaside town, and today it’s blessed with bright sunshine and even a soupcon of warmth from the old currant bun, though there’s a wind which finds it’s way into your every cranny ( I said cranny ) if you’re standing in the wrong place. Despite my dulcet gorblimeyguvnor tomes, I actually hail from the north – east, and it’s thus that I fully appreciate the kindred spirits we see on the Esplanade today. In Newcastle we used to say that you could always tell when winter was on it’s way as the girls started to leave their coats at home when they went out for a night on the lash, and it’s exactly the same here….I’m leaning on the seawall talking to Arthur and Steve with the sleeves of my fleece pulled over my poor little paws to stop them from freezing, when some young thing in a vest tip and shorts enthusiastically suggests to her mates that they “ buy some cans of Coke and go and drink them on the beach “. Not only is the very sight of her in this scanty clothing enough to give me hypothermia, but I’m sure I saw a polar bear on the beach earlier on…..Porthcawl is actually quite a cool little place, at least at this end of town…the “ real “ beach is back around the headland with the funfair, Kiss Me Quick hats and daytripping families from Cardiff and Newport, all shaven heads, straining rugby shirts and casual domestic violence. The only time the pleasant Spring ambience is broken comes when a load of wannabe Hells Angels on Harleys thunder along the front, their intimidating exterior somewhat mollified by the realisation that, on closer inspection, more than a few of them are of pensionable age. ( Slight linguistic diversion….what would be the collective noun for a group of bikers ? A leather ? A shitload ? An unwashed ? A wheelie ? ). Inside the venue everything is calm efficiency, except that acoustically it has all the warmth and sonic beauty of a municipal swimming baths. It’s an odd, domed, hexagonal room, and when you clap your hands under the dome it sounds as if it’s right above your head….but move a few feet back and it’s shifted way to the right. It’s thus a longer soundcheck than normal as Arthur summons all his skill and experience to make this work. We’ve used the venue’s own PA system which, whilst adequate, isn’t really helping maters much, and for a very brief while we toy with the idea of putting our own PA in, but as there’s only an hour to doors we realise this just isn’t going to be feasible. Arthur wears the expression of a man who knows he’s going to be on turd-polishing duty tonight, but if anyone can get this place to sound good, he can. The longer soundcheck means that we have to eat almost on the hoof tonight; Nick and I manage to get into recommended local chippy Beale’s seconds before it’s inundated with the aforementioned daytrippers, whose children all seem to bear such farcical names as Turrock, Cheyenne, and Cody. We get back and the crew convene at stage left to wolf down our dinner. It’s the penultimate show of the tour tonight, but there’s another reason for celebration too, as it’s Junior’s 31st birthday. None of us could believe this as he looks about 15, but it’s true. He’s growing a Tour Beard which at least adds a couple of years to his boyish visage, but which, coupled with his flowing locks, also makes him look disconcertingly like Jesus. VERY useful on those road crew prayer meeting sessions we have each morning, mind…….We’ve marked the occasion with one of those jolly little helium balloons which we’ve moored to his monitor desk, and during the course of the show I look across the stage several times to wonder who the strange moon-faced individual standing next to Junior is, until I finally make out “ Happy Birthday “ plastered across it’s mush. D’OH ! The show tonight is, to be totally honest, a bit below par…..nothing you could put your finger on and say “ THAT was wrong “ or “ HE cocked up “ but somehow it just doesn’t gel like previous nights. There’d been a bit of a discussion at soundcheck about harmony vocal lines and so some of them had changed, and maybe THAT’S what it was, but as ever, the only people who ever notice these things are the band and crew….as far as Joe and Josephine Punter are concerned they’re seeing a fantastic show, and they react accordingly. As with Blackwood, the singing on the last two songs is stunning, and the domed roof actually seems to amplify it, so it all gets a bit Cardiff Arms Park ( and yes, I KNOW it’s not there anymore, but
“ Millennium Stadium” is just SO naff ). South Wales has been great for us, and we make a mental note to ensure we come back next time around. After the show it’s our first long overnight drive for a few days….John will leave at 2.00am – ish and aim to get to the final show of the tour at Buxton around 7.00am, but for Arthur, Nick, Rodders and myself it’s into the vans and up the road to Bromsgrove. It’s not too far but feels much further as the long climb out of Wales involves more water – replenishing stops than we’d normally make, so it’s not until about 2.40am that we finally pull into a brand new Travelodge which is cunningly concealed behind a pub and a nondescript housing estate in one of the more nondescript parts of the nondescript little town that is Bromsgrove. In fact, it’s so new that Doris the SatNav doesn’t even acknowledge it’s existence, and would blithely have guided us hither and yon had not Eagle –Eyed Nick spotted the sign as we roared past. I gratefully slump into bed, and as I close my eyes I start to think about tomorrow being the last show, how quickly the tour seems to have gone and so on. I sleepily make a mental note that I must also remember to….zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Blackwood Miner's Institute Fri April 1st

2011-04-08T17:22:00.000-07:00

It’s only our second ever visit to South Wales, the first being a cracking little show at Newport Riverfront on the last tour. Tonight ( and it IS April Fool’s Day, so we were a tad dubious about this when our agent sent the date through ) we’re at a venue which glories in the name of Blackwood Miner’s Institute. It may well once have echoed to the bombast and rhetoric of the pitmen’s union, but these days it’s a cool little theatre, and it’s even hosted such biggies as Stereophonics quite recently. We may not quite have reached their dizzy heights sales-wise yet, but we’ve done pretty close to sell-out business tonight, and if last time’s experience was anything to go by we’re in for a good night. There’s a great deal of clichéd garbage talked about “ The Valleys “ and Wales being the Land Of Song and all that malarkey, but Blackwood really IS in “The Valleys “, although these valleys are so far up the mountains that you half expect to see a species of dinosaur hitherto thought extinct striding up the main street. The venue is also on a hill more suited to goats than ageing, overweight road monkeys such as myself, so by the time we’ve got the gear in I’m already cream – crackered. It’s all a bit tight inside and there’s a fair amount of flightcase Tetris going on just so we can get everything onstage, but as ever we get it nailed , if a little later than usual. The main topic of conversation regarding the venue is that for some inexplicable reason known only to the architect who built the place, it has no backstage toilet, and by extension, no backstage shower. No doubt he was a hardy miner who felt that washing was some kind of girly fussiness, and that getting rid of the coaldust weakened your back or something, but for our sorry band of bus-encrusted travellers this is bad news with a capital Smelly. There IS a washbasin which allows us to lower our undercarriages into a bowl of icy mountain stream water, but the bloodcurdling screams which emanate from the little room where the sink sits are enough to chill even the bravest heart, so for most of us discretion is the better part of valour, and we decide to wait until tomorrow. Rather typically, the fact that there’s no shower coincides with this being the hottest, stickiest venue on the whole tour, but them’s the breaks, as they say...You always know when you’re in for a good evening when the audience clap and cheer as they see the shadowy figures of the band making their way onstage during the intro footage, and tonight is one of those nights. Although they don’t cavort as early or as freely as the Dumfries crowd, this lot are loud loud LOUD and make their appreciation crystal clear. Tonight’s megacheer number is Suspicious Minds, and it’s a REAL megacheer….they clearly LOVE The King here, and when the photo of him comes up on the screens you’d have thought he WAS in the building , as opposed to still being dead. From here on in it all goes a bit banzai, and the place turns into a sea of waving hands, bellowing voices and sweat, adding yet another layer of funk to our already grimy bods. It COULD be shaping up as another Spirit In The Sky night, but the band want to keep their powder dry ( it’s the only thing that is, mind ) and so they close with the normal one-two combination of Daydream Believer and Walk Alone. The singing we hear back from the crowd is totally brilliant, and all that Welsh choir cliché nonsense suddenly doesn’t seem so daft after all. A fabulous night, then, and it isn’t over yet….a fairly elderly lady and her young female companion are still in the front row after everyone has left. She’s remained behind to politely ask if the band would play at her birthday party. She can pay them the princely sum of £ 400 but, and here’s the clincher,
“ she’ll also do a spread of sandwiches “. Sadly the date coincides with a hair-washing night for the band, so they have to regretfully decline. The response of the people here tonight has been fabulous, though….after the show we all repair to the local Wetherspoons for a restorative libation, and there’s a constant stream of folks coming by saying how much they loved the gig, when are we coming back, it’s the best thing they’ve ever had there and so on. Lovely, lovely compliments, and it just reinforces what we all believe here….that we’ve got a show which can go all the way. For now we’ve just got our sights on knocking That’ll Be The day off it’s perch, but after that, who knows ? I head back to the bus and resolve to dig out my jackboots and that map of the Sudentenland, Poland, and the Low Countries……………

Exmouth Pavilion Thurs March 31st

2011-04-08T17:20:00.000-07:00

And so we come to Exmouth. A little background is called for here before we go any further. This show had been selling very slowly, but as they’d had three months run at it we were confident that they’d turn it around and that the show would do OK. Wrong. Three days before the show it had sold a mighty fifty-two tickets, by far the lowest sales we’ve ever had. Apropos of nothing else, On every level it makes sense NOT to do the gig….firstly, we’ll lose a shedload of cash, secondly the VENUE will lose a shedload of cash, and thirdly it’ll be pretty horrible for the band. However, when we suggest this to the management of the venue they not only said they wanted to keep the date in, they also threatened to invoke a cancellation penalty if we didn’t play. This makes it financially impossible for us to cancel or postpone the date, so here we are. The bright young thing at the box office breathlessly tells me that sales have now gone up to a whopping fifty – four, and I have to go and have lie down to deal with the excitement. At east the view’s pretty….we’re right on the beach at the quiet end of town, and it’s all very picturesque and Devonian. Big John tells me that a German submarine once came up the mouth of the River Exe right here, and I wait patiently for the punchline, as John’s ALWAYS got a punchline, but no, that’s it….it’s just a micro-history lesson. .Seeing as I’m the master of largely useless trivia, I file this away for future reference... I’m sure I’ll be able to make someone’s eyes glaze over somewhere. Back inside, Dom and Ali, the two venue staff, couldn’t be friendlier, either, but even they are a tad embarrassed by the “ cabaret style “ seating and how sparse it looks in this fairly big hall. One saving grace is that Chris’s brother Anton is coming tonight, AND it’s his birthday, so he’s bringing twelve guests which will swell the numbers somewhat. We’d actually asked him if he could invite the entire population of the town where he lives, but failing that, twelve extra bodies will help nicely. The other thing that drives us mental about these shows that don’t do well is that invariably when you speak to some of the locals they say things like “ Oh, I’d have bought tickets if I’d known it was on…I didn’t see any adverts ! “. We also hear that the theatre’s foyer and little café has been closed for a while for refurbishment, and this was a popular rendezvous point, so we’ve missed out on people seeing the ads in there too. As we’ve already said, if folks just didn’t want to see this show we’d understand, because we’d be playing to no-one every night, so it HAS to come down to the local promoters. Anyway, I won’t go down that particular ranting route again, as that way lies madness…..The band’s attitude to tonight has been really good…once they realised we were stuck with it they just get ready to deliver the best show they can, and there’s no petulant snits or anyone locking themselves in dressing rooms in floods of artistic angsty tears. This, of course, is just as it should be….when folks have paid good money to buy a ticket to see you, they expect to get the best show possible whether there’s eight or eight thousand out there, but I must admit I have worked with bands who pulled the most amazing strops over things like the toilet paper in the dressing room loo being the wrong colour or the alignment of the stage messing with their feng shui . In such situations one is tempted to find a large, ungreased pole and shove it where it’ll REALLY mess up their feng shui, but fortunately we have no such issues with our chaps, and so, despite the fact that by the time the house lights go down there are open wastes between the isolated knots of audience members, they still lay into Please Please me as if they were at Wembley. There’s that initial wincing moment at the end of the song where you can actually hear individual voices and hands clapping, but Den just goes into his “welcome” link as normal, and from then on it’s all good. In fact, the open spaces work to our advantage, prompting people to get up and dance long before the band normally ask them to. This unscheduled bopfest also yields possibly one of he strangest sights I’ve ever seen. There’s a chap down at the front in an electric wheelchair, and next to him is his wife or partner. She’s holding what appears to be a kind of remote control for the chair, and as she grooves along she’s making this fellow’s chair “ dance “ too. A lot of fun for her I’m sure, but the poor chap’s gripping the arms of his chariot with in white-knuckled terror and hanging on for dear life. Eventually she hears his screams above the racket of the band and wheels him out of the firing line. Weird. There might not be many people here tonight but they’re making a proper row by the end of Daydream Believer, and it’s a genuine encore call that the band respond to. In the end it’s worked out OK ( apart from the nut-scrunching financial loss, of course ) and we’ve scored hundreds of Brownie points with the folks down here, but we could do without many more like this, to be honest. At the end of a night like this there is, of course, only one thing for professional musicians and road crew to do…..PUB FRENZY !!!!

Weymouth Pavilion Wed March 30th

2011-03-31T16:35:00.000-07:00

An early start for everyone today as we have to meet the bus and drive down to Weymouth, which is a long old poke. It’s good to see Big John again after what seems like ages, and all the pick-ups go to plan and are on time. The traffic’s light, the roads are clear, and John only has to do a 30 minute tachograph break, so we’re all puzzled when we realise we’re still sixty miles away from the venue at the time we should be loading in ! Once you’re off the M27 the roads DO get narrower and much, much slower, but this is weird…there’s no way we should be this far behind schedule. Arthur and Nick, having driven down in the vans, are already there, and a little disgruntled when they hear our news. There’s not much we can do about it, though….John’s going as quick as he can, so all the four of us can do is look disconsolately out of the bus windows at the rain as we wind our way through the Dorset countryside. The guys will use the local crew to help them load in, so at least the kit will be in the building when we get there, but it’s not a nice sensation to be stuck here with time slipping by, and we’re all twitching. We finally hit Weymouth, and it becomes clear that they’re trying to move it somewhere further down the coast, as every road seems to be dug up. We crawl with agonising slowness through this poo until we finally pull up at the venue just before 3pm, nearly two hours late. As we’d hoped, Arthur and Nick have got everything inside, and the team swings into action. It’s a testimony to how well we’ve got things nailed now that we’re up and ready for soundcheck at the normal time, and apart from a couple of glitsches and malfunctioning cables, we’ve even got time for a fish and chip session. Now, I may dash the latter statement off in a matter of seconds, but you need to be aware that the procurement of said piscine comestibles involved a trek of transcontinental proportions for me and Tomps. Wednesday evening is clearly early closing day for all the chip shops in Weymouth, and by the time we’ve covered what seems like ten fruitless miles I realise that I can’t go on any further. I collapse in a snowdrift at the side of the road, and Tomps struggles back to see what the problem is. “ I’m done for “ I tell him. “Leave me here, you go on…I’m only holding you up “ . He’s a real hero though, is our Tomps, and he hoists me over his shoulder as though I were as light as a feather, instead of actually nineteen and a half stone. Eventually the lights of The Marlborough Fish & Chip Emporium glimmer through the mist…we’ve made it, and after a restorative double cod and chips with mushy peas and a can of Vimto I’m fit enough to return to the theatre. It was a close run thing, though, let me tell you…..SO…on to the show. The Pavilion is one of those venues that never seem to do desperately well, but as soon as the council or anyone makes any noise about closing it down, then the local population are up in arms and the petitions start to fly until the action is stopped dead in it’s tracks…but then the petitioners don’t bother to come to any of the shows, and the whole process starts again ! A shame, because a full house in here would be brilliant. Even so, we’ve nearly tripled the audience from the last time we played….and just as with last time, things start slowly, with polite rather than rapturous applause and the jokes getting titters rather than laughs. In short, it looks and feels like hard work, but the boys doggedly stick to their guns and you can actually feel the audience starting to thaw. Strangely enough it’s Do You Wanna Dance in the acoustic medley that seems to do the trick tonight ( obviously a Cliff stronghold, then ) and the second half is much more of a done deal, though from where I’m sitting onstage things still sound quite muted, and I’m expecting only a handful of folks to be dancing in the “ party “ section. I’m genuinely surprised, then, to hear Arthur saying “ they’re really going for it “ on the comms. I peer round the curtain and not only is everyone on their feet, but loads of them are right up against the front of the stage too. Safe, staid Weymouth has become Rock City Central for the night, and another town is crushed beneath the mighty boot of the all – conquering Bootleg Sixties show. Or something. Tonight’s Shadows moment has the best response yet, as Nick, Tomps and myself, all fairly well equipped in the midriff department, lift out shirts, grab our bellies and treat Phil to a full – on “ truffle shuffle “ which elicits a big grin from our guitarist. Ten out of ten to him for not just hurling at the sight of three overweight men jiggling their considerable ballast at him. Fortunately we were out of the audience’s sight, otherwise we’d no doubt have been arrested for contravening some kind of health and safety rule.As we’re going to be staying here tonight and driving on to Exmouth in the morning, and as Den’s got some friends in town, almost everyone heads out into town after the show, but Arthur and I decide against it, and I must admit to crashing out at a very girly early hour. I thus miss the drama when Arthur realises that as the house crew left the Pavilion they must have switched the power off, including the power to the bus, which means that the batteries are rapidly draining and if something isn’t done about it PDQ we’re not going to be able to leave in the morning. John had taken a swift trip to town but Arthur reaches him and he gets back just in time He manages to get the bus started, but has to run the engine all night which makes for an uncomfortable ( and
costly ! ) few hours. The band, needless to say, have hooked up with Den’s friends and some local musicians and have, it’s fair to say, imbibed well of grape and grain, so when they finally crash back in at some ungodly hour they’re oblivious to all that’s gone on, and proceed to talk to each other very loudly for ages in the classic style of the terminally pissed. What with this, the engine, and a classic case of Old Geezer’s Bladder, the night passes slowly and fitfully, so it’s a very gritty-eyed and haggard Tony who finally falls asleep about half an hour before he’s due to get up……

Wimborne Tivoli Sat March 26th

2011-03-30T03:42:00.000-07:00

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…...."

Dunstable The Grove Fri March 25th

2011-03-28T02:34:00.000-07:00

So we’ve had a five – day break, and I’m wondering how much ring-rust will have accumulated in that time, considering that the show was slightly below par after just ONE day off earlier in the tour. At least the Grove Theatre is as good a place as any to try and pick things up again; we’ve played here twice before and it’s a great theatre with a flat-push load in right onto the stage,. a stack of wing space, and best of all, a sparkly new D & B PA system. Sales here had been slow initially but have picked up a lot in the last week, so we know we’ll have a good crowd, and the fact that Junior gives me a list of about twenty – two names for the guest list means that the numbers will be swollen even more ! Tomps has come up with the wizard wheeze of having his camera film us doing the set – up using time lapse photography, so we’re looking forward to seeing the playback of THAT ! As usual, everything flies in quickly, and pleasingly, there’s no sign of the layoff at all as everything goes up quickly and efficiently. We have the time to chop off the manky bits of the white gauze for the “drop” in the acoustic section, and Nick and I also manage to finally get around to making the new running board for our own PA system ( been on the “ to do “ list since Morecambe ! ) , plus we’ve got a couple of spiffy new bits of kit which also help to make the show easier to set up. The band start to arrive for soundcheck; Steve’s first, followed by Chris with his ( hopefully ! ) repaired keyboard. and then Jamie, blinking in the early ( well, 4.40pm ) light, and looking bereft without his Magic Bunk.. Soundcheck has an unusual cast today as the band run through Leon Russell’s Delta Lady; they’ve been asked to do a private show for someone who is a real Leon Russell fan, and so they feel they need to add this to the repertoire.It’s a bit lumpy the first time through, but these boys are GOOD and they’ve got it nailed after a couple of turnarounds. We also need to double-check what’s in and out of the show tonight….the last one was for Dumfries, so we need to move a bunch of the visual stuff out and other stuff back in ( well, I say “we” but actually I mean “Tomps” as my knowledge of these things renders me about as redundant as Motorhead’s reserve triangle player.) After soundcheck Steve, as ever, potters about the stage picking up any bits of loose gaffa or LX tape. This strange but endearing habit has earned him the soubriquet “ Great Uncle Bulgaria “, though I have to say, we’ve got the cleanest stage west of the Rockies. There’s another small matter to be decided on tonight. When the band segue into FBI from Apache, they do a little Shadows synchronised routine.This involves them all turning to their right, so they’re looking straight at Tomps, Nick and I in the wings, and then to the left, where they’re looking at Junior. After a couple of nights we decided it’d be a good idea to try and provide some kind of distraction at this point. Initially this was aimed at Phil, but as it’s gone on we’ve become aware of Den and Jamie peering around Phil’s back to see what we’re doing each night, so now it’s a whole band thing. So far we’ve done things like given ourselves extravagant facial hair made out of white gaffa, we’ve turned around too so as to mirror their movements, we’ve had noses made out of paper cups and worn them with rabbit ears, we’ve pretended to be swimming, we’ve even hidden. Tonight Tomps has managed to find a load of oversize glasses that ape Phil’s Hank Marvin look, so at the appropriate time we whip them on just as the band turn to face us. Unlike Phil’s glasses, these have lenses, and they create almost a 3D impression, so that when Phil turns round I squeak and jump back as he seems to be standing right in front of me. OK, OK, I KNOW it sounds childish, but it’s the kind of odd thing you do on tour, and it helps keep us sane. Showtime finally comes around, and the band click seamlessly back into gear as if they’d never been away. On a big stage like this with a good lighting rig and a big PA system they really come into their own. My partner Kay has come to the show tonight, and as she sits in the wings and watches the show unfold she asks me how we manage to see the same thing night after night and not get bored. I remember asking Arthur the same question when he was mixing something at our recording studio years back, and he told me that he got to a point in the mix where he didn’t listen to the playback as actual music as such; he was listening to it literally as a piece of sound, to work out the levels, balances and tones. It’s a bit the same with the show….. although we’re always aware of what’s going on, the quality of the playing, the audience reaction and so on, we do tend to see it as “ this is the one where we bring in that piece of footage “ or “ the moving lights have the gobo effect on them here “ “ or “ I’ve got ten slides to fit in to this one “ or “ this is the solo acoustic number so I’ll mute all the other channels on the mixing desk “. Because of this concentration, the first set can be sometimes be over in what seems like ten minutes, and that’s very much the case here tonight. The crowd have been right behind us from the start, with Junior’s family and friends among the most vocal, and the band have responded to this, so my potential worries about maybe needing to blow cobwebs away have proved groundless. In an earlier blog I talked abut how on big stages and with the full facilities you can see the future of this show, and tonight is very much one of these nights. It’s not just about spreading out, it’s about using the space properly. It’s about being able to do little theatrical flourishes like the gauze drop in the acoustic section. It’s about having enough lights in the rig so that even the basic colour washes are rich and deep, and the moving lights are the icing on the cake as opposed to having to carry the other lighting. It’s about having a PA system which allows Arthur to weave HIS spells and bring out all the subtleties and nuances that the music needs. It’s about the images on the screens being huge and striking. It’s about the smaller gestures becoming grander, such as putting six pyros across the front of the stage instead of just four. Individually these are really all just “ tweaks “, but when you can put them all together as we have tonight there’s a very different take on this show, and suddenly the City Halls, Apollo’s and ( whisper it quietly….) even West Ends don’t seem so far away. Back when dinosaurs strode the Earth I used to be an agent, and one of the criteria we always applied when looking at any new band or artists we were looking to sign was “ Will they be able to project beyond this pub / club ? Can I see them playing Wembley ?” With THIS band and to some extend THIS show, we’ve already got part of the answer, as they totally rocked the 02 Arena when they opened for Elton John a couple of New Year's Eves back. There’s no point in going into this business if all you want is to be satisfied with scratching around the circuit year after year as many artists and shows seem to do. We’re doing this because we want it to be the best show of it’s kind in the country, and then beyond that. We WANT to be in the City Halls. We WANT to be in the West End, We know it’s a long and potentially costly process, and we also know that in this weird world of showbusiness it might not ever happen, but as I look out at another standing, cheering crowd as the show ends I also know that we’re doing as much as WE can to make it so…..we’ve got the right people, the right pitch, and the right attitude to get there. Are you with us, brothers and sisters…..?!

Dumfries DG One Leisure Complex Sat March 30th

2011-03-25T01:28:00.001-07:00

Our first, and unfortunately only visit to Scotland. The original plan had been to go on to Dundee, Inverness, Stirling and Kilmarnock after tonight, but ticket sales have been so appalling that we’ve been left with no option other than to cancel; we don’t have the financial reserves to keep the tour out on the road for four or five days with no income, and as Middlesbrough has been similarly awful, that’s been canned too, and so we’ve now got a five-day hiatus coming up. Good news for the band and crew, who get to go home and see their friends and families, but not such good news for the four partners and the tour accounts. What is SO annoying about this is that here in Dumfries we’ve done really well, and they’ve sold more tickets than the five cancelled shows put together. Leading up to the show the other venues all seemed to be looking to us to cough up money for ads and posters, but THEY are the promoters, not us….we’ve already sent them a load of posters and flyers at our expense, and it’s their job to sell the shows, not ours….we help where we can, and have done some local paper ads here and there right through the tour…but the main burden is on the venue as the promoter. When tonight’s venue sent me an A4 sheet packed with the media work they’d already done and what they still planned to do, I really wanted to send it to all the other venues and say “ THIS is how you promote a show, you numpties “. What’s the point of us spending a year in preparation for a tour, then putting our financial security on the line to pay for it, THEN working our nuts off for the duration of the tour itself only for some council – run venue whose employees pick up their salary at the end of every month whether people come through the door or not to go “ Oh, shall we spend some money on advertising this show ? No ? OK then “ which is what seems to happen. We KNOW there are reasons…..we’ve seen how the recession is really biting now, and Dundee’s a very depressed town ( I’m saying nothing….) and the Scottish dates lost a huge amount of their pre-Christmas business to the terrible weather in December, but the bottom line is….so did Dumfries, and yet we’ve got 300 people here tonight, because PEOPLE KNOW WE’RE COMING. To use a line from the film Field Of Dreams, “ Build it and they will come “. DON’T promote the show and you end up with a situation like this. It’s slack, it’s lazy, and it’s wrong. If we were stiffing everywhere on the tour then you say “ OK, it’s us…no-one wants to see this show “ but that’s NOT the case. It’s beyond bloody frustrating, and it’s something we’ll have to think about very carefully on future tours. This is the second time that Middlesbrough, for example, have had the show, and the second time they’ve failed to sell tickets for it. See a pattern there ? I do. When you ask for an explanation you get vague “ Yeah, it’s really weird..…things we thought would do well just aren’t selling “. Well, that’s maybe because you’re not advertising them properly you TOSSERS !!!! Anyway, on to some people who DO know how to promote a gig….the DG One is a spanking new leisure complex which hosts all manner of events. Rodders was here last year with Scots megastars Runrig, and soon it’ll play host to the globe-buggering entertainment extravaganza that is the Roary The Racing Car Show, but tonight it’s ours. It’s a big place but it doesn’t feel soulless like some sports halls, and the facilities are really good. We even get a whole changing room to ourselves, though this turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. I go in early to have a shower and am the very first person to use the place since last night. I’m feeling quite skanky as I make my way into the first shower cubicle, but a good hot sluicing will sort THAT out. It’s got one of those water – saving things where you have to keep pressing a button to maintain the flow, so in I go, close the door, and duly press the button, at which point a spray of scrotum-shrivellingly cold water pins me to the door. I scream like a girl but there’s no alternative…either I bite the bullet and wait for it to warm up or I stay mucky. To my gasping, whimpering relief it only takes one more icy blast before it gets hot, and from then on all is wonderful. Nightmare. Everything goes together well and quickly today, though Rodders struggles a bit with focusing the lights as they’re miles in the air and can only be reached by a megaladder, so he has to wait until we’ve totally finished onstage before he can start his tomfoolery, and as a result misses his heart attack on a plate, aka Scotch pie and chips. As the rest of us chomp away and feel our arteries hardening, we reflect that maybe he got the best part of the deal after all….We’ve had to make some judicious changes to the visuals today…for obvious reasons out go the England World Cup footage and the Bobby Moore ad, in comes superb video footage of Dumfries in the Sixties and some Scotttish TV programme idents, but to Arthur’s disappointment we can’t find the Barr’s Irn Bru ad he’d asked us to look for. Still, we’ve managed to sufficiently de-Anglicize things, and Tomps has done a great job of re-editing everything on the fly. We’re really not sure what to expect as the lights go down, but as the band crash into Please Please Me, we see…what’s that ? It can’t be ….it is ! People are dancing in front of the stage from the very first song ! A bit of chat from Den, then it’s into Don’t Throw Your Love Away, and….they’re still dancing ! By Hippy Hippy Shake there are loads of people down there, and while they politely sit and watch the visual inserts, up they get again as soon as the next song starts. I wonder what’ll happen as Den takes the stage alone for The Times They Are A-Changing, but it’s brilliant…..everyone sings along and it gets one of the loudest cheers of the night. We are, it is safe to say, home and dry here.. There’s an interesting moment on Pinball Wizard tonight; I’ve had to move the pyros back from the edge of the stage because of the dancers, and they’re now close to the “black tat” we use to hide the cables. As the stage right pyro goes off, some of the fallout drops onto the black tat, igniting this supposedly flame-retardant material, and soon a merry little blaze is dancing along the front of the stage. Quick as a flash Nick runs on and starts stamping the flames out, and I’m mortified with embarrassment….until I see that the audience think it’s part of the act ! It’s THAT kind of night, and the band totally cruise home in style. Another booking here, please !! As we’ve got this unscheduled break now, everyone’s keen to get home….Rodders is heading back to Cornwall, so he and Nick jump in the van, and off they go. Phil’s off back to Sweden, and Arthur’s flying home too, so we drive to Liverpool airport to drop him off for a six am flight, and I do the rest of the journey on me tod. Tonight was totally great in so many ways,….in fact, the general view is that it’s been the best show of the tour so far. We feel that nothing can dampen our spirits…. Until the van turns onto the motorway and up comes the first sign….Preston 80 miles. And to think we used to reckon Preston was the end of the world. O joy unconfined. Just the seven-hour drive to look forward too, then…..

Bridlington Spa Theatre Fri March 19th

2011-03-25T01:16:00.000-07:00

Luckily, nothing else did go wrong, but because of the delay and the problems with having to fill the Merc’s engine with water every 200 yards or so, it’s gone three am before Nick and I hit Le Craphole Du Jour, also known as the Grantham South Travelodge. The nicotine-grizzled troll on reception seems hell-bent on stopping us getting to our beds, presenting us with a litany of questions, forms and bizarre touch-screen computer malarkey, but we finally manage it and I’m asleep before Nick’s even had a chance to realise it, with the result that he engages in a thirty- minute conversation with me and thinks I’m just being a bit quiet or standoffish. A stentorian snore finally tells him the truth of the matter, and he crashes too. The next morning is fine and bright but WAAAAAY too early as we head out to the two recalcitrant vehicles, and cross our fingers. Nick’s starts right away, and with just a pause to fill the radiator with the contents of a small reservoir, so does mine, and we’re off to the east coast of Yorkshire. The band and the rest of the crew are snugly parked against the venue right on the prom, and it’s such a beautiful day that they are actually woken up by the heat of the morning sun warming the bus. They run onto the sand, gambolling like children, and rush headlong into the sea as it gently breaks upon the golden beach. In the clear azure sky above seagulls wheel and swoop, their distinctive cries echoing across the strand, as below them the tour party splash, dive, and swim in the clear waters.( This, by the way, it’s what’s called poetic license…the reality is that Tomps and Junior thought about having a paddle, realised they’d lose at least one foot to frostbite, and went back to bed.)Funnily enough, when we were here last year it was also a beautiful day, with a similarly murderously cold wind, but if you can get out of the wind it’s actually pretty damn lovely…after the load-in Nick and I realise there’s a kind of sheltered terrace along one side of the hall, and it’s an absolute sun trap. The benches there are all occupied by old folks, their wrinkled faces turned towards the heat like superannuated sunflowers, and we join this strangely peaceful little community for a while, talking in hushed tones as if we were in church, so anxious are we not to disturb the tranquillity of these elderly sun-worshippers. Suddenly one of them farts loudly, and with what sounds horribly like a follow-through, so we scuttle back inside. This being the seaside, there’s only one choice for crew grub…fish and chips, and we know the best plaice in town. Ha ! Plaice ! Fish !! See what I did there ? Oh, never mind…..Busy Bee’s is one of those quintessentially English fish and chip shops that cook all the fish as it’s ordered and you order it by weight. Having seen the size of the portions it would appear the choices were “ Big, Bigger and Moby Dick “ but it’s totally gorgeous, and coupled with a pot of mushy peas and a can of Vimto a chap could easily believe he’d died and gone to heaven here. We invade Den’s dressing room and chow down in a silence broken only by the odd moan of ecstasy. There’s some trepidation about the projectors tonight, but despite the Ribena mark they behave reasonably well….the chaps had a look today and realised the mark is due to a burn, so there’s going to have to be some serious repair work done when the tour’s over, but at least it looks as if we’ll be able to get through the last dates. The flickering’s not so bad tonight, but one light has flickered out altogether….we hear the sad news that The Shadows’ Jet Harris has passed away, and as a mark of respect decide to dispense with the Hank Marvin suit and visual jokes tonight. Tomps finds a really good picture of the man and adds it to the slide show so we can pay proper tribute to him at the end of the Shadows medley. As with Samson’s hair, however, the Hank suit clearly gives Phil his Shadows – playing powers, because tonight, for the first time, and without the suit, he goes wrong, and the band have a mini-flap for a couple of seconds until they pull it round again. Could have been the ghost of ol’ Jet just funning with us, of course….Last time we were here we played in the Great Hall with the seats in a cabaret style, and had a belting night, with loads of people turning up in 60’s clobber. In tonight’s room there is a conventional theatre setting ( and very nice it is too ) but the 60’s kit is still in force, and one particular group of ladies have really gone to town. There’s a lovely, warm feeling to tonight, right up until the point two women at the front get thrown out for being pissed and abusive, but hey, you can’t have everything. After the show we try to track the group of ladies down as they’d wanted a picture with the band and we wanted to put it on the website to encourage more people to do the dressing – up thing, but as is the case with venue stewards everywhere, they hustle everyone out…. one minute you’re in the gig applauding the band, the next you’re standing in a cold street by an exit wondering where your coat is and why your wig’s on back to front. Shame. Tonight it’s Arthur and Rodders doing the van stint, so they’re off to Scotch Corner to stay overnight before pushing on to Dumfries. I’m really tired and get to bed as soon as is socially acceptable ( i.e. after we’ve ripped the piss out of Phil about the Shadows cock-up for about an hour ) but these are not good roads, and it’s like driving over a ploughed field. Luckily Big John must think so too as he eventually pulls in for a few hours to give himself ( and us !) a welcome little break, and I manage to grab a nap. We’ll need our wits about us when we get to the border and the notoriously tough and nasty Scottish Passport Control…

Stevenage Gordon Craig Theatre Thurs March 17th

2011-03-25T01:15:00.000-07:00

As you may recall if you read the blogs from last time, on every tour there’s one show where the Gods Of Rock rise, gather up their spandex robes, adjust their rhinestone halos and say “ Have some of THAT, O lesser mortal “. Today is that show. Even though it’s now over I’m still shaking. I apologise in advance if the usual narrative style ends up being more of a catalogue of disasters, but believe me, that’s how it went. I’m not even sure I can remember them all, but here goes…..Well, to start with, all was fine….we had a bit of brekkie at Tescos and then back to the venue for a nice shower, and all seemed deep and crisp and even. The gear got loaded in, the projectors went up in the air….and then we noticed one of them had a big purple spot at the bottom of the screen. This can be down to many things, from burned – out lamps to suicidal raspberries throwing themselves in front of the bulb, but the one thing it ISN’T is good….especially when a lot of the material on the screen is white or light - coloured. It looks like someone’s lobbed a bottle of Ribena at it.Arthur and Tomps have a look but there’s nothing apparent and nothing they can do….and then it starts to flicker, quite badly. Again, there’s little we can do, so we apply some gentle impact therapy and hoist the projectors back into the air…at which point one of the others starts to flicker and break up too. Now, as the visuals are such an important part of the show, you can appreciate why this heralds an attack of what Manchester United’s manager calls “ squeaky bum time “. The problem is, there really ISN’T anything we can do…we have no spares, no specialist knowledge, and, this late in the day ( and your ) no recourse to a repairman….we just have to get on with it. By soundcheck we’ve got the projectors switched off to save lamp life in case that’s the issue, but this is soon forgotten as the soundcheck starts to degenerate into a frustrating maelstrom of whistles, pops and feedback squeals onstage. Then one of the DI boxes
( through which the acoustic guitars go) breaks down, almost unbelievably followed shortly after by the bass guitar DI. There’s very little that can go wrong with these things, though we’ve got a spare…but now two have died. The house come to the rescue and loan us one but it’s a short-term solution, and we’ve got no chance of getting back to the unit where our others are stored. Bugger. Just after that another channel goes down on one of the stage boxes, and we’re wondering if there’s a ghost or gremlin in here tonight. We finally get through the soundcheck with no bloodletting and cross our fingers that the projectors will make it through the show….this is another local gig and so there are many friends and family in, which means we want things to be perfect. What we DON’T want is for Den to walk to the microphone on the opening number, get his foot caught in his jack lead and rip it out of his bass guitar before he’s even sung a note…but that’s what happens. He recovers well but it’s an inauspicious start….and as I fire in the first of the animated slides, they freeze, for the first time in a long time, and definitely for the first time on this tour. I can only step through to the next one, which looks horrible and jerky. Several slides in, and it freezes again. This is a nightmare, as the whole Kennedy / Dylan solo that Den does is backed by animated slides. Tomps tells me to look away as he always does, sticks up a holding slide onto the screens and mid-show closes everything down and reboots it, which is pretty drastic and basic at the same time, but seems to do the trick. The purple spot on the projector seems to be getting bigger ( it isn’t ) and the flickering seems to be getting worse ( it is ) but somehow we get through until the end of the show without further mishap, although the lads made some changes to the running order which caught us out a bit. Was it a good show ? I honestly have no idea, as I was so on edge waiting for something else to go tits up. They could have played “ My Old Man’s A Dustman “ tonight and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. We know there’s nothing we can do with the projectors…..we just have to limp them through to the end of the tour…and I must be totally honest and say I just want today to be over so that we can get to Bridlington and come at it all again fresh tomorrow. The load – out is the fastest we’ve done on the tour, thanks to Kate the stage manager and her electric cattle prod ( not very PC or union-friendly but BLOODY effective ) and this is a good thing….Nick and I are driving the vans up to Grantham tonight and then doing the rest of the trek to Brid tomorrow morning, so we’re anxious to get away….but the Rock Gods have not finished with us yet. Oh no. Nick jumps into his shiny new van to drive it into the loading bay and….nothing happens. At all. It’s completely dead, but this is no simple flat battery jobbie…when he puts the keys in the ignition the headlights come on before he’s even turned the ignition switch on..,,,and when he DOES turn it on, they go off. There’s some kind of short, and only one thing to do…call the AA. We figure that if they can at least get him going we’ll drive straight to Bridlington tonight and sleep in the vans, a prospect that fills me with a warm fuzzy glow. Or not. He rings the AA and they predictably tell him they’ll try and have a patrolman out some time before the next Ice Age, but to our amazement and joy he turns up within half an hour. With very little teeth – sucking, head – shaking and “ that’s need to go the garage mate” – ing, he waves his hands over Nick’s engine, intones an incantation under his breath, sticks a jump lead onto the engine casing and with a roar it starts. At this point he starts to try and explain to Nick and Big John that there’s a problem with the overhead underhang or the knurled grunion rod or something, but frankly I don’t care…we’re moving again, so let’s just GET THERE and we can talk about it afterwards ! It’s gone 1.30am by the time we finally roll out, but we’re moving. PLEASE don’t let anything else happen…….

Radlett Centre Wed March 16th

2011-03-25T01:13:00.000-07:00

If it’s Wednesday, it must be Radlett…..we played here last year just after the tour finished when we did a one – off charity show for our agent Alan Field, and I remember it as being a bit weird….no Rodders, as he’d gone off on Runrig or Gary Numan, and we had Ellie Leah back in the show to do four or five numbers. It was just near enough and yet far enough away from the tour to be really odd…things kind of clicked into place easily enough as we’d only finished the main tour a couple of weeks before, but then a new tune would come along, or Ellie would come onstage, and it was all a bit unsettling, especially as I’d had to go back to calling the lighting cues to the house, having been so used to Rodders handling all this. A year on and we’ve only seen Ellie once since, at Steve’s wedding, as she’d joined the cast of Sister Act in the West End, but other than that it’s business as usual for us this time round. Big John’s day hasn’t started well….he was slumbering like a baby ( if you can imagine a six foot four, bearded baby ) in his bunk when along came some Great British Workmen who wanted to dig up the road, right where he was parked. Now, normally, if someone asks Big John to move the bus once he’s parked up and asleep, the ensuing fireworks make the current shenanigans in Libya look like a vicarage bonfire night party, but he complies without anyone losing a limb or a head. The respite is temporary, though, as these doughty artisans set to with the old pneumatic drills, making further sleep impossible ( except for Jamie, of course, who is ensconced in his Magic Bunk, which sends it’s occupant into a slumber so deep we can only tell he’s not dead by saying the word “ beer” and watching his nose twitch ). When I arrive at the gig in one of the vans John is stalking around the car park looking for all the world like a grizzly bear in search of fresh prey, but luckily when he sees me he breaks into a smile….I’ll not be on the menu today, then. The only saving grace about all this racket is that we’re just a few miles up the road at Stevenage tomorrow, so John will have plenty of time to catch up on his zeds. The Radlett Centre is another cool little theatre, and the only slightly bizarre thing about it is that the extra row of seats they’ve installed in the front is about six inches away from our PA system….not a problem were we Metallica or similar purveyors of noise, because those fans actually want their heads inside the speakers. I mean, I know some of our fans are getting on a bit, and may be a little hard of hearing, but this is ridiculous !! Fortunately good sense prevails, and they’re moved out of the way, thus avoiding the possibility of death by Bootleg Sixties. Alan’s actually here tonight ( he was going to come to Harlow but realised it clashed with the Champions League match between AC Milan and his beloved Spurs….we’re still smarting from the rejection ) so we have a bit of a catch-up about how the tour is going, plans for the future, and some offers we’ve had for later in the summer. It’s always good to see Alan, and it’s especially interesting this time as he’s also agent and manager for The Searchers, who have been crossing paths with us all over the country. He tells us that THEIR business has been a bit patchy too, and that’s actually a good thing for us to hear…we just have to keep believing that any problems we’re having with attendances are not down to the show being a pile of wombat poo, but are the result of economic factors and other stuff we don’t really understand. We’ve done over half a house here tonight which is pretty respectable for a first “ public “ gig ( the last one was a private show ) but even though the audience are very appreciative everything seems a bit flat after the sturm und drang of Scunthorpe’s mentalists last night, at least until the end, at which point, as we’ve already said, resistance is futile. This is pretty unfair, however, as Scunny was a bit special, and by any other measure tonight would be classed as s really good gig. Go Now makes a welcome return ( though it turns out to be a One Night Only engagement ! ) and everything else is as bang on as ever…..it just doesn’t take off like last night. Afterwards, however, Alan is fulsome in his praise, telling us how much the show has improved since last time and how much slicker it is. He’s been round the block a time or ten so he knows his onions, does Alan, and it’s good to hear his endorsement. The only place where we differ is that he’s very much in favour of us bringing Ellie or another girl singer back into the show right away, whereas we see this as a possible development for the future, along with the dancers, banjo player and fire-eating dwarf ( I’m joking, of course….we’d NEVER have a banjo player ). It’s all very cordial, though, and everyone’s in a pretty good mood afterwards. The band have the option of another night at home so they all scuttle off into the night ( except Phil, who, being based in Sweden, can’t quite make it home and back in time for tomorrow’s show, so like some Flying Dutchman of the motorways, he is doomed to forever travel around Britain in this bus ). Arthur and Nick also head home, leaving just the crew and Phil to make the run up to Stevenage. We get parked and powered up outside the Gordon Craig with no problems just before midnight, and then we remember there’s a 24 hour Tescos just across the car park !! I feel a Doritos hot salsa sauce and cool tortilla chips frenzy coming on, and the other lads keep saying the word “ cider” for some reason, so off we scoot. These all – night supermarkets are SO weird….it seems like the only other normal shoppers are policemen and nurses, because everyone ELSE must be a total stoner judging by the huge bags of crisps, chocolate, biscuits and other munchies – satisfying snacks their baskets are piled high with. I get to the till and plonk down my basket, piled high with crisps, chocolate and biscuits…….oops….

Scunthorpe Plowright Theatre Tues March 15th

2011-03-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

A moment, before we discuss today’s show, to run through the events of our day off here yesterday, The people at the Plowright are a fine group of human beings, and Glyn the tech manager had arranged to let us park up the bus, connect to shore power and use their facilities yesterday too, so we were all clean and sparkly and ready to “ do “ sunny Scunny. Somewhere along the way, however, the wires must have got crossed, and so the proposed tour of the museum, library, art gallery and ironworks never materialised. Instead, I saw Nick, Rodders, Tomps and Junior heading off to town at about 11.00am “ to get some breakfast “. I didn’t see them again until much, much later that night, by which time Tomps the master cider – drinker had worked his evil influence on the others, found a Wetherspoons, and a reasonably – sized orchard had been consumed in the name of “ sampling the various brands “. By the time we hook up with them in a posh Indian restaurant that night they’re all as sampled as newts, and Nick in particular is having trouble with speaking English, staying awake and remembering his own name. In fact, he sleeps through pretty much the entire meal, to the great amusement of all his fellow Booties, and I’m left wondering what sort of mess he’s going to be in tomorrow morning…….As it transpires, quite a bad one. His eyes are like two cigarette burns in a nun’s bum and he looks like one of the president’s faces carved into Mount Rushmore….in other words, rocky. Tomps, being a dyed in the wool rugger bugger, is used to taking on board copious amounts of alcohol and then being fairly untouched the next day , and both Junior and Rodders baled out early enough to be relatively unscathed this morning, but Nick is a bit out of practise, and he’s paying the price today. To be fair to him, he still gets the work done…only he does it in total silence, lying down , and with an icepack strapped to his head. I must say that these days I just can’t drink anymore, especially if I’m working, and as I see Nick struggle through the ninth circle of Hell I thank my lucky stars that this is so ! Everything else about today goes well, though….this is a great theatre with plenty of wing space and nice easy access, though it has to be said the dressing rooms are, shall we say, a little tired, in the same way that Gadaffi is a little mental, but they’ll do for us….we’re not proud ! There’s one thing about the Plowright that’s really good, though, and that is that it has a low roof, which traps the audience noise and kind of filters it back onto the stage, so that when they clap or sing along they sound like a football crowd, and this helps create a brilliant atmosphere. There are lots of people here from last time, but there are enough laughs on the jokes and links we’ve used before to let us know that there are plenty of newcomers too, and that’s definitely what we’re after. When the band play on these smaller stages they are very, very powerful, and tonight is a perfect example. There are also lots of little things that have helped tweak the show to make it slicker and better this time around. For example, although Rodders has brought fewer moving lights this time he’s using them in a really effective way, and he also knows the show so well now that he’s picking up all the links and solos with his “specials”. The moving images Tomps does are great and I now know by heart where all the slides need to be fired in. Arthur’s got the sound just so, the lights are bang on, and then there’s the band…….it really is a pretty awesome package, to borrow a word which our colonial cousins across the Atlantic are prone to overusing. Tonight, resistance is futile, and the audience are in the band’s pockets within about three numbers. It all means that they can relax a bit, and at that point all bets really ARE off….there aren’t many bands that could live with the guys on this kind of form. It’s a cracking night all round, and when you see this kind of thing happening and a virtually full house going totally banzai, the whole thing comes together and makes perfect sense.. After the show the band meet and greet, and there are loads of well-wishers wanting to tell them what a fantastic night they’ve had. Happily Nick no longer looks like an extra from Dawn of The Dead, and with the mighty assistance of Matt, the house crew’s human forklift, we’re out and away in no time. I’m actually heading home tonight for some reason which I can’t quite remember, and just at the point where I’m falling asleep at 3.00am I see that the road I need to use to get back is closed. Arse ! The other lads are riding on Radlett in the Tourbus Of Doom, and it’s a couple of gigs on home territory now, so we’ll see if we can’t bring some of that Scunny spirit with us. Although don’t mention spirit ( or any other type of alcohol ) to Nick ever again….

St Helens Theatre Royal Sun March 12th

2011-03-17T09:36:00.001-07:00

Another short hop today, so because the nice Oakengates people let us stay here again last night, we have a mini lie - in and mooch off about 11.00am. All is going swimmingly until we actually get to St Helens. The area around the theatre is very Coronation Street-esque, which in itself isn't a problem; what IS a problem is that someone's dropped a pedestrian precinct right in the middle of the road we want to go down, and there's an impenetrable one-way system which renders these serried rows of terraced houses completetly identical. It takes us an hour to find the theatre, and even then we can only reach it by reversing the bus and vans the wrong way down a one-way street, much to the chagrin of an old git washing his clapped - out car in the street. " This is a one-way street you know " he huffs. " We're only going one way", replies Nick, which gives rise to an outburst of indignation that I shan't dignify by repeating here. By now we're an hour late, we're struggling to get the vehicles in, and I've had enough of matey and his puffed - up histrionics. I must admit that I let fly with a stream of the most corrosive epithets, whch culminated in telling him that if they had some blinking decent road signs in this blinking place then we wouldn't need to blinking reverse down his blinking road. Except I may not actually have said blinking. Once at the theatre we quickly make up the time as Mike and Pete the house guys are great. The only real downer with tonight is that we know this is the lowest-selling show oh the whole tour, and I must admit it makes vibing yourself up to do the best possible show a bit of an effort. Everyone digs in, though, and soundcheck is got out of the way without incident. The theatre also has a very narrow proscenium arch which makes siting the musisians so that they don't disappear into the wings a bit of a challenge, but this gets overcome too, and by the time showtime comes around the atmosphere backstage is actually pretty good. I must say here that the band have handled the whole adaptation to tour bus life really well...they're not normally used to arriving at venue until just before soundcheck, or even later in some cases, but on this tour they get there when the rest of us do. That means they've got a lot of time to themselves but they've used it well; some of them explore the town we're in, some read, some just go for a walk. In the case of Jamie, he sleeps. Oh my goodness, how the boy sleeps. In fact, he can be such a sloth I've considered putting a tree trunk along the length of the bus and letting him hang upside down from it. He's the Rip Van Winkle of the Bootleg Sixties show and no mistake, but even THIS is good....the more rest he and Den get, the better we can protect their voices. I must admit than in touring days when my time at the venue wasn't so filled with poo as it is now, I was similarly inclined, and was to be found in my bunk at every available opportunity. There's a lot to be said for rest, mind, especially when you get to my age ! So on to the show, and it's one of those odd ones...the people who are here love it, but there's not many of them in so it's all just so QUIET ! This definitely makes things more difficult for the band, especially on the links, where they're used to more audience response. It's not that people aren't getting the jokes, it's just that their laughter is largely lost in the theatre, but as we've always said, it doesn't matter whether there's 10, 100 or 10,00, people in the audience, they've all paid good money to get in here and see us, and so we have to put on the best show we can. The first half is hard work but goes well enough, and then we get the message back....Den's dressing room has been broken into and he's had his phone and wallet stolen.There's not really much you can do in a twenty-minute interval, but Mike gets right on the case and contacts the okice while I call T Mobile to suspend the phone service. He's insured, so that's a good thing, but if you're anything like me and carry your life in your mobile then you'll appreciate how much of a nightmare this is, even more than the theft of the money. For me the most amazing thing is that he can then go onstage and start the second half with, of all the ironic titles, Feeling Groovy, which he quite clearly isn't. In fact you'd never think anything untoward had happened at all, as he gives it his usual 100%, but after the show he's one pissed - off puppy. The polioe arrive to make a report and give a crime number but despite their politeness you can't help but feel this is something they've seen a grillion times up here, and they know as surely as we do that none of the stolen items will ever be recovered. On top of the low turnout it puts a really bad spin on the evening, so we just move into fifth gear and get out of the theatre and then the town as quickly as we can. I'm carrying a spare mobile with me which I offer to Den, but as it takes a degree in astrophysics to even work out how to make a simple call, he sensibly declines, and opts to sort something out at the T Mobile shop in Scunthorpe tomorrow. This could be another venue to add to the " Stockport FIle " as it's become known.....

Telford Oakengates Theatre Sat March 12th

2011-03-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

As it’s relatively short run from Derby to Telford we’ve opted to leave the bus outside the Assembly Rooms and leave at 8.00am this morning; that lets everyone have a night in the bus where it’s not moving, and we’ve got daylight if we have a problem with the van again. One again the theatre have been very helpful and have left us a power cable out for the bus, plus the lovely Heather from the venue lets us in early to do the whole shower thing, so it’s a squeaky clean bunch of Booties crew who convene for the load-in. It’s a new one to us, is the Oakengates, but it’s a cool little theatre and the tech lads, Euan and Rob, are not only helpful but a good laugh too, which always helps the day along. As I’ve got a boatload of admin to do I’ve gone in early, and the lads kindly let me skip the first part of the load – in to finish off. For some strange reason this takes longer than expected and I finish JUST as the last piece of gear rolls onto the stage….! As soon as we start to set up I’m reminded of a little army of worker ants….everyone knows exactly what they’re doing and so we scurry around the stage, antennae wiggling. Everything is going fine until someone drops a sugarlump on the floor and we have an uncontrollable urge to swarm all over it…..It’s another quick build today, and that can only mean one thing…fish and chip break !! Arthur heads out and returns with the biggest portions of chips I’ve ever seen…I mean, whole fields of spuds must have given their lives to feed us today, and I’ve also got what appears to be two fish, which means something almost unheard of happens…I have to (gulp!) leave some. For a cove raised on the sanctity of clearing your plate at meals, this is tantamount to sacrilege, but I really DID feel like a bursting sofa by the end of it. By showtime I’ve managed to prise myself into an upright position and waddle over to my position at Missile Command, and I’m hoping that the band haven’t partaken themselves, or else this is going to be a somewhat static performance tonight ! Luckily they haven’t, and so they kick off with their customary vim and vigour. When we do these places for the first time you really can’t tell what sort of response you’re likely to get, but the show has sold quite healthily and the applause we get is substantial and prolonged. There’s plenty of life in these folks, and as the set progresses it quickly shapes up into one of the better gigs we’ve done….the band are on form and all the “ crowd pleasers “ do just what it says on the tin. The acoustic section goes down very well too, and we’re cruising by the interval. The second half kicks off much as the first and we relax into our roles until suddenly Jamie has a senior moment during Itchycoo Park and goes into the chorus instead of the second verse. The band recover really, really well, but Jamie’s been thrown and as a result his vocal virtually disappears from the mix, prompting Arthur to warn us on the comms that maybe his voice has gone. As we’re about to go into the Hole In My Shoe / Strawberry Fields / Whiter Shade Of Pale section there’s a quick flurry of conversation as we try to work out how to jump the visuals forward if Jamie has to duck out of these, and as s result a miss a cue, but then Jamie comes over to the piano and we see him give a thumbs up to Junior. There’s a collective intake of breath as he sings his first vocal….and it’s fine. We realise that what must have happened is that when he realised his mistake he must have backed right off the microphone and that’s why we weren’t hearing anything. It’s been a false alarm but what it DID show was how well trained we all are now…the band got through the hiccup with barely a missed note and we’d worked out a Plan B for the visuals within a matter of seconds. This only comes from practise and experience, and we’ve now got both in spades. The rest of the show is a total triumph, and Telford becomes another venue to add to the “ we’ll come here again “ list. As it’s a shortish run to St Helens we’ve decided again to stay here tonight, courtesy of those nice Oakengates people, and do the drive tomorrow morning. That can only mean one thing…après gig !!! There are two pubs within staggering distance of the venue which stay open late, and so we quickly load out then head into town for a restorative libation or two. The first sight of the town as we leave the theatre isn’t a prepossessing one….all the shops have shuttered fronts which are somehow eerily reminiscent of Beirut, but by the time we’ve made our way to the pub it’s looking a lot more homely. In a nearby club a Guns’n’Roses tribute band is playing, and we toy with the idea of going along, but when you’ve listened to music all day that’s the last thing you want, to be honest, so we all file into the bar, only to be greeted by the teeth – rattling, brain numbing volume of the TV which seems to be tuned to a channel specialising in dance music that’s not dissimilar to a pneumatic drill at full throttle. Grabbing a drink we head out to the comparative peace of the beer garden, where the six of us sit around a table and immediately begin checking our phones. Big John has been in the pub too and comes out to find us all staring at our screens. “ What the hell are youse lot doing ? “ he asks, and Tomps replies “ We’re just texting each other “ which would be even funnier if I hadn’t seen one of my daughters and her friends doing JUST that in the past. We know the band are somewhere in town as well ( maybe at the Guns’n’Roses thing picking up tips on throwing shapes ) but they’re nowhere to be seen tonight, so we crew monkeys and Big John settle down to an hour or so of banter, very little of which would be repeatable in a reputable family publication such as this…suffice to say the conversation touched on such things as the best swearwords I ever heard, incipient senility and a joke which ended “ and then the vicar said “ That’s not even my dog……… ! “

Derby Assembly Rooms Fri March 11th

2011-03-15T06:06:00.001-07:00

The bus arrived at about 5.15am this morning, but as the load in isn’t until 1 o’clock everyone catches up on their sleep. The Assembly Rooms is a familiar old friend to Arthur, Rodders and myself through our days doing the Bloodstock Festival here
for several years. Despite it’s name the festival was nothing to do with horse breeding or racing; instead it was two days of dodgy metal bands, often German, with singers that sounded like they’d either got an intimate part of their anatomy stuck in a mangle or else that they were trying to vomit up the soles of their own feet. It was a vista of denim. leather, unwashed hair and acne, and we loved it, every last nut-shrivelling, eardrum-buggering, horns-ablaze, Teutonic posturing moment of it. Sadly the festival no longer comes here, having been hijacked by corporate hyenas in Germany, and the whole seat of the pants, could collapse at any minute thrill of the thing has been replaced by a homogenised, sanitized, just-add-water bog standard festival. Oh, the same bands play, of course, but now they all have separate dressing rooms instead of a semi-communal backstage area, and the gear is moved on and off stage by unsmiling, efficient Aryan robots instead of being manhandled through the backstage kitchens of the Assembly Rooms by some untrained but very willing Derbyshire oiks. On the face of it the new regime sounds infinitely preferable, but Bloodstock at Derby was real, and a bit chaotic, and a bit frustrating, and bloody hard work, and a lot of fun. Sadly I don’t think we’ll see it’s like again, as music, like so much else, is increasingly sponsored, branded, and neutered within an inch of it’s life until it finally disappears into the voracious maw of the corporate beast. Bloodstock’s founder could be something of a clot at times, and he gave us some classic moments like the occasion he realised on the morning of the show that he hadn’t ordered a safety barrier to keep the seething hordes of metalheads from inundating the stage, but he was a genuine, flesh and blood person, essentially a fan who decided he’d like to stage his own event, rather than some faceless number-cruncher in an anodyne office somewhere talking of gross potentials, per capita merchandise spends and magnifying the marginals. I spit on them all and hope they get electrocuted by their bloody calculators. RANT ALERT----HE’S NOT FINSHED YET !!!! I mean, what have T Mobile, Nat West or sodding Volkswagen got to do with music ? And I don’t want to go to the Labatt’s Ice Export Double Filtered Special Wonderbrew Apollo…it’s the bloody Hammy Odeon, you soulless, bloodsucking numpties !!! RANT OVER-----ALL CLEAR. So….Derby Assembly Rooms, then. They’ve got a nice PA system of their own here, so Arthur decides he’ll use that, which means less poo to bring in from the vans, and we get all the kit on one load of the lift. It’s an impressive edifice, is this lift…it’s actually the whole width of the stage and takes you up either to floor level or else it can be added as a forestage to the main structure, but what .it DOES mean is that those happy, hernia-inducing moments of hoiking flight cases up steps and so on are a thing of the past. We do a nice fast build again while the band make use of the showers ( quick footnote…the shower pressure is so strong and the needles of water so sharp that it felt like I was being pinned to the wall by an unrelenting wave of tiny demons wielding little pitchforks….it gets the dirt off but it also removes at least two layers of skin ). One of the things we always love about working here is the crew….unfortunately head tech Nigel is on holiday but Chrissie from the tech crew is like a little mascot to us….when we first met her she was about three years old and doing a kind of work experience thing, but now she’s all grown up and dominant and masterful and things ( or is that just me…?) and it’s a real pleasure to work with her again. It’s another fast build as a result and by four o’clock we’re sitting in the Green Room chomping fish and chips as befits our status as rufty-tufty rock pigs. Soundcheck is a bit of a narky affair as there are little squeaks, whistles and bleats coming out of the monitors that Junior( oh, that’s the name we decided on for Young Chris, by the way ) is manfully trying to eradicate, and there’s a bit of snappishness around that luckily I know by now will be totally forgotten about after about two minutes on the bus tonight. As ever, by the time showtime comes around everyone’s up for it and ready to go. You can usually tell from the audience reaction to the opening sequence whether or not it’s going to be a good night, and by that measure all the signs are in our favour….they laugh at Pinky and Perky and Batman, cheer the Beatles, and clap along to Ready Steady Go, so by the time Den’s “ Good evening everbody ! “ booms out of the darkness, it’s game on. I know I’ve already mentioned that it’s the rock numbers that seem to be getting the best response on this tour, but it’s true…when the lads kick in with the intro to You Really Got Me, people actually scream, they go wild at the end of the Light My Fire wig-out, and they even cheer my pyrotechnics ( I thangyoo, I thangyoo ) at the start of Pinball Wizard. It’s not a geographical thing, either…it seems to be happening everywhere we play. That’s not to say they don’t bellow along with gusto to Daydream Believer or Sunny Afternoon, of course, but it’s as though the rockier songs act as some sort of temporary conduit back to the rebellious days of their youth, and it’s almost as though we have a different audience for those particular numbers.Weird, but in a good way ! After the show we have another chinwag with occasional Bootlegger and all round good buddy Ben Dorrington, who has come along with his lovely lady Kirsty to be an actual audient tonight, giving him an advantage over most of the crew and all of the band….apart from Arthur, none of us have actually seen the show from the front still, so Ben joins a select little group of people who have been on both sides of the curtain, so to speak, and whose opinions we actually care about. The good news is that he, too thinks the show is better and slicker and tells everyone so, and that’s pretty gratifying coming from a respected fellow pro. I slip him his brown envelope full of cash, and’ job done, he and Kirsty melt away into the night……!

Aldershot Princes Hall Thurs March 10th

2011-03-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

As it turned out, Big John woke up early and so the two vehicles actually left at 4.30am. They got down in good time, though, so even Nick managed to crash back out, and everyone got a decent night’s sleep, which is just as well, because at about 10.30am I’m woken by a commotion outside the bus. I can see Big John and Nick standing there watching something, and when I step outside it turns out to be a fairly hefty chap squaring up to two WPCs outside the magistrate’s courts next to the theatre. Within a matter of minutes it’s turned into something straight out of Police Camera Action as another couple of policeman arrive, and suddenly matey is shouting and yelling and bobbing and weaving like a boxer.The boys in blue obviously decide that discretion is the better part of valour and in next to no time another couple of officers arrive along with a squad car which screams up to the bus, lights flashing and siren howling, to help subdue Rambo. I curse under my breath, thinking that everyone will have been woken up by the police car, so I go up the stairs to check on my slumbering babes. Far from finding them blinking and mewling in their bunks as their beauty sleep is disturbed, however, they are all crammed into the back lounge, where they’ve got a birds eye view of the proceedings, which are taking place on a mezzanine floor about level with the bus windows, They’ve got cameras and mobiles out and are snapping away like rabid paparazzi. Vultures….! This is another old friend of a theatre, and as before tonight’s show is being promoted by diamond geezer Mr John Martin. He texts me to ask when we’ll be at the venue and what time we’d like our breakfast bringing down, so I reply “ we’re here, and now, please !”. He’s as good as his word, and in next to no time appears with piles of sandwiches, sausage rolls and biscuits.
Now, I happen to know that her Majesty Queen Elizabeth is a big fan of the show and follows these blogs assiduously, so to her I say “ Your Maj, forget all these sports people, musicians, entertainers, politicians and various other nonentities when you’re putting your Honours List together, and let’s see plain Mr John Martin become Sir John, knighted for his services to rock’n’roll in general and needy crew members in particular ! Rarely can there have been a more deserving case for the old sword touching the shoulder. Arise, Sir John , say all of us in Bootiesworld ! The local chaps here are top notch too, especially Darren, who directs me to the best place from which to intercept the ice-cream lady at the interval. Here’s a man who really knows how the wheels turn in this business ! Any of the shows Sir John has done for us in the past have always been belters, so we know we’re in for a good night. A lot of the folks here go and see the band wherever they play and are diehard Overtures fans, so it’s no surprise that we have folks choogling away in the side aisles within a number of two or the band going onstage. The only slightly disconcerting thing is an occasional noise which comes over the comms headphones and appears to be someone in the crowd either vomiting, or making a jolly good stab at doing so. Remembering that last year there was an incident where an unfortunate punter parked their tiger over about six rows of fellow groovers in most spectacular and olfactorily unpleasant manner, we wonder if this same person has returned, and that the sight of the band playing onstage provokes some kind of Pavlovian response involving copious amounts of sick. The answer is more straightforward; it’s a chap with some mental issues and apparently he makes these involuntary sounds when he’s excited, which doubtless comes as a major relief to the people sitting around him who recall the sights ( and smells ! ) of last year ! Despite the fact that the band see they have the crowd in their pockets right from the off, there’s no question of just cruising, and they gradually apply the pedal to the metal as the show progresses. Steve’s having one of his “ octopus” nights where he seems to have grown an extra arm or two, and Den’s totally mastered the art of bantering with a partisan crowd between songs without ever losing control of the situation. With Phil, Jamie and Chris rising to the occasion as ever, the whole thing is a slam-dunk, so that by the time Mony Mony carpet-bombs the theatre we know people will be talking about tonight for a long time to come. Our Uber-fans Marilyn and Debbie are here tonight, leading the charge from the front as ever, and speaking to them afterwards they comment that they think it’s one of the best shows they’ve seen the band play, and if anyone knows it’s these girls ! It’s been a total blast, and this almost takes the pain away from an onerous post-gig chore, which is once again van-related. The car doctors have looked at Arthur’s vehicle today and decided that though it’s a bit shagged out it’ll survive in the short term, so as soon as we’ve loaded up, Arthur, Junior and I jump in the nice new hire van after the show and head for Sandy, where the now temporarily repaired Merc is waiting for us. We start to cross-load the kit from the Longmarsh van into the Merc , and it’s while we’re doing this that the lights of a police car swerve into the yard. Ah. This could be a tricky one…” Yes, officer I KNOW it looks like we’re stealing a load of PA from the van, but we’re not, honest…you see this is our van and it’s broken down but now it isn’t and we’re taking it away to Derby and leaving this nice new rental van instead but actually that’s coming with us TOO for now cos it’s going to Bedford and of course the people who own the garage know me and…..oh bugger it, jut put the cuffs on…I don’t even believe it myself “. Fortunately the officer obviously thinks our story is SO implausible that it must be true, so he lets us go and scoots off.. All we have to do now is drop the hire van at Bedford and then there’s just the little matter of the drive to Derby. When we arrive there the bus still hasn’t arrived, so we sit in the van and wait, eyes drooping. We need a volunteer to go and stand on the road to guide John in, and as I’ve got my hat, coat and gloves I get the short straw. The bitingly cold wind whistles round my undercarriage as I wait, and somewhere a church clock strikes 5.00am.….beneath the encroaching hypothermia, a sense of déjà vu starts to creep in…..

Harlow Playhouse Wed March 9th

2011-03-15T06:02:00.000-07:00

We wake up bright and early ready to put our megaplan into action. Arthur hotfoots it up to Sandy in the knackered Merc to have it looked at again, and he’s going to head back later this morning in a rented van. The Millfield lads have done us one last favour by letting us leave the kit from the Merc here so that the poorly van can travel up to the garage unencumbered by our pile of poo. Unfortunately we have to take it outside the theatre quite early to clear their stage, so once again I find myself standing in the bitter North London cold babysitting a load of PA gear with Nick, and I begin to wonder if I’ve somehow offended the Sun Gods and am being punished for my transgressions. It’s so cold that as we wait a brass monkey comes up to us and asks us if we’ve got a soldering iron….At about midday Arthur pulls up in the shiny new Longmarsh rental van and we quickly load up the kit then huddle over the heater to try and thaw out our frozen bones. It’s a short hop to Harlow and our teeth have just about stopped chattering as we pull into the backstage yard where the bus is parked up and the lads are unloading the other van. This is our third time here, and it’s a really good place to work in….a nice big stage, plenty of wing space, and the closest we get to a “local” gig. They have tended in the past to have a bit of a draconian attitude to all matter health and safety related, rootling around in the back of amplifiers, mains distro racks and the like, but this time all is co-operation and smoothness. Head technician Peter even repairs a couple of bits and bobs for us during the build, and by half past two everything’s in place, making it about our fastest set - up of the tour so far…then the computer has a cow again and refuses to start. Tomps has developed a really good way of dealing with this….he knows that I get all panicky when I hear about things going wrong, so if I go anywhere near him when there’s a problem he just stands in front of the computer and says something like “ Move along…nothing to see here “ I’m quite happy to do so, because the next time I look he’s always managed to fix it as if by magic. He casts his spell once again here, and by six o’clock we’re all done and dusted, giving us a chance to check out the fleshpots of Harlow. Five minutes later, our curiosity satisfied, we head back to the theatre to chill out.. When we did this show last year I remember thinking that it felt like we made a jump up somehow, that the whole thing had moved onto a different level. There’s no Damascene conversion moment tonight, because every night on this tour so far has already just confirmed what I felt back then…this is ready for bigger things, and these dates are the next step in cementing our position in the UK touring calendar. The choice of material is bang on, the clever use of medleys has allowed us to bring in all or part of twenty-four new songs, the links are tighter, the new production elements add more quality to the proceedings, and overall everything’s just slicker and better. The band are always a pretty mighty proposition under any circumstances, but sprinkle on all the fairy dust that the production team bring to the party and you’ve got something special. Watching the band level a full house tonight is almost a privilege, and being an actual part of it certainly is. I’ve already said that everyone clicked straight into the groove right from the off on this tour, and tonight is another example…there’s an almost magisterial element to the band’s performance which crucially never strays into the territory of arrogance or, even worse, complacency. To use that horrific X Factor terminology, they “own” the stage every night, and when the stage is as big as this one that’s a very potent brew. When they’re fully in their pomp on things like Pinball and the closing medley section yu can see what a truly great band they’d be playing ANY kind of music; man for man they’re as good as any, and better than many, of the so-called “ stars “ on the circuit today. Gentlemen, I salute you !! After the show there’s time to meet friends and for one lucky member of the tour party, to renew an old acquaintance, and everyone is full of how great tonight has been, how much better than last year etc etc etc. This is the primal force, the lifeblood that keeps us going and makes everything worthwhile. No matter how long you’ve been doing this for, how jaded your palate and how cynical your attitude, nothing can beat the feeling you get when you know you’re part of something really, really good, and you’re there right at the start of it. Over the years I’ve been involved with the breakthrough years of bands like Culture Club, Eurythmics and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and they were all a brilliant adrenaline rush, but it’s definitely different when the show is yours; we can actually see what all the time, money and hard work we’ve all put in is about, and looking out at the faces of the audience as they’re clamouring for more at the end of the show is totally priceless. As we leave, the house crew seems genuinely impressed by what they’ve seen, and when they ask us to come back again they really mean it, and the atmosphere on the bus is humming. Only one man sits in detached silence, grimly clutching a mug of tea. That man is Nick Liddard, and he knows that he’s on rota to be driving the van to Aldershot later, following the bus. The projected departure time is 6.00am, so he’s reckoning on a few hours kip. It’s not to be, however……

Edmonton Millfield Theatre, Mon & Tues March 7th & 8th

2011-03-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

…….so we’re limping the damaged van back from Marlborough to London where we’re hoping to get it looked at. Me and Arthur are nervously watching the temperature gauge and Nick’s riding shotgun behind us in case something falls off or we blow up, but to our surprise we get all the way from Marlborough to High Wycombe with no real trouble. We drop Arthur off and I head for Edmonton, where we’ll be parking the bus and van outside the venue tonight. Alas, the van clearly doesn’t like me, as within about two miles of the M25 the temperature suddenly shoots up into the red. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever done that “ broken down in the early hours on a deserted road “ thing, but it’s not to be recommended. Time to make a choice….carry on round the M25 and risk seized engines and certain death from boiled – over radiators, or head down the A40 into London and try and crawl to a garage where the van can cool down and have a soothing bucket of water or two. I take the A40 path, and it’s the right one….I just make it to a garage where the van gasps and wheezes like a constipated warthog for a while before allowing me to unscrew the radiator cap without disappearing in a cloud of scalding steam. In goes a bit more water, and off we go again. Clearly the van had given it’s all on the first part of the journey, because before I’ve even got as far round the North Circular as Finchley it’s going all thermo-nuclear on me again. I spot a garage and pull in, but quickly notice the big black mentalist in the hoodie that’s stalking around the forecourt shouting and waving at imaginary dragons or something. Rather fearing that he may indulge in a spot of light murder if I get out of the van, I swiftly head out again. Luckily there’s another garage just down the road, where the van crawls panting into a far corner, and I let it cool down fully whilst staring out at the darkened windows of Finchley for what seems like and hour and a half, but was, in fact, only ninety minutes.
I slake the beast’s thirst with about forty gallons of H20, and once again set off for Edmonton, now thankfully only a few miles distant. As we’ve got a day off after Marlborough the Millfield folks had very kindly agreed to let us come in a day early and use their facilities, so the plan had been to park the bus and van outside the theatre as and then go in early tomorrow, but when I get there the road seems to have been turned into some kind of display showroom for things that stop you doing other things….there are bollards, double yellows, a “ use this and you die “ red route, towing and clamping signs and the road itself actually seems to have been narrowed, too…all that’s missing is an armed guard with a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher. I find a side road that’s neither mined, fenced off or otherwise protected by weaponry, and park up to wait for John. It’s quiet. Very quiet, sort of “ only person in the world “ kind of quiet. It’s very, very.very cold, too. I put on my coat, hat and gloves, and looking like Nanook of The North step out into Silver Street to look for the bus and give John the good news about No Parking World. It’s now 4.30am, and within about two minutes the fatigue is kicking in and I’m cold, miserable and wondering if that shelf – stacking job at Kettering Asda’s is still open, but luckily John comes round the corner just at that moment, and even more luckily we manage to get the bus tucked in behind the van, so I crawl, whimpering, into my little bunk and am asleep within seconds. When I wake up we’re inside the theatre grounds, John’s got the bus connected to the venue’s electricity, and we’re good to go. We still have to resolve the van issue, however, so today’s task, should we choose to accept it, is to take it to it’s “home” garage in Sandy to have it looked at. We duly jump in and head north to drop it off, then get picked up and taken home to Geddington for a night, where we have home cooking and, of course, the washing machine.. Next morning we jump a train back down to Sandy where, we hear, the van is apparently behaving itself. However, before we’re even on the A1M it’s starting to heat up again, and by the time we reach Potters Bar it’s in the red and we have to stop. This is Bad News. We’ve got some bottles of water on board for just such an eventuality, so at least we manage to get back to the theatre, but we need a Plan B, and quickly. In the meantime there’s the small matter of a sold-out show to do tonight, so we have to focus on that. Millfield is a great little theatre, and we had one of the best shows of the tour here last year, so expectations are high. Once again, though, the vagaries of this bizarre business of ours come to the fore. There’s nothing wrong with the show as such, and the audience reaction is as good as ever, but for those of us who see it every night we can tell that the band’s performance is slightly flat. It’s nothing you can put your finger on, just a lack of sparkle. Den’s had a headache constantly for the past four days or so, and is far from well, but it’s not just that. In fact, after the show someone makes the comment that the show suffered from “ day off syndrome”, where everyone just drops out of the groove for a bit, but it’s something we have to look out for….this has been going SO well that we don’t want any derailment now. In the auditorium, however, it’s business as usual as far as the crowd and theatre staff are concerned…they’re loud, partisan and totally up for it, and despite our internal misgivings about the night, it’s another winner ( in fact, within a matter of days the theatre will contact our agent with an offer for us to do TWO nights there in 2012.). As the house lights come up the audience file out in to the night, all happy, warm and fuzzy, doubtless looking forward to a nightcap and a soft, comfortable bed, but we’ve still got work to do….tomorrow we have to head to Harlow, and the van needs to go back the garage again, so we sit on the bus with the model cars on the table and try to work it out. It’s all a bit “ So if you drive to HERE in this van, and we meet you HERE in the other… “ but we think we’ve got a plan, though it involves staying here another night. Once more the Millfield boys come to our rescue and agree to let the bus stay here all powered up once more, so we make the cocoa, put on our jim-jams, dressing gowns and slippers, put the cat out and turn in for night…….

Marlborough Theatre On The Hill Sun March 6th

2011-03-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

Another venue where we’ve been re-booked from last time, and another venue where there’s been a late jump in ticket sales. When we played here before we were only the second act to play this brand-new facility, and we had to deal with some teething troubles, such as the fact that they didn’t actually have any three-phase power in the theatre so we had to hire in a big old cable and run the mains in from another part of the building. This time they DO have the three-phase power in the theatre…but they don’t have any of the adapters to step it down to single phase power, which is what we actually need. As it’s a Sunday, there’s no chance of going to one of the supply houses to get one, so Arthur has to dig out the calculator and work out if we can run the whole show off 13amp sockets if we spread the load around enough. The answer is yes, but just, and there’s a moment reminiscent of the scene from Apollo 13 where Gary Sinise is attempting to see how many support systems the crippled spaceship can run. One by one we flick switches, hold our breath….and eventually everything’s working. The whole thing could be totally derailed by an injudiciously switched – on kettle, however, so we set armed guards on the kitchen and make the band wash in cold water in case the hot showers trip the fuses. In fact, as the theatre is actually in a school, the cold showers bring back happy memories of days being thrashed by sadistic games masters, double Latin and nights in the dorm with Fotherington-Smallpiece Minor…but that’s a whole other blog. The small stage and low stage roof make this an intimate place to play, but it’s also a bugger to get a decent onstage sound as the noise rackets around everywhere and the only answer is to turn down, which really goes against the grain. Ironically the sound in the main auditorium is great, but up here it’s a different issue. There’s also the matter of the big gap between the stage and the first row of seats; but as the audience know what to expect this time round we’re hoping that this doesn’t cause us any problems. Kate and Mike from the venue are doing a sterling job, providing us with all the backup we need as well as copious amounts of tea and cakes, and despite the worry about the hair-trigger power situation we’re looking forward to tonight’s show. Last time here we had a smallish crowd but they totally went for it, and we had an unscheduled appearance of Spirit In The Sky as an encore too, so there’s definitely an air of anticipation about tonight. From the first number everything seems to go well, but as the first set progresses we the feeling we’re getting is more of warm appreciation than the looney – tunes abandon of the previous visit. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, and there are loads more people here than before, but it’s just a bit….restrained, somehow. Things do seem to pick up in the second half, but then a really weird thing happens. What we normally do in the Sixties party sequence is get almost to the end before Steve gives them the hard word about getting up and dancing. Tonight, though, Den points out the big space on the dancefloor before Green Onions and suggests everyone uses it. Sure enough there’s a rush to the front where some serious frugging starts to take place, but a lot of the other folks stay in their seats, and when Steve does his “ get up “ bit only a few more actually do; it’s as though there are two audiences, one who want to dance their collective nadgers off and one who just want to sit and watch. It’s all fine but as I say, compared to the last visit it’s very different. The demand for an encore is totally genuine, though, and sure enough the band oblige once again with Spirit In The Sky, which has Tomps and I indulging our inner air-guitarist. It’s as kick-arse as ever ( sorry, can’t do “ kick ass “…it’s just SOOOO American ), and suddenly we’re seeing glimpses of 2010, but then the lads are bowing and coming offstage and it’s all over…..there’s been no Walk Alone, and we’re left having to scramble to jump through the slides and cue up the closing VT insert. Turns out that Den’s voice was starting to go, and as Walk Alone is at the top end of his range he felt it made sense to cut it. It’s not made a difference to the audience, though…they’ve loved it, and the feedback we’re getting is even better than last time. Everyone’s happy as we start to load out into a bitterly cold night, but our spirits are soon dampened when it becomes apparent that Nick’s van is ALSO in trouble, and won’t start. When I finally look back over this farrago that I call a career, I’ll see some fabulous highlights, some great gigs, some amazing people and some willing farm animals. I can, however, state with absolute certainty that way, way down the pantheon of memories will be the recollection of trying to bump start a Sprinter van down a hill outside a school on a freezing cold Wiltshire night. We finally get both the poorly vehicles going, and set out for London. What could possibly go wrong…..?

Worthing Assembly Hall Sat March 5th

2011-03-15T05:55:00.000-07:00

Anyone who read last year’s tour blog may recall that I’ve got a personal reason for not liking this particular venue, and I must admit that the prospect of another visit here doesn’t really improve my usual jolly, sunny disposition. In fact, if it wasn’t for Ray, the splendid chap who is the technical manager for the hall, I’d be inclined to reach for the can of lighter fuel and matches and raze the place to the ground. That would probably take the shine off their day a bit, though, so I grit my teeth and get on with it. After two previous visits to the venue and slow advance sales this time it was looking as though we were destined never to do well here, but something odd has been going on recently. Ticket sales have taken a pretty hefty jump in just the last week, and all of a sudden we’ve doubled the audience we had last time. I’d actually been wondering if I could do a
“ rentacrowd” thing on some of the slower-selling shows, and had come up with the wizard wheeze of targeting the immigrant Polish community and billing the evening as a seminar on how to cheat the welfare system and the NHS; unfortunately they all already know, so it’d have been a total bust. There’s something else slightly odd about tonight, which is that it’s not only a big old stage, it’s split – level, too. What we’ve been trying to do up to now is keep the band close and on one level, as it makes for a more intimate and much less cluttered layout…we’ve even taken Steve off the drum riser we used last time out, and everyone’s preferring it. Here, however, the split is in such a place ( oo-err, missus…) that we have to have Steve, Chris and the second keyboard on the upper level. One thing that IS nice about it is that it gives you a little glimpse of what this could look like when we’re playing the big stages all the time, when this has become the most successful show of it’s kind in the world, when our every move is documented by a slavering media, when women of loose morals and looser clothing throw themselves at us at every turn, when heads of state, kings and queens fawn for our attention and ALL WILL HONOUR, LOVE AND FEAR US IN EQUAL MEASURE……err, so anyway, Worthing Assembly Hall….despite it being a bitterly cold night the audience is lively and warm, and despite the size of the hall this flows back to the stage and the band pick up on it. I’ve already mentioned how there was no ring-rustiness when the tour started, and everything clicked into place as though we’d been touring all the time. One of the side effects of this that I’m really enjoying is how relaxed the band are onstage, and this also communicates itself to the crowd. I’ve often felt that if a band looks like it’s enjoying itself onstage then the audience will pick up on this and a whole synergy takes place which is somehow mystical and cosmic and otherworldly and almost godlike in it’s intensity …..sorry, it’s been a long day…. There are some great new highlights appearing in the show such as the two acoustic medleys, Jamie’s reading of Whiter Shade and Phil’s Hank Marvin turn, and of course we’ve still got the big production numbers like Pinball Wizard and Hole In My Shoe / Strawberry Fields from last time, and it really does seem as though we’ve hit on a winning combination judging by the audience reactions. Tonight is no exception, and we have to pinch ourselves to remember that this is Worthing, bastion of the genteel, reserved and incontinent. There are people dancing in the side aisles long before we get to the Sixties party section, and when Steve finally exhorts the audience to get to it’s feet in Mony Mony there’s no second bidding needed, even the extremely old lady in the front row who looks like she doesn’t know where she is and has probably been getting flashbacks to the Blitz from our pyrotechnics. We’ve never had a reception like this here before, and so this one has got to go down as a major success for us. Den has family here tonight and they’re fulsome in their praise, as is the gaggle of fans who do the whole posing for photos with the band thing. In fact, despite all my initial misgivings, it’s been a really good day. We’re staying here overnight tonight too, so the plan is for everyone to pile into town after the show for beers and an infusion of lard from Ali’s All-Night Kebab & Botulism Emporium. Just as I leave the venue, however, there’s a little twitch, and I feel my hand close on the box of matches and can of lighter fuel in my pocket……

Andover The Lights Fri March 4th

2011-03-08T17:53:00.001-08:00

Our first visit to this quiet little Hampshire town, and early impressions are good…the theatre is a little lovely room, the dressing rooms are comfortable, there’s a shower, and the crew are very friendly. What could possibly go wrong ? Well, one of the vans, for a start. It’s been running hot for a while but last night it suddenly started to bubble and boil like a demented dragon, and it just about made it to the appointed overnight stopover point. This morning Arthur calls me ( I’m driving the other van ) to tell me that the recalcitrant Mercedes has thrown another temperature-centric wobbly, and is currently steaming in a lay-by somewhere near Uxbridge. This is a Very Bad Thing. All of the PA is on this van, so unless we get this sorted out, tonight is going to be the very definition of and “ Unplugged” show. Luckily Arthur manages to slake the beast’s thirst just enough to let him make it to the gig, but this one is going to run and run, as they say….Another very weird ( and more than a little worrying ) thing happens today. As I was driving from Loughborough last night I was aware of being quite tired, but I must have been worse than I thought. I was listening to Janice Long on Radio 2 and I’m utterly convinced she said she’d had a text from someone who’d been at the Loughboroiu8gh show, and that it was brilliant, after which she played the Stones’ Satisfaction . So chuffed was I that I told Arthur and then texted Den, who was also pretty pleased. Imagine how I felt, then, when I arrived in Andover only to be told by Den that they’d listened to Janice’s show again on the Radio 2 podcast, had heard Satisfaction, but nothing about the Bootlegs before it. Clearly everyone thought I’d lost my mind, and worst of all, so did I…..I was TOTALLY convinced of what I thought I’d heard. Here’s a word of advice, kids….don’t ever get old or tired….it sucks !! Anyway, temporary insanity apart, the rest of the day goes smoothly, even our trip to the bank. The four partners of the company have to sign some documents and as we’re on the road our branch have kindly sent them on to Andover so we can go in, sort them out, then get them sent back through the internal mail. There’s a slight hiccup when one of the local staff tries to tell us we can’t see the person we need to see unless we’ve made an appointment with him, but fortunately she sees the logic when we point out that we couldn’t possibly have done so as we were unaware of his very existence until the moment she uttered his name. Foolish girl. Back at the show everything’s going well, and we hear we’re pretty much on a sellout for tonight. Considering it’s our first time here, this is a great result, and the tiredness and van troubles are consigned to one of the little attic rooms of our minds for a while because tonight, Matthew, we are going to be The Gods Of Sixties Rock ! One slightly disconcerting thing becomes clear as the audience come in, and it’s something that we do notice from time to time. The front rows seem to be made up of, shall we say, more senior members of society, so that when you look out it appears at first as though you’re about to address the Annual General Meeting of Age Concern. We’re not totally sure why this is; perhaps their memories of the Sixties are rooted in the chummy cabaret of the Barron Knights or the twinkling Celtic charm of The Bachelors rather than the sonic assault of The Who, but it’s bit odd for Den when he gets his first glimpse of them. Fortunately the rest of the room is made up of younger and much noisier souls, so that when the lights go down a proper cheer goes up and from the opening chords of Please Please Me we’ve got them. In these little theatres this is a powerful, powerful show….the band is a fearsome proposition at any time, but coupled with the lights and all the visuals the whole thing just blows you away.. It works fine in the big theatres too, but this is where it really smacks you between the eyes. There’s a special sting in the tail tonight too; the lads have decided that there’s no way they can cone to Andover without paying tribute to the town’s most famous sons, The Troggs, so there’s a new one – night – only encore of Wild Thing. Considering that they only played the song for the first time at soundcheck, it takes the roof off the place, and the members of the crew like my good self who are old rockers at heart unanimously decide it has to stay in the set every night. A rousing rendition of Walk Alone neatly wraps things up, and then it’s into the town for a beer for the band and onto the bus with a Chinese for the crew., proving that the class system is still alive and well in the music business !

Loughborough Town Hall Thurs March 3rd

2011-03-08T09:16:00.000-08:00

A brief diversion, if you will indulge me, while I lift a corner of the curtain on the five – star rock and roll swankfest that is the process of touring at this level. We’re already waaaaay ahead of the last tour insofar as we’re travelling in a big double – decker tourbus. This really does become your home on wheels; you’ve got your comfy little bunk, there are a couple of lounges, a galley with microwave and fridge, a loo, at least two TVs with DVD player and usually a games console or two, so it’s not exactly slumming it in the back of a Transit. There are some drawbacks, however. For a start, the loo is downstairs from the bunks, and negotiating your way down the stairs of a moving bus when your bladder is screaming for blessed release is an interesting experience. There’s also the ubiquitous “ no logs in the bogs “ rule that applies to all tour buses, whereby you have to dispose of your….errr…solids, somewhere beyond the confines of the onboard khazi. Under normal circumstances this is quite manageable, but when you’ve partaken of a botty – scouring chicken madras from the Golden Bengal in a moment of drunken weakness, then, my friend, you are in for a night of buttock-clenching, eye-watering hell. There’s also the fact that you’ve got eleven or twelve blokes in fairly close proximity, and you can easily have a situation where someone in a back bunk just wants to go to sleep, whilst everyone else wants to recreate then last days of Caligula’s Rome in the rear lounge, and this can make for a somewhat tetchy atmosphere. Luckily there are no such wild excesses on this tour, and the most radical thing that’s likely to happen is when someone takes the last two slices of bread to make toast, or moves someone else's slippers, but you get my drift. There’s also the little issue of hygiene. I must admit that the Booties tour party is much more fragrant than the usual tribe of band and crew, and we’ve got more than a few who like nothing better than tidying up the kitchen and tutting when someone leaves a cup out after they’ve used it. This is all good stuff, and makes for a nice, clean bus. One thing we don’t have on board, however, is a shower, so we’re dependent on the venues having them. Most people tend to wake up, have a shower, get dressed and go about their daily business, but what happens with us, especially the crew, is that we wake up , get a couple of tea if we’re lucky then go straight to the load –in. The band have got the chance to shower during the day before or after soundcheck, but we don’t, so we try and grab one whenever we can. Often the only option is after the show, and this isn’t ideal when you’ve got a caretaker looking at his watch and muttering under his breath about how he's missing the Corrie omnibus or some such cobblers. When you’re touring as we are, one of the things that really makes a difference is when you go to a venue which makes you welcome, where the facilities are good and where you feel like you’re working with the people there rather than against them. We haven’t been anywhere yet ( even Stockport ! ) where we’ve had any problems, but I have to say that Loughborough Town Hall is one of those venues that you actively look forward to visiting as a crew. Kev and Andy, the house technicians, are two of the friendliest guys you’ll ever come across on the circuit. Nothing’s too much trouble for them, and they’ll do things like bring you tea and snacks without being asked, just because that’s the way they are. In the grand scheme of things this may not seem like very much, but believe me, this kind of hospitality is gold to us. They excel themselves today; apart from the statutory buckets of tea, they bring plates of sandwiches and posh nibbles that would be more at home on a Hampstead dining table than in the hands of six hairy – arsed road crew, but they totally hit the spot. To people who are used to dining on Ginster’s finest products at a motorway services at about three am, this is manna from heaven. Everything goes in and up really quickly today, and there’s also a vey nice backstage area where the band manage to get showered and changed, so all in all there’s a relaxed feel about today . Even the soundcheck slips by quickly, and we’ve got the rare bonus of a totally clear hour before the doors open. When we played here last year we got a really good crowd and a fantastic response, so we’re hoping that this year lives up to it. Sales have been good, too, so all the portents are in our favour, and another good sign is when the audience laugh and cheer at the film footage of the intro. Three songs in and we’re home and dry. The band just click into top gear, and on nights like this you can see why Elton John was so fulsome in his praise….they really ARE the best in the business, and the crowd play their part in making this one of the finest nights so far. We thought Croydon was our best reaction yet, but this has shaded it....

Croydon Ashcroft Theatre Wed March 2nd

2011-03-05T17:42:00.001-08:00

The last time we were here at the Ashcroft was on the final date of the 2010 tour, and I remember it being somehow anti-climactic, especially as the house was enforcing a rule whereby no-one was allowed to even stand up and dance in their seats without being taken out the back and beaten with rubber hoses by steroid – crazed heavies. A word with the management happily reveals that this is no longer the case; they’d
“ misinterpreted the licensing guidelines “, apparently. Where it said “ the paying audience should be allowed to express their appreciation and enjoyment of the evening’s entertainment in any appropriate way “, the management actually thought it said
“ anyone showing even the faintest vestige of enthusiasm will be swiftly and violently eliminated in the appropriate way “. An easy mistake to make, really. We’re in good company tonight, as Lenny Henry is playing the Fairfield Halls next door, so we might just sneak in for a chuckle. Today’s one of those days where we get lots of little niggling technical things going on like cables suddenly not working and noises coming out of places where they have right to come out of, but eventually everything’s up and running and we’re good to go. As Jamie’s voice has been getting stronger by the day the decision is made to put two of the “ dropped “ songs back in the set, though he’s unfortunately not confident enough yet to do his solo number. We sit him down and sympathetically tell him that this is fine, not to worry at all, but that if it’s not back in within a show or two we’re going to have to throw him out of the moving tour bus. Twice. The show goes up and he’s quickly on to one of his first real tests, “ Go Now “ ( or “Gonads” as is it somewhat childishly referred to by the crew ), but he sails through without a hitch, and it becomes clear early on that this is a crowd looking for a good night out. They obviously couldn’t find one in Croydon so they came to see us, but hey…you take your breaks where you can find them. For some reason on this tour it seems that the crunchier songs like You Really Got Me, Light My Fire and Pinball Wizard are going down best, though Whiter Shade has been a real winner too….guess it’s just not a song that people cover very much as the vocal is so difficult to nail properly. When You Really Got Me’s guitar riff kicks in tonight people actually scream in recognition, which is both gratifying and a little bit scary at the same time , and the second half just builds and builds….even the other acoustic section storms it, especially the “ Elvis Moment “ on Suspicious Minds. The acid test, of course, will be the dance party section….will the audience go for it, or will years of conditioned subjugation by the authorities keep them in their seats ? Steve kicks in the intro to Mony Mony and does his “ Get up off your seat and on your feet “ call, and bugger me, do they take notice !! At best we were expecting some gentle shimmying and clapping along, but no…with a roar a bunch of people stampede to the area in front of the stage where they proceed to wig out with almost mad abandon. There’s one oldish chap who is just banging the palms of his hands on the stage whilst bellowing along with the songs, and right in the middle is Really Should Know Better At His Age Man, who actually looks like he’s been wired directly into the National Grid. He treats us to a display of Dad-dancing of almost Olympian quality before getting totally lost in the moment, turning to his girlfriend and commencing what can only be politely termed “ heavy frottage “, with much pelvic thrusting., before he disappears into the melee of gyrating groovers. Their singalong stuff would grace the terraces of any football stadium, and at the end of the main set we’ve never heard cheers like it outside the Liverpool Philharmonic last year. It is, quite seriously, one of the best receptions we’ve ever had, and to be honest we’re all a bit stunned by it, so marked is the contrast from last year. Our only vague disappointment is that we didn’t improve on last year’s attendance figures, but a word with the management after puts things in perspective for us….next door, major star Lenny Henry, in his adopted home town, has only pulled a crowd of around 400. We’ve been hearing for a while that business is down in general all over the country, and this brings it home to us with a bang, so although we’ve not done massive numbers tonight, between ourselves and Lenny we’re DEFINTELY the happier of the two. A somewhat disturbed evening lies ahead for his tour accountant, methinks…..

Stockport Plaza Tues 1st March

2011-03-03T10:56:00.000-08:00

Ah, the unrelenting glamour of life on the road……We wake up this morning in a sort of lay-by outside the theatre in the middle of Stockport, parked on either side of a rubbish – filled skip ( which also seemed to be home to a family of Albanians ) and as we emerge blinking into the weak sunlight, hair awry and all smelling faintly of eau de bloke, some locals stare at us as though we’d arrived from another planet…..which in a sense we have, as OUR planet isn’t largely populated by shellsuited, soap-dodging benefit scroungers whose idea of a day out is a family trip to Poundland. Once again we look up at the massive illuminated art deco frontage of the Plaza, and once again we ask “ What in the name of Basil Brush’s underpants are we doing here ? “ The external grandeur of the theatre, we recall grimly, doesn’t extend to the dressing rooms or backstage facilities, and , of course, there’s the little matter of a 1 in 6 slope carpeted by lush, flight-case knackering shag pile waiting to swamp our gear, at the end of which there’s a hoik up on to the stage which is so high Sir Edmund Hilary once came here and planted a bloody flag on it. To be fair, there are two improvements from last time. One is that they’ve actually supplied a couple of crew to help us load in, and the other is that they’ve now got a goods lift which makes the ascent of Everest to the stage a little easier. In fact, it all comes in and goes together easier than we’d expected, but it’s still a grind. To add insult to injury we know this one’s not sold well ( this sentence was brought to you by Great Understatements of Our Time, number five in a series ), so everyone’s a bit fratchy. No blood is shed, fortunately, and we make it through to soundcheck in one piece. We’re trying a new bit of theatrical jiggery-pokery tonight which involves dropping a piece of scenery in and out, so we test it out at soundcheck. The band impress us by working around this potentially dangerous object without loss of limb or sight, so we decide to keep it in. If it does end up braining one of them we could just work it into the show and call it suffering for our art….And so to showtime, and the depressing sight the audience scattered throughout this huge place. At least the management haven’t tried to sell the balcony, which is so far away they speak a different language there, and within a couple of songs we’re reminded that although this place wasn’t heaving last time either, this tends to be a noisy and enthusiastic crowd. They’re really good natured too, and Den gets some banter going with them. There’s one woman in particular who may possible be a little over – refreshed as she feels it necessary to bawl out to the stage after every other song. This in itself isn’t too much of a problem, but she combines the volume of a jumbo jet with the raucousness of Barbara Windsor, and I’m here to tell you folks, it’s not a winner. Den handles it with aplomb, however, and luckily it doesn’t seem to affect anyone else’s enjoyment of the show, especially after we have her forcibly removed and shot. The set rattles along beautifully, and the new trick in the acoustic section works a treat, so we’ll be using that wherever we can. Jamie’s definitely getting better; “ Whiter Shade” is almost at full power, though we’re still being prudent and keeping “ Go Now “ and “Itchycoo Park” out of the set for another day or two. It’s in the bag by the time they get to the new “ Sixties dance party “ section, and there’s some proper community singing on “ You’ll Never Walk Alone “. As with last time we’ve won this crowd over and they’re full of praise, but once again we’ve played to a small crowd and you have to start looking at the venue itself to see if everything is being done to promote the show. We make a little mental note for the future. The load out isn’t as brutal as we’d feared, partly thanks to the venue’s new scissor lift and partly due to the fact that they’ve got some people to help us this time, but some purblind, spavinned Neanderthal has chosen to park their car right up against the front of the bus and then abandon it, necessitating the whole crew dragging the skip along the road so the bus can get out( much to the displeasure of the Albanian family, whose kids were due up in an hour to go and commit some burglaries ). It is with genuine feeling that we say “ Stockport, thank you and goodnight “……

Skegness Embassy Sun Feb 27th

2011-02-28T14:46:00.000-08:00

We seem to make a habit of playing out of season seaside towns these days. Nothing wrong with that in itself, it’s just that when they’re on the North Sea like Skeggy then it’s about 25 degrees colder than anywhere inland, with an icy wind that blows right across from the Urals and straight up your gusset. “ Skegness – it’s so bracing ! “ say all the tourist ads, probably because “ Skegness – come and get frostbite in your nethers ! “ wouldn’t have sounded quite so appealling. At least The Embassy is warm and welcoming, and although we know that tonight’s not sold too well there’s a nice big stage, and so for the first time on the tour so far we can spread out and run the full production. One of the things that we were talking about on the bus last night was how both band and crew seem to have hit the ground running this time out….apart from the initial technical grief we had at Haverhill everything has been remarkably painless, and we’ve dropped into a really good groove right from the off. When I think back a year to how things were at the start of that first tour it seems like a lifetime away; events that would have had us run screaming into the streets last time are now met with a shrug of the shoulders and an“ OK then “. The band’s attitude has got a lot to do with it..…this is a very different way to tour than what they’re used to, but they’ve taken to it like ducks to water, and that’s made for a much easier working environment. It helps that we don’t have any major prima donnas in the tour party, of course, but it’s also because we know and trust each other more now. We know the band will always deliver, even when they’re feeling physically below par, and they know we’ll always make them look and sound great. Even Still As Yet Unnamed Chris Stocker The Monitor Chap has bought into the whole vibe, and so far his only crime has been to be younger and better looking than me.I’ve been on tours where band / crew segregation has made things almost unworkable, but there’s none of that here. Today’s a great case in point….with the help of an excellent local crew we bang the kit up in record time, so we have a nice relaxed soundcheck that seems to be over in no time at all, giving us the chance to get something to eat or even ( Oh luxury of luxuries ! ) grab a quick nap back in the cocoon of our bunks on the bus. As we’d feared, tonight’s not a big audience, and there’s an element of polite applause at first, but gradually a few whoops and cheers come in, and suddenly that invisible barrier is broken down. It seems to be the rockier numbers like You Really Got Me, Light My Fire and Pinball Wizard that get the best response, but the crowd sing along lustily when asked to and although there might not be many of them their demands for an encore at the end are loud and genuine.We hear after the show that the duty manager was so impressed with what she’d seen that she e-mailed the general manager at home during the interval saying “ you’ve GOT to re-book this show ! Good news indeed, but unfortunately another worry does rear it’s ugly head tonight….Den’s been carrying a bit of a bad throat for a couple of days, and after the show he’s decidedly croaky, so it’s on with the big coat and woolly scarf , a quick drop of jollop and off to bed for him. To make things even more fun Chris ( that’s Chris Keyboards, by the way ) seems to be coming down with the same thing. Our safe little bus may soon be turning into a plague house on wheels, so we’re going to have to keep a very close eye on everyone over the next couple of days. We can’t have history repeating itself…..can we ?

Market Drayton Festival Centre Sat 26th Feb

2011-02-28T14:44:00.000-08:00

OK, let’s get this out of the way here and now. I’m a fat bastard. I love my food. In fact I love anyone’s food. Last time we were here, Sheila, the lovely lady who cooks all the grub in the venue’s café made us some fantastic cakes, and I may just have had a teeny tiny sample of each one. As a result, everyone in the tour party is convinced that we’re only back here doing this show tonight because of Sheila’s cakes. This is not true. We’re only doing this show because of Sheila’s cakes AND her toasted sandwiches. We love this venue, and we love the people who work here. Today we love them even more because since our last visit they’ve built a whole new backstage area with nice loos and a lovely, hot shower. They’ve even supplied us with a load of fluffy towels and some shower gel, and nothing ever seems to be too much trouble for Geoff and Glyn who run the venue. A nicer, more helpful bunch of people you truly couldn’t wish to meet. We know the show’s going to be a stonker before we even start, too….they love their Sixties music here, and fortunately they love us playing it for them. Although it’s always cosy onstage and there’s a slight element of Tetris about the placement of instruments, cases and so on, the atmosphere’s great and as the audience are virtually on top of you there’s a great communication between the stage and the auditorium. We’ve encountered one problem, though….what’s become known as The Chris Issue. We’ve never had two people in the party with the same name before, and it’s a bugger. We started trying to differentiate by calling them Chris Monitors and Chris Keyboards but that was too unwieldy. We then tried Big Chris and Little Chris but that didn’t work either, so we thought the easiest thing was to find a tour name for Chris Monitors. First out of the bag was “ New Pug “ followed by “ Pug 2 “ and even “ Not Pug “, but we need to help the poor chap make his own mark on the tour, so until anyone else can come up with a better moniker he’s know as “ Oy ! You !”. Suggestions to tony@thebootlegsixties.com, please…..Right. Let’s get this next bit out of the way quickly too. The venue fed us. Sheila may have made some cakes. I may have had a piece. Of all four of them. And then taken another cake on the bus after the show. See ? Simple. No problem, And CERTAINLY not deserving of the public humiliation dished out from the stage as Den regaled the audience with tales of wanton gluttony from yours truly. I mean, how unfair…after all, I was just helping the poor woman decide which one tasted best (the amswer was all of them, in case you’re interested ). But enough of this, and on to the show….we’re adding a new bit to “Suspicious Minds” tonight, as we’ve finally got the techy bit sorted out to do it in full, so we’re gradually getting towards the finished version of the show.. As soon as Jamie’s back up to full strength we’ll put the missing songs back in, and that’ll be that. He’s definitely starting to sound better already, and although he’s judiciously pulling back from going full throttle still, it only feels like a matter of time now. The show tonight is pretty flawless from top to bottom, and it’s genuine pleasure to watch the band’s faces as they play and see how much they’re enjoying this. The Market Drayton crowd are as vociferous and enthusiastic as ever, even cheering the film of Geoff Hurst’s last goal for England as if it had been scored tonight and not forty-five years ago, and the new “ Elvis moment “ works an absolute treat. There’s one lady of somewhat advanced years in the front row who sits throughout the evening with a sort of “ stunned mullet “ expression on her jib, and the initial feeling is that she must be finding it all a bit loud, but when the “party” section starts she’s up and dancing too. They’d seriously let us play all night if they could, and for all the constraints of size and finance it’s one of those places that we’ll try and come back to every time. After the show we get a really nice e-mail from a lady who was there tonight. The last time we played here she’d just tracked down her Dad who she hadn’t seen for 48 years, and the two of them came to see the show and were in tears as the band played “Walk Right Back” as it had become “ their song”. Unfortunately he was too ill to attend this time, but she told us her story and how much the show and that song had meant to them. Now, I may be a great big cynical old Hector at times, but when you hear things like that it makes you realise that what we’re doing here can seriously touch people’s lives. In the context of what’s happened with Clive it’s all too easy to trivialise this as just so much musical fluff, but it IS worthwhile and it can make a real difference. Altogether now….We are thr world, we are the children…..

Morecambe The Platform Fri Feb 25th

2011-02-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

A long old run up to Morecambe for Nick and I in the equipment vans this morning, but the roads are unusually clear, and apart from having a struggle to escape the tractor beam of a McDonalds near Lancaster, I get there in good time. I’m also ridiculously pleased to get a series of texts from Clive asking how things are going and sending me a selection of his latest jokes; he may be down but he’s not out ! This is my first sight of Morecambe, and to be honest it’s not inspiring; it’s a cold, wet February morning, the tide is out, and all I can see as I drive along the seafront is miles of muddy shallows disappearing into the murk. With a shiver I remember that this was where a group of Chinese cockle – pickers were trapped by the incoming tide and drowned not that long ago. It’s grey, depressing stuff, and even the sight of town hero Eric Morecambe’s statue in classic “ Bring Me Sunshine “ pose can’t raise the spirits. I pull up to the gig to see the first problem of the day….last night’s duty manager has forgotten to take the lock off the bollard on the access road, so instead of being safely tucked in by the building with power hooked up and all systems humming, the bus is out on the main road being battered by driving wind and rain. To add to the overall ambience, a hideous denizen from the Ninth Circle Of Hell comes up ( you may also hear them referred to as “ traffic wardens” ) and happily slaps a ticket on the bus on the grounds that it’s causing an obstruction. The fact that the roads of the town are virtually deserted seems to have escaped this troglodyte’s notice, and unfortunately an attempt to explain our predicament merely prompts a swivel – eyed rant about rights of access and the sanctity of Her Majesty’s highways. I’m sure I also heard something about how we were all going to burn in eternal flames for having the temerity to park there, but I could have been mistaken. As soon as one of the venue staff finally comes along to let us in, however, the day takes a major turn for the better . The gig itself is a massive improvement on everything we’ve seen here so far…..it’s the old railway station, and the management have done a fantastic job of turning it into a cosy, quirky venue. House guys Shaun, Ron, Tom and Magic are friendly and helpful, and after a brew or four we’re warmed up and raring to go. It’s the band’s first day of using venue showers instead of having hotel rooms, and there’s a little bit of trepidation as to how they’ll deal with it, but apart from a few cases of terminal bed-head, they’re all fine. The set-up comes together quite quickly and the only casualty is the running board for the PA speakers which I spent several hours lovingly crafting earlier this week. After serving us well in Haverhill it finds the mean streets of Morecambe just too tough for it’s tender sensibilities, and promptly sheds two wheels as soon as it gets down the ramp. Epic fail….. The venue has been laid out for tonight in what’s known as cabaret style, in other words it’s tables and chairs rather than rows of seats; we did this once before in Bridlington and it worked really well. Tonight proves to be just as good; everyone is close to the stage, creating a nice, intimate atmosphere. Jamie’s voice is still suffering so we continue to run the slightly truncated show, and we realise that there’s a certain symmetry about the songs we’ve taken out….Go Now has gone now, She’s Not There isn’t there, and Elvis ( Suspicious Minds ) has left the building !There are about nineteen new songs being featured in full or in part, and there’s a second semi – acoustic medley been added, plus there are new outfits, new solo bits, new links and loads of new footage, so although it retains the essence of the regular show there’s plenty of different stuff for returning fans to enjoy. There are already songs that are showing early signs of becoming standout moments; a stomping version of Out Of Time closes the first half and Jamie does a fantastic job of Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade Of Pale ( or Skiffle Lie Fandangle , as it’s also known ), plus Phil’s twist on the Shadows is a corker…we may have dispensed with the Black Box Of Bafflement but the spirit of Hank still lives on !We’ve still to see Jamie’s new solo spot, and one song in the second medley can’t be done just yet as we’ve got to sort out some visual issues, but what we’ve got already is looking and sounding great, and the audience are lapping it up. For the second night running the show computer behaves itself, largely thanks to Tomps offering it a sacrifice of several pocket calculators and a digital watch, and apart from a couple of “ new cue “ visual glitsches the whole thing runs beautifully. Duty manager Shaun ensures that he earns legendary status after the show by giving us a big bag of doughnuts, sausage rolls and sandwiches for the bus, and so it’s a bunch of much happier campers who climb into their bunks and head south down the M6. As the bus pulls out there’s a bump from beneath the wheels and I look out the window to see what looks suspiciously like a traffic warden lying in the road where we’ve just been parked…….

Haverhill Arts Centre Thurs Feb 24th

2011-02-28T14:38:00.000-08:00

Do you ever get that feeling that everything’s conspiring against you, and that maybe some things just aren’t meant to be ?? Now, I’m normally a “ glass half full “ kind of cove, but recently even my optimism has been given a severe shoeing. We’re about to start what is arguably an even more important tour than the debut outing a year ago, yet over the course of just a couple of days we’ve heard that Jamie’s chest infection is still giving him serious trouble with his voice, quickly followed by the dreadful news that our friend and fellow crew member Moore, has suffered a stroke and is in hospital. As Clive was probably the fittest and healthiest member of the whole crew this has been a major shock, and to be honest we’re struggling to get it to sink in. He’s got such a presence that it’s hard to imagine him being laid so low, and this has really cast a pall over our preparations. The only bright spot is that Tomps, despite being the most in- demand cameraman and video editor this side of the Rockies, has come to the rescue and managed to re-arrange his work so that he can cover the whole tour. It’s thus with somewhat mixed emotions that we arrive at the Arts Centre today…..we’ve got the usual pre-tour mixture of nerves and excitement peppered with a fair amount of anticipation, a dash of pure terror and a pinch of roiling guts, though on reflection the latter is probably last night’s chicken jalfrezi. For the first time in ages there’s also a totally new face on the crew in the shape of monitor engineer Chris Stocker. When Pug left us last year for Antipodean shores we’d half expected that he’d either run out of money or do something illegal, either of which would necessitate a sharp exit back to Blighty and the welcoming arms of the Bootleg family, but sadly he’s proved to be made of sterner stuff, and we’ve had to go back to the drawing board. Of course, with our contact network and our gazillion years in the business we could get a monitor engineer in no time at all, but it needs to be someone who fits in with our somewhat idiosyncratic bunch as much as someone who has the pure technical ability. We’d seen Chris before many times outside Milton Keynes railway station as he sat wrapped in rags with his dog on a string, and had been impressed with the cheerful way he shamelessly begged for money and scraps of food, so after a short negotiation about how many bottles of cider he’d be paid and a quick trip to a local sheep-dip, he was in. So finally the build-up is over, and here we are again in Haverhill. Now, first days are always a BIT fraught, but today seems especially knotty and gnarled. Chris is seeing the system built for the first time, and there are also new elements to the PA, so that all takes a while to get going, plus the computer which runs all the show visuals falls over and steadfastly refuses to start up again. Did you notice how calmly I slipped that in, Faithful Blogreader ? A year ago that news would have at best rendered me a sobbing wreck and at worst had me reaching for the steak knives to commit hara-kiri, but these days a combination of absolute trust in the abilities of my colleagues and, of course, some blind, desperate optimism gives me the warm, fuzzy feeling that it’s somehow all going to be fine. The other thing that seriously impresses me is the band’s attitude…..instead of having conniption fits, Den accepts the problem with almost Zen-like stoicism. Before we’ve even started the first date we’ve had to change the show anyway…..Jamie’s voice problems mean that we’re having to drop four numbers from tonight’s set….but the experience of last year’s tours mean that we now greet this kind of news with almost arrogant insouciance rather than bowel – loosening panic. As it happens, by some arcane process of digital alchemy the computer decides not to only to start working but to KEEP working throughout the show, although Tomps advises us not to breathe anywhere near it or even look at it in case whatever little demons are churning around inside it’s bits and bytes get the arse with us and go on strike again. All in all it’s been a pretty fraught and stressful day, to be totally honest, but then the lights go down, the “no smoking” announcement is made, and the magic begins all over again . Can I just say here and now that I’m going to make no excuses for not going into detail about the actual show here, because if I’m totally straight with you much of it went by in a blur of new cues, new songs and furtive sideways glances at our recalcitrant computer. Suffice to say that despite Jamie’s vocal worries the band, to use a well-worn X Factor cliché “ owned “ the stage tonight….and fear not, folks, there’ll be a lot more about the performances themselves in future blogs. One thing that DOES merit special mention, though, is that for the first time we’ve a big, spiffy, proper tour programme which Den put together with old mucker and all – round graphic genius Ian; it’s glossy and professional and I think I want to marry it and have it’s children. Well done chaps….big pats on the back due all round. Another marker of how the show is expanding and developing arrives tonight in the shape of a big, shiny double-decker tour bus, with bunks, kitchen, entertainment systems, engine, wheels and everything. This beastie is going to be our home for the next few weeks, though sadly not for me tonight….I’ve got to head back to base to pick up some bits and bobs for tomorrow. I DO get the dubious pleasure of being the pathfinder, leading the bus out towards the M11 and tomorrow’s show in Morecambe, but as I stop for fuel I see the bus pass me and disappear into the Suffolk night. Either driver Kev is now sure of where he’s going now, or else I’m going to find myself very lonely at the gig tomorrow…….

My Little Office, Geddington - The Sequel Sun January 16th 2011

2011-01-16T08:35:00.000-08:00

Good day everyone, and Happy New Year from Bootleg Sixties Towers ! Despite the fact that I'm still hoovering up pine needles and that not all of the Christmas choccy has been eaten yet ( actually that's a blatant lie ) we're already just a few short weeks away from the start of the 2011 Spring Tour. We have, in fact, been working on this since way back before the last jaunt in the late summer of 2010, but in the way of these things what starts out as a distant mark on your wallplanner suddenly becomes the day after tomorrow in the blink of an eye. Actually we've been pretty much free of the usual logistical and personnel buffoonery that surrounds tours, meaning that either we're getting better at it or a disaster of truly gargantuan proportions is waiting just around the corner to bite us on our Christmas pud - reinforced arses. Apart from some posters going temporarily astray and the fact that Scotland was shut for December ( apparently they had some trouble with a light dusting of snow. Can't say I noticed...was it mentioned on the news ?? ), our biggest headache so far has been finding a replacement tour bus. Oh yes, we're going all proper rock 'n' roll on this next runout. Now, SOME tour buses are mobile Palaces Of Sin, but somehow I can't help feeling that ours will be more a travelling melange of Ovaltine, Ssanatogen, Ralgex and slippers. We'd found a bus company that had come up with one of those " so brilliant I can't believe no-one's thought of it before " ideas about their cost structure. Well, the reason no-one's thought of it before is because it obviously doesn't bloody work, and they've now gone out of business, leaving us to find an alternative in what is the country's busiest touring period of the year. I thought we were going to end up with a twelve - berth hay wagon or, if we were REALLY lucky, a sea - going container on the back of an Eddie Stobart truck, but no, we'll have a real, shiny bus, with bunks, a kitchen, a loo and everything. We even toyed with the idea of having the band's logo emblazoned on the side so that as we traversed the country, people would rush into the street, look at the bus and say " Who the hell are The Bootleg Sixties....?" As it happens the artwork for this was going to cost the equivalent of the Gross National Product of Paraguay, so we knocked that idea on the head. Our other big task has been replacing the godlike genius that was Pug, monitor engineer extraordinaire. We were even hanging on to a vestige of hope that he might tire of his new life Down Under, especially in the light of their recent moisture problems, and come back to help us; however, he sent me picture of himself in Sydney harbour on a blisteringly hot day, happily shitfaced and mooning at the camera with a whole posse of simiarlly beer - sodden chums, so clearly he's not pining for home TOO much. We think we've found a likely candidate to take over, but so as not to tempt fate I won't mention his name in case he explodes, contracts dengue fever, or turns out to be number one on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Whoever we end up with, though, this next tour's going to be very interesting. Not only are we going to some new places like Andover,Exmouth and St Helens, we're going to a whole new territory, Scotland, for the first time. We're also going back to some places we did on the last tour, hoping to improve on or at least match how we did before, so the overall aim is to crank the show's profile up a notch or ten. We're still planning to stick to one major UK tour per year, so we have to make the most of every show. We WILL be doing some special one-offs around the country again later in the year, so watch the website for details. Speaking of the website and all things digital, we're about to add a FanZone page in time for the tour. It's going to be a members - only feature, and we'll using it for news updates, visual and audio downloads, competitions, and all manner of Booties - related malarkey, so keep an eye on the site until you see the link to join. You'll also, I'm reliably informed, be able to follow us on Twitter. Far from being something that might pique Bill Oddie's interest, this is, apparently, a new - fangled thing that young people use, like Mugbook or Faceache or whatever it's called. From our point of view it means that we'll be able to give you minute - by - minute accounts of debauched Nurofen - popping sessions on the tour bus and the like, plus you'll be able to tell us what you think of the shows pretty much as they happen. I'll still be doing the blog, of course, but Twitter gives us a faster, closer relationship with you all...plus it means some of the other buggers in the tour party can write something this time ! There'll probably be at least one more blog before we kick off in Haverhill on February 24th, so as they say on all those radio shows that make you want to reach inside the set, drag the DJ out and punch him in the face, " Remember, keep it here...."

Doncaster Civic Wedneday Sept 8th

2010-09-09T01:40:00.000-07:00

And so, feeling like it's only just started, our mini - tour is over. Tonight's the last show, and the really annoying thing about it is that we were just starting to properly click into that tour groove again, where everything runs smoothly, the performances are at a constantly high level, and everyone totally knows what they're doing to bring the whole thing together. The last three shows in particular have been a perfect example, with build and soundcheck times getting shorter as we tighten up the production. It's an odd one, though....on the one hand I'm not wanting it to stop as we're seeing The Bootleg's Effect again, and it's quite a heady thing to witness, but on the other hand my business head tells me these short tours aren't really cost effective, and I know I've got a lot of number-crunching to do when I get back to HQ. There's also a lot going on with various members of the tour party; Steve is about to start the stress - inducing process of moving house, Pug really IS going to Australia this time, and I'm trying to deal with some health issues which are causing problems, so in a way we DO need this to be over to concentrate on those things. The fact that we've had so many personnel changes on the crew over such a short space of time, especially with Arthur not being here for the final few shows, would normally be a cause for palm-moistening anxiety, but although the actual logistics of this haven't given us any worries whatsoever, the constant movement of people has lent a sort of temporary feel to proceedings; we haven't had the chance to get that gang mentality going, and that's helped disrupt the continuity just as much as the odd gaps we've had between shows. In short, I'm feeling a bit dischuffed today, and can't REALLY pin down why. Any free pyschoanalysis to this blog site, please..... But enough of this introspective maundering and maunging, on with the show ! Today we're at the Civic Theatre, a truly odd little building right in the middle of Donnie. From the outside it looks a bit like the big brother of those godawful prefab houses that the post-war government built for their returning heroes (" Great....Hitler tries to shoot my knackers off for five years, and as a thankyou from my country I get to live in a cardboard box with windows.....")but from the inside it's all old-school theatrical finishes and flourishes. It's long and narrow, with a decent stage and a somewhat alarmingly low roof, but it's exactly our kind of place. Like Leamington, the theatre has just reopened after a summer break, but we know before we get here that we've already more than doubled last night's paltry audience. The box office are also quite optimistic that there'll be a decent walk-up; Acker Bilk played last night, and much of the business there was walk-up, though to be honest I think that's more a case of audience prudence....I actually thought Mr Bilk was tootling Stranger On The Shore with the celestial choir these days, and was genuinely surprised to hear that not only was he still alive, but that he was still touring. He must be about 95 by now, so I guess the audience were just leaving it to the last minute, ringing the theatre just as the doors opened for the evening..." Hello, has Acker died yet ? No ? Great...I'm on me way over. I'll have two front row tickets, please... ". They're also hopeful that we'll pick up some of the people in town for the start of the St Leger meeting at Doncaster Racecourse, but having seen some of these characters around town earlier in the day I'm not so sure....at first I thought it was just a particularly big office party, as there were loads of men in suits and ties wandering around in large groups talking loudly and comparing mobiles ( it's a sad facet of 21st Century life that manhood is no longer measured by the size of your "wedding tackle" but by the number of apps you've got on your phone... ) I then thought that maybe it was a fancy dress "do", as I spotted three girls wearing clothes that sacrificed every vestige of comfort and practicality on the altar of ludicrousness. However, as I rounded a corner I came across a wine bar teeming with punters, and suddenly it clicked. It was the women who gave it away, actually. They'd obviously seen in OK and Hello magazines what the Beautiful People wear at Ascot Ladie's Day, and had put their own unique South Yorkshire spin on it. These aren't " the uppper class ", though, they're the wives and girlfriends of salesmen, and farmers, and factory owners, and car dealers, and as such are tarred with the indelible brush of their true origins. They may have the Chanel and Dior dresses and the Louboutins and Jimmy Choo's, but as they totter around on their vertiginous heels with their orange sunbed tans and their ridiculous confections of net and bead "hats" perched on their perfectly coiffed heads, you just KNOW they'll always be Sainsbury's, and never St Tropez. Still, if any of these preening hordes want to come and throw some of their winnnings at us, I'm not going to complain. Back at the theatre, it's been a record turnaround; we got here at 1pm, but by 5pm we've set everything up, soundchecked the band, and have loosed Damian upon the unsuspecting streets of Doncaster in search of fodder. Whilst impressive, there's a downside to this unexpected windfall of leisure time. In a nutshell, there's nothing happening to keep the adrenaline levels flowing, and the tiredness of the past few days starts to kick in. I'm sitting at my stage right position, intercom headphones on, all set for the show, I tip my head back to rest it on the wall.....and suddenly I realise that the odd thing which sounds like an asthmatic warthog having a particularly troublesome bowel movement is actually my snoring. I've always been pretty good at that touring / armed forces thing of napping when you can and where you can, but as I'm getting older I no longer leap into wakefulness the moment my eyes are open....it's more of a slow crawl punctuated by occasional whimpers and curses, and I'm less of a coiled spring ready for action, more of a three-toed sloth awaking from a long winter's hibernation. As such when someone asks me a question over the intercom, my reaction is " Mnnnnngnnnngng ", which at least has the effect of stunning my interrogator into puzzled silence, giving me time to drag myself back into some semblance of consciousnesss. Fortunately, before I can tumble back into dreamland again, the doors are open, and in come the audience. Rather brilliantly, right at the front there's a guy in a red satin Sgt Pepper-esque suit and slightly unconvincing wig, though I have to admit that the rest of the crowd are, shall we say, at the more mature end of our audience demographic. Hey ho. I call the house lights out, the intro video rolls, the band move into place in the dark, and then ANOTHER first happens.....the audience are actually applauding the shadowy figures onstage, quite loudly and enthusiastically, as it happens ! We're wondering if it's going to be one of those " little crowd, big reaction " nights, but to be honest the first half's all a bit...polite, I guess. Oh, they like it well enough, they laugh in the right places and sing along when asked, but apart from our red-suited and bewigged gentleman, no-one's going Radio Rental. The second half, though, as often happens,is a different matter. It must be something they put in the wine gums on sale at the foyer kiosk, but by the time we get to the combo-punch of Green Onions / On The Beach / Surfin' Safari / Mony Mony / Daydream Believer, they're not just dancing in the aisles but in front of the stage too. When the lights go up some of them come to the crew at front of the stage, some go to the two boys at the front of house mixing posiition, and some to the duty theatre staff, but they all say the same thing..." That was the best show we've had in here...when are you coming back ? ". This, ladies and gentlemen, is The Bootleg's Effect. We came, we saw, we rocked ( and, it must be said, occasionally rolled, but only when the situation demanded it ). And so on to the loadout, and a final, genuinely sad parting with our man Rupert "Pug" Jones, who will be leaving for Oz tomorrow. Pug's been with Arthur and I for a few years now, and has developed from an enthusiastic but inexperienced youngster into a good, solid engineer, popular with bands and crews alike. He works with us on pretty much everything we do, not just The Booties, and I'm really, really going to miss him. I tentatively suggest that I'll look into the cost of airfares so that we can fly him back for next year's tour, but he just smiles wryly. We may well be at the start of a new adventure with this show, but Pug's a young man and HIS new adventure is of a much more fundamental and life-changing nature. His eyes are on a much more distant horizon and he may yet decide that his entire future lies on the other side of the world. This may, quite literally, be the last time we ever see him, but whatever is ahead for him in Australia, he goes there with our love and best wishes. We also say goodbye to Ben Dorrington, who has stepped in for these past four shows as it he'd been here for ever, and who has been been his usual funny, friendly self throughout....he's off back to the world of corporate mega-shows tomorrow, muttering something about an event involveing duelling bulldozers, but our paths with definitely cross again. It's thus with something of a heavy heart that we start the drive back to Bedford to unload the kit. The end of a tour, even one as short as this, is always slightly dislocating, and it takes a few days to adjust and decompress. As often happens on last nights, we've not really had the chance to talk much to the band...they've all been round and thanked us as we were de-rigging, but they've got an even longer drive than us ahead of them and so they need to get weaving. It's odd....we often don't see Jamie, Phil and Chris at all between Booties' tours, but when we DO, everything just clicks back into place. We've spent very little time with the lads on these dates, largely due to the travelling arrangements, but already there's talk of trying to get a tour bus for at least part of next year's Spring outing, so we'd be together a lot more... now THAT will be something to look forward to! Talking of next year's tour, by the way, it will run from February 24th to April 3rd, and we'll be publishing the dates on the Bootleg Sixties website shortly. For my part I just want to say thanks again, Faithful Blogreader, for making these random musings worth writing. I've decided that I definitely want to do something different for the next tour....I'd toyed with the idea of a " talking book " kind of thing, which can apparently be added to and accessed from our website by some arcane and mystical process known only to the Grand Wizards of Thoon, but I felt it needed to be BIGGER, somehow, so I'm currently sketching our plans for "The Bootleg Sixties Tourblog...On Ice ". I think it could work, don't you ? In closing, I've been asked by a couple of people if I could publish the setlist which the band played this time out. I didn't ask them why, though I would respectfully suggest that they REALLY need to get out more, but here goes anyway. This is the tour setlist, by the way, not the Liverpool setlist...I've already eaten that one. Bye for now, and as the old cliche goes, watch this space.....

SET ONE
From Me To You
Just One Look
When You Walk In The Room
Hippy Hippy Shake
Go Now
We've Gotta Get Out Of This Place
Pretty Woman
Catch Us IF You Can
In My Room
You've Got Your Troubles /Tobacco Road / For Your Love / She's Not There
Hard Day's Night
Mr Tambourine Man
Keeep On Running
Sound Of Silence
Sunshine Superman / The Letter / Pretty Flamingo/ Sorrow / Walk Right Back
You Really Got Me
Wonderful Land
I'm A Boy
I'm A Believer

SET TWO
Blowin' In The Wind
Itchycoo Park
You Were On My Mind
Happy Together / Sunny Afternoon
Hole In My Shoe
Strawberry Fields
Light My Fire
California Dreaming
Handbags And Gladrags
The Star Spangled Banner
Pinball Wizard
He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother
Green Onions
On The Beach
Surfin' USA
Mony Mony
Daydream Believer
--------------------
You'll Never Walk Alone ( Blimey...sounds like a bloody good show...must try and catch it sometime..... )

Leamington Spa Royal Spa Centre Tues Sept 7th

2010-09-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Just to complete the full Travelodge Experience, I spent much of the night parking my tiger in the loo, thanks, almost certainly, to a suspect chicken and mushroom pie that I had last night, so it's a somewhat less than refreshed Henderson that drags his lardy arse out to the van. The lads are all up and about and have been sampling the delights of a nearby Sainsbury's cafe, but the very idea of breakfast makes me want to blow chunks, so I pass. Pug very kindly brings me a bottle of flavoured milk to help settle my roiling innards, and despite initial doubts I give it a try. If it works, great, but if it doesn't at least the vom will be colourful.... The drive from Hereford to Leamington takes us into the countryside on our way to the M5, and it's a lovely autumn morning as we wind our way up hill and down dale, and we're thoroughly enjoying the drive...right until we suddenly run into Hi - Visibility Vest Man and his " Road Closed " sign. Bugger. Nick's behind us in his van, so we set off in convoy along the diversion signs, which, in time-honoured fashion, disappear almost immediately, leaving us deeper and deeper into Nowhereland. We decide to place our trust in Doris The Sat-Nag, who is telling us to turn left along what appears to be a donkey track, but it soon broadens out into a single cart-lane, so we know we're going in the right direction. The scenery is quite stunning, and one hilltop vista in particular looks like it's painted on the brilliant blue sky. It's all very Watership Down, but we've got a gig to get to, and the fact that we've just passed a carvan of Bedoiun traders and their camels makes us wonder if we're as close to the main road as we thought. I don't think we're in Herefordshire anymore, Toto....Fortunately we hit the road we need just a couple of miles further on, and from there it's a straight, fast run to Leamington, or Royal Leamington Spa to give it it's full name. It really is a very pretty place, all Regency grandeur and horsey ladies in pearls and twinsets, though the Royal Spa Centre itself is a modern theatre that sits a little uncomfortably in the middle of all this opulence. Having said that, it's got good facilities, a nice big stage and a helpful, friendly crew. It soon becomes clear, however, that one thing it HASN'T got is an audience for tonight's show. We were always a little nervous about this one because the theatre has just re-opened after summer refurbishment, and we are only the second show of the autumn season, so there was a fear that their promo and marketing machine wouldn't be fully geared up to these early shows. Our fears, as it transpires, are justified....they've sold a paltry seventy - two advance tickets for tonight. Now, sometimes, things like this happen and they just don't make sense. I've seen the marketing schedule the theatre has done, and it includes all the posters, flyers, mail shots, e-shots and newspaper ads we could ask for. The ads also cover Coventry, possibly our strongest area outside of home territory, so there's no rhyme nor reason why this hasn't sold, but the fact is that it hasn't. There are two ways you can go in these situations. One is to throw a righteous wobbler, blame everyone in the world and cancel the show, pissing off theatre and ticket-buyers alike, and the other is to bite the bullet, get on with it, and chalk it up to experience. I can see that the theatre's done it's bit to push the show and that they're as baffled as we are, so we go for the latter option.
As I said in a previous blog, the band have got a good attitude to this kind of situation, and they're very philosophical about it all. The show will still be as good as if we had a full house, and there'll be no slacking or shirking, so all I have to do now is tear at my clothing in despair and wonder how the buggery bollocks I can absorb the financial hit we'll take tonight. Luckily nspiration strikes. Drink heavily. I thus head to the pub with the others where I proceed to get steaming drunk and start a fight with a policeman. And his horse. On a serious note, this is a landmark we hoped we'd never reach, namely a new lowest audience attendance figure. The trick is not to let is get you down until afterwards, so though we watch somewhat disconsolately as the sparse audience drifts into the theatre, we click back into " show gear " as soon as the house lights go down. As often happens, it's never the disaster I was afraid of. For a little crowd they make their presence felt, and though some of the jokes might not get the belly-laughs they do elsewhere, this is going well....very well, in fact. Technically, it's a flawless show, and there's nothing forced about the audience's response to the band or their calls for an encore. In many ways the lads have worked even harder tonight; instead of going into their shells they've been smiling and looking like they're enjoying themselves, and Chris in particular has been something of a cheerleader over the past few shows. There's a steady stream of people telling Pug and Damian what a fantastic show it is as they file out afterwards, and as Den says, that's what this building process with the show is all about. They'll tell people who will tell people, and the next time we come here it'll be a totally different story. Next time there'll be no-one here at all......!

Hereford Courtyard Monday Sept 6th

2010-09-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

One of the good things about the way this whole project is developing is that everyone's much more realistic about how it's growing. The fact that we had a pretty mental and virtuaqlly sold-out show last night doesn't mean that the next show will be the same, especially if we've never been there before, and so we descend on Hereford with the attitude that no matter how many people turn up tonight, they're not going to forget us and they're going to want us back. Hereford is famous for bulls, cider, popstrel Eliie Goulding and....err...that's about it, so we don't know whether it's a hotbed of classic Seventies rock, banging techno, finger-in-the-ear "Whose pigs are these " folk music or even the last outpost of The Wurzel's fanclub. What we DO know is that this is a really nice theatre with a great crew, and despite the fact that it's pissing down enough to get Noah worried for much of the day, we're enjoying the wide open spaces of the stage. Last night was so small that at times I felt like one of The Borrowers, but here we've got bags of room, and this is the kind of stage where we can really make this look like a big, grown-up rock show again. It's fine to be able to knock people out with the show in little rooms like Market Drayton and ( speak the devil's name quietly ) Boston, but to move everything on we have to be able to fill the big stages and still have the audience saying it's one of the best things they've ever seen. We're still very much breaking new ground, even after all this time....we've never been here before, so we don't know what to expect, so we just have to get in, do our jobs, and bring the message that THEY WILL SURRENDER TO US EVENTUALLY AND LOVE US MORE THAN ANY OTHER AND GIVE US ALL THEIR MONEY AND THEIR ADORATION AND THEIR VIRGINS AND EVERYTHING....Actually, I'd settle for the virgins. Just a couple. One, even....Anyway, back in the real world, the rain continues to hose down, which is not good as it pretty much kills the " walk up ", which is people who decide to come along on the night or on the spur of the moment. Faced with the choice of venturing out into the teeming rain to see a new show or to crank up the heating a notch and snuggle down in front of the old crystal bucket, sadly the Big Brothers and X Factors of this world win almost every time. No matter though...onwards and upwards,as they say. There's actually a decent crowd in tonight, as it happens, and they're clearly in the mood to be entertained, making much more noise than an audience of this size has any right to do. Where a show like this CAN fall down isn't on the songs, strangely enough, it's the bits between them. Den and Steve in particular have got some great lines, and there's nothing worse than dropping in a funny which had them rolling in the aisles last night, only to find that tonight it's greeted by total silence and tumbleweed blowing across the staqe. Den's VERY good at this, though; he's got a way of almost challenging the audience not to join in without them realising that's what he's doing. It works, quite literally, every time, and tonight's no exception. The first number where we get the audience involved is only the fourth one in, Hippy Hippy Shake, but there's no hesitation as they clap along with the lads. There's one lady of somewhat advanced years who does this weird, twisting shimmy dance throughout the whole show, and we're all loving this game old bird as she boogies along. Turns out later she didn't really WANT to keep dancing, she's just got a particularly nasty case of piles, but she's setting the standard anyway. Den has decided to reintroduce On The Beach to the end of the set as we're still getting a lot of " you don't do any Cliff " comments, and it's a great choice as it makes the last five songs a real " Sixties party ". When the band finish and leave the stage it's to genuine and full applause, and then a first happens for us...the crowd break into the " We want more ! " chant, which is as appreciated as it's unexpected. You'll Never Walk Alone leaves them still baying for more, but it's lights up, curtain down and on to the next one....they'll have us back here, no doubt, and we want to leave people talking about this show. It's a fast getout, so we all head to the local Travelodge for some much - needed sleep. Ah, yes, the Travelodge....now, I don't want this blog to turn into some kind of Lonely Planet guide to the hotels of Britain, but it would also be churlish of me to leave the experience unremarked. The first warning sign is that it's slap bang opposite the Cider Museum. This is dangerous because Tomps, normally the mild - mannered Clark Kent of our tour party, has been known to turn into Ciderman, destroying all in his path, after just one pint of Scruttock's Old Dirigible scrumpy. I make a mental note to lock him in his rooom and then spirit him away past it in the morning. The second thing that makes my nadgers curdle is Travelodge's current advertising campaign. Now, a Russian meerkat flogging car insurance I can handle, but a bunch of teddy bears coming on like East End villains urging me to " Sleep tight " just makes me want to hurt people, preferably the numpty from the advertising agency that came up with the idea in the first place. On the ads the rooms all look warm and cosy, but the one I go into boasts a cold austerity that would make a monk's cell look like a suite at The Dorchester. There's not a single picture or anything to break up the monotony of the four white, white walls, and within five minutes I'm feeling like I'm doing a ten stretch for armed robbery ( maybe THAT'S why the little bears in the ads are like thugs....). Still, it's got a bed, and I'm knackered, so I sit down on the edge of it...and am immmediately tipped backwards, where I lie scrabbling on my back with my legs in the air like an upended turtle. There's a SERIOUS dip in the middle of the bed....it must have been used by two hippos for a major shagfest or something, but I'm in it now, and don't have the strength to climb back out again, so it's goodnight from me.....bloody " Sleep tight " indeed.....

Wavendon Stables Sunday Sept 5th

2010-09-06T09:03:00.000-07:00

Something of a local gig for many of the crew today. Wavendon is a tiny pimple on the bum of the urban sprawl that makes up Milton Keynes, a city memorably described by comedian Bill Bailey as " Satan's lay-by ", and we've worked at the Stables many times over the years with various productions. The whole shebang was started here ages ago by the late, great jazzer Johnny Dankworth and his wife Cleo Laine, and the original Stables was a stable block attached to their house ( see what they did there ? ) but this purpose - built theatre is spanky and new and smells of carpet, as opposed to horseshit, which somewhat blighted the vibe of the original place. Although the theatre is pretty small, it hosts some excellent and high profile acts, and has a fiercely loyal regular audience, known as Stablemates ( it just keeps getting better, doesn't it ? ). It's a little bit of a weird one for the Booties show as the greater part of the stage space is what's know as a thrust ( oo-er missus ) which sticks way out into the audience. It means there isn't a flat area behind the stage big enough to take all three of our screens, so we've had to fanny around hanging screens from the ceiling. Only problem is, there are no actual bars or fixtures to hang them from. Oh no. What we have instead is a mesh of metal cable which also acts as a floor which the lighting technicians can walk on when they move lights and cables around. From underneath it looks like a giant net, and when you're just walking on it, it's fine. However, when you have to lie or kneel on it when tying off the hanging bars and cables for the projector, it suddenly tskes on the properties of a cheesegrater. Clive is manfully clambering around up there, his efforts punctuated by yelps of pain and the occasional scream of actual agony, and when he finally gets back down to ground level his body has been imprinted with a fascinating tattoo of indendation marks where he's been sliced and diced by the mesh, but there's no actual blood, so that's alright then. Girl. Today is an odd one for another reason, too...Arthur and Clive are only here for the build and soundcheck, then they are jumping on a tour bus to go off on a short series of dates for Yamaha, starting in Dublin tomorrow. As such there's a bit of an " all change " feel about the show, with Pug moving to front of house engineer and our old mucker Ben Dorrington coming in on monitors. Ben has actually been on a transatlantic voyage with the Queen Mary II, so he will arrive back in Heathrow this morning, having flown in overnight from New York. No doubt he'll be as fresh as a daisy and not in the LEAST jetlagged.....Because there isn't enough space behind the stage for the screens we've had to move everything forward, and as such it's quite cramped up there. Steve's access to his drumkit is so tight we seriously consider the option of him abseiling down from the wire mesh above, and there's no way the band can get on from stage right at all, so this is going to be tres cosy, especially when Nick performs Le Danse IKEA, getting the stools on and off for the acoustic section. One REALLY good thing about tonight, though, is that it's sold very well. We know we have a good number of fans coming up from our home areas, but the Stablemates have been buying their tickets too, by the looks of it. We've done a couple of sold-out shows in the past here when we were working with Peter Green Splinter Group, so we know the intimacy of the venue can produce a great atmosphere, and the level of noise we get at the end of opener From Me To You tells us all we want to know...tonight's going to be a belter. Some nights we have some strange things happen, like the audience will respond most strongly to things like the Simon and Garfunkel song, and then they're with us all the way. Other nights it's Light My Fire that really breaks down the barriers, and sometimes we've got them from the first number. That's definitely the case tonight, and the fact that the audience are so close makes their response seem even louder and more powerful. Nick does indeed have to do an obstacle course to get the stools on and off, and we discover that one of the moving lights is actually pointing straight at a lady in the balcony ( we only really noticed when her eyebrows finally burst into flames ) but other than that it's a stonking gig. When the crowd sing back at the band on things like Sunny Afternoon and I'm A Believer it pretty much takes the roof off. In fact, it feels very much like the Marlborough gig last tour where we absolutely ripped the place up and did an unscheduled second encore for the only time on the whole jaunt. Part of me's hoping that Den will call Spirit In The Sky again, but he does the sensible thing and "leaves them wanting more ", as the showbiz maxim goes. There are loads of friends and fans wanting to speak to everyone afterwards, and everyone's totally buzzing. It's definitely going to be one that we'll talk about for a long time to come, and for all the right reasons. There might not have been any weird stuff like dive-bombing bats here tonight ( though Damian DID have a moth fly down his shirtfront ) ...it was all about the music, the band and the audience. Wavendon is now officially the Rock & Roll Capital of The Civilized Western World....

Christchurch Regent, Thursday Sept 2nd

2010-09-04T01:17:00.000-07:00

I'm sure someone has actually been down here and moved Dorset a bit further south since last time, or maybe it was the teeth - grinding monotony of the miles and miles of roadworks on the M1 and M25, but it takes bloody AGES to get to Christchurch today, and the carload of crew types arrive a full thirty minutes after Arthur and Nick have pulled up in the two gear vehicles. It's an absolutely glorious South Coast day, but we've no time to appreciate it as we're straight out of the car and into the load-in. The Regent is one of those curious little theatres that you find tucked away in various provincial towns around the UK, fronting onto the main street but with a modest facade that you almost miss as you drive by. Haverhill Arts Centre and Chatham Central Hall are very similar, but inside the Regent it's a totally different ballgame as the place has this lovely, faded art - deco vibe. It's fun, funky and exactly the kind of place we enjoy playing. The load -in is a BIT of a bugger, as they've got this big, grown - up scene dock at a height of about 4' from the ground, all tricked out and ready for the ramps or tail-lifts of the big trucks that will back up to it. However, it's way too lofty for our two Mercedes Sprinter vans, so we're faced with the option of either humping things in from floor level or rolling it up a mental switchback disabled access ramp that wouldn't look out of place as a ride on a local pleasure beach. The local crew lads are very helpful, though, and in the case of stage manager Sean, a laid - back and luxuriantly - ringletted rocker, they're also expert tea makers. Cold drinks are fine in hot weather, but sometimes a good brew will cool you down just as effectively, and boy do we NEED cooling down.....despite the fact that the scene dock shutter door is kept open until the last minute to allow some breeze across the stage, within minutes of our arrival we're sweating bullets, and Pug in particular looks like someone's just upended a bucket of water over him ( mind you, he breaks into a sweat just lighting a cigarette, so that's not really saying anything.....). The stage is also a bit narrow and cramped but we get sorted with the minimum of cursing and flouncing. The band all arrive without mishap or delay, and the soundcheck is dispatched with such elan that we've got nearly an hour and a half before doors, so I make a play for Damian's Food God title and trot out in search of comestibles, returning successfully with...yep, you guessed it...fish and chips
( actually I almost fell over the bloody place as it was virtually next door to the theatre, so I don't think Damian's got anything to fear from me ). It's such a lovely evening that I suggest we dine al fresco " Nah " replies some wag, I'm going to eat mine outside instead ". Foolish boy. We dutifully troop out and have one of those lovely little tour bonding moments as all eleven of us, plus Den's lad-ling William, sit chatting and eating outside the theatre in the gorgeous Dorset sunshine, seagulls wheeling overhead. Despite the idyllic setting I'm keeping a wary eye on the birds; I've seen these winged muggers on You've Been Framed as they filch grub out the very hands of unsuspecting tourists, and despite the fact that it would take a veritable Schwarzenegger of the avian world to part ME from my food, I'm not going to give them the slightest opportunity. Eventually it's time to head back inside, and as the doors open we realise it's not going to be that large a crowd tonight.In the past this has worked both ways for us; early in the last tour we had a couple of quiet shows and it seemed to hobble the band in some way, so that they played very much within themselves. On other nights it made for a more intimate connection, though, and a couple of the best shows we did were to smaller audiences. Pleasingly, tonight is very much the latter. This is a really enthusiastic crowd, vocally boosted and prompted by our perennial front - row stormtroopers Marilyn and Debs, and it's one of those nights when you just KNOW it's going to be good. When this band is put onto a small stage these days, we don't get hissy fits or diva strops about not having room to express themselves or some such cobblers, what we get instead is a kind of raw, undistilled intensity that really does prove irresistible to audiences. Add Arthur's sonic genius and the lights and projections to the mix and you've suddenly got something that seems way too big a fit for it's surroundings. It's not a case of arrogance; we KNOW this is a great show, and when you squeeze it into somewhere like the Regent it's phenomenal. Tonight is a perfect example of The Bootleg's Effect, and the fulsome praise heaped on us by the house staff coupled with the post-show e-mails from audience members just reinforce our resolve that we're on the right track with this, and that it's just a matter of time before we're stepping up to a different level. Tonight is also a FUN show; Steve's enjoying himself so much he corpses just as he's about to start his vocal for " In My Room " and everyone's relaxed and joking. Things are helped along by the sudden appearance onstage of a bat, clearly shaken from his slumber in the upper reaches of the theatre's roof by the sturm und drang of the band's playing. For a few numbers he zooms around the hall, even swooping down to buzz the band a couple of times. Some of the female audience members seem a little discomfited, but Chris deadpans reassurance, " Don't worry, it's just a special effect " he tells them. I know we sometimes say that our show features special guests, but this really IS a first..... Fortunately our little Pipistrelle friend ( later christened Eric The Bat by Marilyn and Debs for reasons known only to themselves ) soon disappears from sight, and we reason that he's either found a way out or much more likely, the sound from the PA has so seriously shagged his inbuilt radar that he's flown headfirst into a wall somewhere. Whatever the reason, the band are left unencumbered to rampage towards the end of another hugely successful show, marred only by my substituting two of the theatrical flashes ( you know, the ones with the " loud report " ) for two dodgy silver jets, and then forgetting to warn the band. It earns me a Paddington Bear Flat Stare from Den and poor Steve has to change his undercrackers AGAIN, but it's just a blip on another belting night for us all. These are the kind of gigs when you know you're getting it all right, and when the venue, the crowd and the local crew are as good as they are here, it's just so, so satisfying. It even takes the edge off a slow and arduous load-out, and will bolster us for the long drive home. We'll DEFINITELY come back here again. As we pull away I bid farewell to the Regent, and just as we drive past the load door I see a small bat swoop down. I can't be sure from this distance, but it looks like he's wearing a little bandage round his head.....

Bromsgrove Artrix Wed Sept 1st

2010-09-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

After the sheer blast of splendiferousness that was Liverpool, there was always going to be an element of " after the Lord Mayor's show " about the first gig after it. That show happens to be in sunny Bromsgrove ( actually VERY sunny, and gusset-moisteningly hot, too ) at a new theatre called Artrix ( I always thought he was Obelix's mate in the cartoon strip, but there you go ). Arthur's flown back in from a couple of days break back on Fuertaventura, and having recharged our batteries a bit we're looking forward to rejoining the fray as we motor down the M6 onto the M5, eventually finding ourselves in the sun - drenched car park of the theatre. Tomps is back on the tour from now until the end as Clive is off doing things like being a squire to the Barron Knights, so we're planning to have a bit of a chinwag with Den when he arrives, just to make sure all the visual elements of the show are totally nailed. Our plans are soon to be kicked into touch, however, as we get a call from Nick saying that a truck has overturned on the M42, and as a result he's stuck in stationary traffic...has been for the past half hour, in fact. As all our gear is spread across two vehicles, this is going to be a bit of an arsebiscuit....we've got the PA system with us but Nick's carrying the moving lights, which really should go in early, as well as our white backdrop, which really should go in first. We can build all the stuff we're carrying on OUR van, but then we're going to have to shoehorn all of Nick's gear in around it when he gets here, and that's the kind of palaver that just makes you break out in funbumps. A couple of calls later and it becomes clear that Nick, sitting in a sweltering stew of stationary vehicles, really isn't going to be getting here any time soon, so we bite the bullet and start setting up. We then realise that there's a very good chance the band are also stuck in the very same traffic, and a couple of phone calls proves this to be the case. The portents are not good. It's actually 3.30 by the time Nick finally pulls up, hot, stressed, and with a face like thunder. " Nice trip ?" I venture playfully.
" GRRRRRAAAAHHHNNNGGGRR" he replies, gnawing on my forearm. Not happy, then.....As it transpires, his late arrival isn't anywhere near as much of a nutcracker as we'd feared, and we get sorted relatively quickly, but the delay to the band themselves is giving us a headache now, not only because we're running out of soundcheck time but also because Den's got a revised show disk coming with him, and we need to get it into the computer, checked and readied. I'm expecting a stream of vented frsutration and invective, but when they finally DO arrive, the band are surprisingly chilled, and my forearms remain unsullied. Arthur and Tomps sort out the show visuals with Den and then we belt through a truncated soundcheck, but it doesn't feel hurried or stressful....in fact it has the slickness of a piece of well-oiled machinery, and it's another one of those moments where you think " We're all actually quite good at this, aren't we ? " There's even time to send our chief hunter-gatherer Damian and Pug out into the sun - dappled evening charged with the task of finding sustenance for the crew that doesn't come in a wrapper marked " Cadbury's ". He's a skilled fodder tracker, is our Damian...despite weighing about three and a half stone wringing wet and being so skinny that he virtually disappears when he turns sideways, he clearly has a fearsomely fast metabolism as he he can pack away his tucker with all the speed and panache of a big fat bastard like my good self. He's the kind of bloke who could find a KFC in the middle of the Kalahari desert, so the task of securing several portions of excellent fish and chips on a Wednesday night in Bromsgrove is almost unworthy of his talents. Nonethless, in what seems like no time at all we're chowing down backstage, making so many little involuntary moans of pleasure that it sounds uncomfortably like the set of a soft porn movie. There really IS nothing ike a good infusion of lard to set you up for a gig... The band are back to the " tour show " tonight after the diversifications of Liverpool, and within seconds of the opening " From Me To You " Tomps tells me over the intercom " Ah, this takes me right back to March ! " as he happily flies in the film footage, and I realise once again that yes, we ARE all good at this, band and crew alike. We blew away a few cobwebs in Whitley Bay but from then on in everyone's just dropped right back into the touring groove from five months ago. There aren't many set changes from last time....Happy Together and Sunny Afternoon have become a joyous medley instead of two separate numbers... there's no " On The Beach " and " Surfin' Safari " is back, but the pace and the power are still potent, and tonight we have a good - sized and vocal audience to bounce off. In fact, the whole show is pretty flawless; there are the usual couple of little technical niggles that we'll talk about in the car on the way back tonight, but by and large it's been a lovely, easy show considering all the transport nightmares that went on earlier and which could have seriously derailed things. It's nights like these when I can almost sit back and enjoy the band and the show rather than work on it, and I know that this is the " zone " the band are so good at getting into; it's smooth confidence without complacency, and it's this as much as anything else that's going to stand us in good stead over what will hopefully be many years of touring this show. More like this one, please.....!

Liverpool Philharmonic Friday Augu 27th

2010-08-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

Today, Faithful Blogreader, I must once again crave your indulgence. This is going to be a longer than usual blog, as there's raaaaaaaather a lot to relate, so I hope you'll hang on in there. As the song says, we'll start at the very beginning.......So we've driven from Whitley Bay, and arrive in Liverpool at about 3.30am, so as you can imagine, everyone's feeling a little torpid. The band are staying in Satan's B & B ( sorry, I mean the Adelphi ) but the crew, as befits our lowly, hairy-arsed status, have been allocated rooms in that pinnacle of budget accommodation, the Formule 1. For anyone who's never stayed in one of these beknighted hostels, a brief description is required. Imagine, if you will, a room...nay, a cubicle...some eight feet by ten feet ( don't ask me what that is in bloody metres....I'm old). Occupying nine-tenths of the available floorspace is a normal-looking double bed. Where things start to go totally Spanish is the second bed, however. This is a kind of bunk arrangement running horizontally across the top of the double bed, accessed by a dinky little ladder. Acting as the en-suite facilities, there's a miniscule washbasin in one corner of the room. A tiny table is slung across the opposite corner, under which sits a scarred and fag-burned plastic chair...and that's yer lot. The Ritz it isn't, and two problems immediately rear their ugly heads. The first is that neither Arthur or I are lightweights, so the idea of scampering up the somewhat flimsy-looking ladder holds little appeal, even if we could physically manage it, which we seriously doubt...the room appears to have been designed as a playhouse for orang-utans rather than a resting place for fifty-something roadpeople. There's a second bulk-related problem, too, which is that even if we DID manage to get up onto the bunk by some process of levitation, osmosis or whatever, neither of us fancies the idea of having the other's twenty-odd stone hovering just above our bonces with just a thin piece of wood standing between us and potential oblivion. And did I mention that after we'd got our keycard from the sullen youth at reception with the Warsaw/Toxteth hybrid accent and hauled our weary bodies and baggage up to the second floor that the bloody thing didn't even open the door ? Now, I know that the band were also having hotel-related fun and games themselves tonight, what with the five of them having to share two rooms, but let me tell you, by comparison with THIS shitbox they're in the executive suite at Claridges. We were finally let into our "room" by another monosyllabic, bullet-headed Pole, and solved the problem of the second bed by taking the mattress off the bunk and throwing it on the remaining floorspace under the sink.By now we were so shagged out that we just didn't care anymore, so I crashed out on the floor, undaunted by the interesting and varied array of insects which then tried to share my covers. After what seemed like only ten minutes but was, in fact, a massive four hours, we were awoken by a herd of bison galloping down the corridor. It was, in fact, just the room-service lady ( from Katowice, since you ask ) wheeling her little laundry cart from room to room, but thanks to some piece of miraculous construction genius every single footstep in these corridors is amplified a thousand times. What can I say...the place is built and owned by the French, and whilst they are very good at being garlic-munching surrender monkeys, they're shite at building cheap hotels. It wasn't over yet, however.....I decided to have a shower to try and get the accumulated floor-level flora and fauna out of my skin, so I summoned up the courage to brave the little cubicle down the corridor. I looked around for a towel, but could only find two flannels under the washbasin. After a moment or two I realised with sinking heart that this scrap of thin terrycloth was no flannel...this WAS the towel. Now, I'm no rough frontiersman or hardy survivalist, but I thought even I could make this work somehow. Wrong. When you've got as much surface area as I have, most of which is covered by moisture-retaining hair, you need considerable drying-power. The little hankie did it's best, and I managed to mop up some more of the liquid by contorting my body under the warm air hand-dryer, but short of performing a handstand there was no way of using this method this to air the old undercarriage, and thus it was with a somewhat chafing, John Wayne-esque gait that I headed back to the room. But enough of this spleen-venting....time to get on with our story. I merely wanted to give you a feel what what we were experiencing in the less than perfect build-up to this, probably the most important show in the short history of The Bootleg Sixties. Having assembled the troops in the carpark ( the hotel, naturally enough, not runnning to anything quite as extravagant as a reception area ) we head off to the venue in convoy. The Philharmonic is a beautiful hall, vast of ceiling and rich in architectural flourishes. With a capacity of over 2,000 it's by far the biggest and most impressive place we've ever staged this show, and despite some shortcomings for our specific needs ( like Cheltenham Town Hall it has no light directly above the stage and a rake of choir stalls behind it )local tech gurus Ad Lib have installed some free-standing screens for us that easily look as effective as the white backdrop we customarily use. Damian's going to have some fun trying to light the stage with a house rig designed more for providing a staid general colour wash for an orchestra than the flashing bombast of a rock show,but he's brought some toys with him and is also in general awe of the place, taking photos of it from every conceivable angle.I've got some toys of my own for tonight, too, more of which later, but for the moment our main focus is on whether or not Den's plan for getting replacement disks for tonight's show has worked or not. Den is coming in at 11.00am to start rejigging the slide show we already have as a back-up plan, and the disks themselves are being rushed up by car, so we're reasonably optimistic. The day gets another major boost when our enterprising foragers Clive and Damian discover a local Egyptian-owned cafe which has hit on the genius idea of a takeaway full Engllish breakfast. For a blissful ten minutes or so there's total silence as we sit in a line at the front of the stage and trough down gratefully. Like any army, a touring band marches on it's stomach, and though I'm carrying enough subcutaneous body fat to enable me to live, camel-like, for several months without food if pressed, this fresh fuel really hits the spot, so it's with renewed vigour that we push on with our work. First major relief of the day....the disks arrive, get loaded into the computer, and after a " Please God, please...." moment, Arthur annnounces " We have a show ". In reality, from here on in we're coasting; the early get-in has meant that everything else is ready for the band's arrival at 3pm for soundcheck, and after that the rest is just tweaking. The soundcheck itself reveals a few frayed nerves and tempers as lack of sleep and the pressure of the occasion take their toll on some of the band, but a couple of " jams " into the process and everyone's visibly relaxing. Tonight's show will differ significantly from the touring show. Perennial Hollies favourite Just One Look is replaced by their Look Through Any Window, The Small Faces All Or Nothing stands in for Itchycoo Park and The Byrds' Mr Tambourine Man gives way to Turn Turn Turn. The Easybeats' resolutely mental Friday On My Mind in in there, and as this is The Beatles Festival, a smattering of extra Fab Four tunes have been added to the mix. Got To Get You Into My Life makes a welcome return and We Can Work It Out takes over from Walk Right Back as the ultimate song of the acoustic medley. Most exciting development for me, however, is the addition of Helter Skelter as the encore number. Always a powerful song, seeing The Overtunes batter it into submission at soundcheck is almost worth the admission price alone. Having long thought U2's version was the defintive cover of the number, I have a serious change of heart as the boys tee it up and knock it out of sight into Row Z. It's times like this, when the five musicians step outside the slightly polite format of Sixties pop and really cut loose that you realise what a truly great band they are; there's a "rock" presence here that wouldn't look out of place on any of the world's arena stages and you appreciate fully that, geniuses at Sixties music as they are, they'd be equally brilliant at any genre in the rock music format. We get a little glimpse of this every night when they do the wig-out section of Light My Fire, but this here is something so joyous and visceral that the few remaining hairs on the back of my neck are stood at attention throughtout. It's magnificent, and to complement the bombast of this closing song, I also have a few little secret weapons hidden around the stage. In addition to the usual array of fireworks, along the front we have four thunderflashes, all featuring what the label solemnly refers to a " a loud report ". Best of all, though, concealed behind the screen I have device known as a bomb tank, which is essentially a bloody great cast-iron dustbin into which you suspend an explosive device called a maroon. Ships in distress use these at sea, so you're maybe getting the picture of the volume involved. The plan is to trigger this mini-Armageddon at the top of the intro build for Helter Skelter, so I have a quick practise until I'm happy I've got the timing right...this is a one-time option so there's no margin for error. Another thing that's different about tonight is that we've got a support band on with us, a lovely bunch of local Cavern-playing regulars called The Shakers who are going to kick things off with a thirty-minute set. There's a strict 11pm curfew tonight, so the show HAS to run tight, and as such we've ditched a lot of the regular banter between songs. We're going to have to keep a very close eye on the clock as we can't risk having to lose any of the set. Seven thirty finally rolls around, the doors open, and at the appointed hour sharp-suited compere Neil walks on to start proceedings by introducing The Shakers. As the band play I peep out into the auditorium and do a quick double-take....the place is full, upstairs AND down. Oh, yes....this is going to be GOOD ! As the last notes of Twist & Shout die away and The Shakers say their " thankyou and goodnight " we're already onstage, clearing their gear and setting up our own. We've been given fifteen minutes, manage it in ten, and so we're good to go. When the house lights go down we get that big audience roar thing going on, then suddenly the stage lights are up and the band are into From Me To You. On the last tour we saw how little venues can barely contain the power and presence of The Bootleg Sixties show in full effect, but we also saw in places like Coventry and Stockport how well the band can make the step up to the bigger stages, and tonight they're doing it as to the manner born. The sound is immense, they're smiling and clearly enjoying themselves, and despite the lack of house lighting Damian's doing some VERY clever things with his MAC 250s. Not for the first time I look at the stage, then out at the audience and think
" Yes....this show really CAN be as big as this EVERY night ". That's for the future, though...tonight we're concentrating on keeping this perfect. Every song is rapturously received, all the visuals are runnning like clockwork, and before we know it there are two thousand plus people bellowing " Then I saw her face " back at Den as I'm A Believer brings the first half to a close. We've overrun by five minutes but we know we can pull that back, so everything's still calm backstage. By the time the house get everyone out of the bar at the end of the interval and we get clearance to restart the show we've lost another five minutes, so I'm getting a BIT anxious, but we'll just have to see how it goes. Instead of the usual video at the start of the second half, Den's done a very clever George Harrison / Eleanor Rigby mash-up to accompany a visual montage he's put together, and from there it's straight into Blowin' In The Wind. All Or Nothing gets everyone back in the party mood, and to hear all those people singing You Were On My Mind is just fantastic. By the time the band are on the home stretch of Green Onions, Mony Mony and Jumpin' Jack Flash it's "back of the net" time, and the audience don't even need to be asked to dance. The noise they make as they bay for the lads to come back onstage is incredible, and you can actually hear screams of joy as Jamie kicks into Helter Skelter. The appointed moment comes and.....BOOOOM ! off go the pyrotechnics, BANG ! off go the band and AAAAGGH ! go the audience as we break the world record for mass simultaneous bowel-voiding. Oh yes, it was loud....it was VERY loud.....At last it's all over, and as the band head off to the Adelphi to meet and greet, we start to take the show down, proud of what we've achieved here tonight. It's been virtually flawless, and we've seen first-hand what this COULD become. We load up the gear, tired but happy, and some of the lads head home, whilst Arthur, Nick and I follow the band to the Adelphi for a quick celebratory snifter. Steve's there with pal and fellow skinsman Chris Sharrock of Robbie Williams and Oasis fame, but we're just after a quiet drink,so we head into the least busy bar. Just as we've ordered, an odd mobile phone call comes in from young Lids, and Nick, concerned by the tone of his offspring's voice, heads back to the hotel to see what's afoot. Phil wanders in to the bar, a big smile creasing his face, and joins us in a Guinness, then uber-fans Marilyn and Debbie apppear.I surreptitiously check to see if they are sporting fresh jeans, as the originals may have been inadvertently soiled by the effects of my explosions, but these girls are made of stern stuff and there's not even a piddle-mark in sight. Nick returns with Lids in tow, and we hear the latest instalment in the tale of the Formule 1. Our Lids hasn't been feeling too good lately, so he'd headed to bed after the show, only to be awoken by the sight of five drunken Scousers standing in his room, apparently looking for some kind of party. It appears that one of the other clever aspects of the room design at the Formule 1 is that some of the rooms can't be locked from the inside, so this mob of marauding Mickey Mousers were thundering up and down the corridors going into whichever rooms they could open. No wonder the poor lad was nervous on the phone.... We finally bid farewell to everyone and head back to Albert Docks where we wearily climb the stairs of the Shithole Du Jour, as we have renamed this Gallic dump. As we reach our landing two security types are escorting a bunch of noisy, bolshie pissheads off the premises, and as they pass us I realise how annoying it is that you never seem to have an Uzi submachine gun on you when you need one. Hey ho, next time, perhaps. It's been a good, good day today, and though we're totally knackered we fall asleep with the glow of a job very well done. Tonight I don't even mind the beetles and fleas snuggling down with me, though tomorrow I will vow to burn this accursed place to the ground and dance on the ashes.....

Whitley Bay Playhouse Wed Aug 26th

2010-08-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

So, Faithful Blogreader, here we are again, large as life and twice as ugly....when you're starting a new tour, there's only one way to set you up for that difficult first show, and that's to go and have a mahoosive cooked breakfast at a Morrison's supermarket cafe. It's not exactly rock and roll but, by Sooty's fur, it doesn't half hit the spot. It's a glorious day up here on the North-East coast,and the Playhouse is all refurbished and spiffy, so there's a nice, relaxed, summery vibe about the place. Of course we know it won't last...it IS the first show after all....but for now we're making the most of it. Back when dinosaurs strode the earth I used to live here, though the place has changed so much I can't even find the street where I stayed. The greatest tragedy is that the fish and chip shop which provided my staple diet back then is no longer here, and to my real sadness neither is the Spanish City amusement park, once the town's main attraction. I'd like to say that I have happy memories of long summer nights spent on the rides there, with a pretty, laughing young girl by my side, but the harsh reality is that for the entire time I lived here it was bloody freezing, and most of the North Sea seemed to seep under my door when the wind blew. Still, it's shame to see the old place gone. Back at the Playhouse, all is going well. Although it's about four months since we last did the show we've all slipped straight back into the old routine, and even new lighting dude Damian is slotting in well. Although the crew came up here last night, the band have opted to drive up today, which is a bit of a haul, but this time there's no speed - governed rattlebucket minibus to contend with; instead they're in a nice new Ford people carrier. There's a bit less space but the trade-off is that now they get to the shows before the next ice age starts, and despite the schlep up from Hertfordshire they're in good spirits. It's actually a bit of a mega-travel day for the band, as after tonight's show we all drive to Liverpool for a 9.00am load-in at the Philharmonic tomorrow morning. Further into a tour this is the kind of thing that causes much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but this early on everyone is still cloaked in a thin veneer of civility, and so this heavy schedule is met with a shrug rather than a knife between the shoulder blades. It's great to see the lads again and they all arrive looking tanned and healthy, courtesy of a brief jaunt to Fuertaventura. I'm more than a little jealous as I really wanted to go too, but a pressing appointment with the surgeon's scalpel prevented me. Still, they're all genuinely concerned and inspect my newly - repaired ( and alarmingly bald ) knee with interest before cracking on with the soundcheck, after which, unfortunately, things start to unravel a bit. First, it becomes clear that the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool have cocked up rather spectacularly, and rather than the five single rooms for two nights that they're MEANT to give the band, there are now just two, and one's a triple. The kicker, though, is that not only will they have to cram in together but they'll have to be out of the rooms early in the morning as they've already been sold ! This, mind you, despite us having all the relevant booking forms and so on. I'd just like to digress here for a moment, if I may. Some years back there was a programme about the Adelphi on TV, one of these " fly on the wall " things. During the course of the programme's run, the Grand National at Aintree was abandoned due to a bomb scare, and everyone was evacuated, having to leave their cars locked in the racecourse. This caused a huge demand for hotel rooms in Liverpool that night as many racegoers were stranded with no means of getting home, and we watched first hand as the Adelphi rose to the occasion to help these poor souls...by putting stratospheric hikes on the room rates and charging huge sums for things like rows of mattress on the dining room floor. What was most sickening was the obvious pleasure they took when they realised that the very last nook and cranny had been sold at some scrotum-tightening cost. I vowed right then that I'd never stay there again, and have been true to my word since. This latest example of incompetence and rampant profiteering just vindicates everything I think about the place.... not that I'm bitter and twisted in any way, you understand. Anyway, hotels aside, things rapidly go from bad to worse when it then becomes clear that the new show slides for tonight and tomorrow that Den's brought with him have caused the show computer to throw a total hissy fit. They won't load at all due to either an iffy disk or some kind of file corruption, and the bottom line is that we've suddenly got about thirty minutes to put a new show together before the doors open...and that's not even taking into account what to do about Liverpool,. which is a totally different show again. Suddenly that thin veneer cracks and everyone's snappy and stressed as we try to resolve this, and I'm taken right back to those heady first days of the LAST tour where shows were being re-jigged on the hoof as Den's voice went awol.This, however,is different, as we're many miles from home with no way of getting to the computer to try and solve the problem. As ever we manage to get SOMETHING together just as doors open, but there's no way of knowing how it'll look or even if it'll work. Nothing like a nice easy start to the tour, then....it's SUCH a lovely feeling, travelling into the unknown in this way, kind of like going into Rat City wearing cheese trousers. For the first half, though, everything's fine. The band sound as great as ever, and it's a real thrill to hear them playing again. It's essentially the same show as we did in February and March, with the Beatles / Hollies / Searchers / Swinging Blue Jeans combination to kick off, and the little acoustic section after " Sound Of Silence ", and once again we see the " Bootlegs Effect " on a whole new audience ! It is, though, a show of two halves, Gary, and though the band raise their game after the break, a few technical problems start to crop up, such as non - detonating pyrotechnics and some truly mental slide programming, plus a few odd sound anomalies. I have, however, been told by some of you that I should try and focus on the big picture a little more this time round, and less on the crew side, so I'll not dwell on those things too much. I'll just let them all return to haunt me in the dark fastnesses of the interminable, lonely night as I toss and turn, tortured by the horror of the imperfect slide show. ...but I'll be fine, don't worry about me ( sniff )....So, the band, then....well, they were brilliant as usual. Anyway, enough of them, back to the and the crew....! Tonight's been a bit of fraught first show, but the crowd response, as ever, has been superb. One of the ushers tells us he even saw a woman crying as the band played " You'll Never Walk Alone ". Personally I thought they played it quite well, actually...crap jokes aside, though, the end result is that another town has fallen beneath the wheels of the Bootleg Sixties bandwagon, or some equally lumpy metaphor. We pack up the truck with a bit of trepidation about tomorrow....it's a big, big show, we've got no visuals for it yet, and a three - hour drive tonight to get there. So THAT'S alright, then...

My Little Office, Geddington, Wed Aug 8th

2010-08-18T17:13:00.000-07:00

So, next week, then.....only seven short days until our band of merry pranksters reconvenes for our second assault on the tender sensibilities of the British theatregoing public. I have to say that it's all going quite pleasingly well so far....so much so, in fact, that we've not only been able to lose the band and Arthur out to Fuertaventura for a week to celebrate a landmark birthday for Arthur's partner Anthea, but also to let me go in to hospital for a quick op on the cartilage I tore on the LAST tour. Sadly the two events co-incided, so while they were out there doing the old sun,sea and sangria fandango, Billy No-Mates here was enjoying sitting at Edith Cavell hospital in Peterborough for ten hours waiting to go down to theatre whilst wearing nothing but a backless theatre robe and a deeply attractive pair of disposable underpants.The only comfort to be drawn from the whole experience is that by me NOT going out there, everyone avoided the sight of my capacious backside stretching a pair of Speedos to the very limit of their endurance. Just think of all the trauma the inhabitants of the island have been spared as s result....Any road, despite these distractions we've pretty much got it all in the bag. Hotels are booked, minibus is ready to collect, pyrotechnics are all set to go, extra lighting's just waiting in the warehouse ready to be put on the vans, and all the crew are locked and loaded. In terms of the dramatis personae, it's pretty much the usual suspects, though Rodders is still on tour with Scottish chooglers Runrig, his place being taken by Damian Goddard. Going some considerable way towards making up for Rodders' absence, however,is the surprise presence of Pug, who has deferred his Great Orstrilian Adventure just long enough to take in these shows. This is a much happier Pug than the one we saw on the last show at Radlett. You may have read between the lines on those last posts and realised that the trouble he had on the last tour was all to do with a GURL, so he'd opted to do the honourable thing and either go to Australia or join the Foreign Legion. As he's allergic to both sand AND camels, Oz got the nod, only for the aforementioned Sheila to then recant her original decision and reappear on the scene. Amid much wailing and gnashing of teeth ( not to mention close perusal of the small print on his air ticket to see how much he'd lose if he cancelled it ) a happy compromise was reached...he's still going out there and she's....err....not. But he says it's alright, really it is. Whatever the story, though, we're just made up to have him back with us. He may smell a bit, but he's got a heart of gold. We still don't actually know exactly what form the show will take as we haven't yet sat down with Den and Steve, but for those of you who may be coming along, the basic structure will be the same as the spring dates, with the notable exception of Liverpool, where we'll lob in a few more Beatles numbers in deference to the fact that it IS the Beatles festival, after all. In short what I'm saying is that isn't a new show....THAT will happen on the next tour, where we're looking to change things round quite a bit. It should be great....Den's got loads of ideas for different songs, there'll be new lighting, and the auditions for the trapeze-artist dwarves are coming along very nicely, thankyou....

Is it that time already ???

2010-07-26T04:04:00.000-07:00

You know how people say those annoying things like " My, hasn't he grown ? " when meeting a child they've not seen for, like, twenty years ? Or how about " I don't know where the year has gone " The obvious answer, of course, is " Into the, dark, voracious maw of The Past, thus taking you another inexorable year closer to your eternal oblivion " but as the question is normally asked by an elderly friend or relative it's probably not too diplomatic to use this particular riposte. Any road, it's only four weeks until the start of the next tour now, and it really DOES seem like just last week that I chasing theatres trying to get payment from the last tour...oh, hang on...it WAS just last week... Since the last tour we've got a new government ( not that I've noticed any difference ), had a World Cup ( we were in it, apparently...must have missed that bit ) seen Katie Price get married again ( I give it a year, tops ) and groaned as Andy Murray failed to reach the final of Wimbledon ( again ), so what could possibly cheer the country up more than a new Bootleg Sixties tour ?? OK, OK, you don't have to answer that...Things have been pretty good for The Overtures since the last tour, as it happens.....you may recall from the last blogs that the band were asked to do a big German TV show, and it went brilliantly. As a result of that success they got invited to do another German TV show, this time in Majorca, where amongst other things they backed Lionel Richie ( he says Hello, by the way ). We're now talking about a German theatre tour next year, as well as following up interest from Australia and America, so it's all going in the right direction. This little tour is a bit of an odd one for us, actually. The Overtures have played the Beatles Festival in Liverpool every August Bank Holiday weekend for about a grillion years now, and have done pretty much every slot on every stage at some point. This year, though, the Festival Grand Fromage, Billy Heckle, has invited the lads to bring the Bootleg Sixties show to Liverpool Philharmonic and headline the opening night ( that's Friday August 27th for those of you who still haven't bought their tickets ). This is a big honour for us, and we're really looking forward to it. We thought it'd be a good plan to do a warm-up show or two on the way up there, so we mentioned this to our gigmeisters Alan and Nick, and next thing we know we're got a whole little tour built around the date...result ! Apart from Liverpool it'll be the first time we'll have played all the other places, so although there isn't quite the same " waking up sweating in the middle of the night going Ohmygodohmygodohmygod " level of pressure that we had on the LAST tour, we've still got to deliver if we want the project to keep building. Because the budgets are smaller we won't be taking out some of the toys we used on the last dates, plus some of the familiar crew faces will be missing or flitting in and out of the tour, and although the show will essentially be the same there are a LOT of other variations. We've been very calm about all this, and have just reassured ourselves that " It'll be fine ", with the inevitable result that the tour has now earned itself that particular soubriquet. The
" It'll Be Fine Tour 2010 " it is, then....As we're going to be touring again I thought it'd be nice to dust off the laptop, crank up the brain, and do another, smaller blog for this tour; a "blogette", if you will. I also need to tell you about something else that happened with the last blogs which fair made me squeak with joy. At the end of the tour I went off on a wee holiday, and when I cam back our megadrummer Steve and his lovely wife Jill had got all the blogs together, along with some of Jill's photos, and had them published in a Real, Actual, Book, with pages and a cover and everything. You know...like a book. A real one. As in not a pamphlet or leaflet. As in not a load of sheets of A4 stapled together. As in a Real Book. Like the things you buy in shops and read. Now, had they done just the one as a kind of keepsake, my little tail feathers would still have quivered with love and gratitude, but it gets even better.....THERE IS MORE THAN ONE COPY OF THE BOOK !!!! Oh yes, thanks to Jill and Steve and the nice people at Blurb.com your humble scribe can now call himself a Published Author ! Now, I appreciate that Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stephen King are unlikely to be looking nervously over their shoulders at this point, nor have WH Smith's or Waterstone's been inundating me with pleading phone calls, but should you wish to have all of the cyber-ramblings from the last tour encapsulated in Real Actual Book form for ALL ETERNITY so you can then pass it on to your grandchildren as an invaluable family heirloom etc etc etc, then you can actually buy one of these bad boys by using the following link : http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/860732/13ad3acdb65fcea9947a27b94f85fc44
Snappy, huh ? And who knows...by the time we finish NEXT year's tour we might have moved on from Real Actual Books to " Tourblogs - The Musical " or at the very least a " Talking Book " CD. Hang on....that's actually not a bad idea....Where's my agent's phone number.....??

Radlett Centre Sun April 18th

2010-04-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

What an odd one THIS has turned out to be…..several months ago our gigmeister, Alan Field, had asked us if we’d be up for doing a one-off show in aid of Habad, a Jewish children’s charity which he’s involved with. As we were clear that weekend and it fell quite soon after the end of the tour we said yes, and then put it on a back-burner while the tour prep all took place. Well, the grunt and grind of the tour has been well documented elsewhere in this blog, so I’ll say no more about that, but couple that with the band scooting straight off to Germany and Sweden afterwards, and suddenly the charity show was right upon us. It was always going to be a BIT different as we’d been specifically asked to incorporate songstrel Ellie Leah back into the show, which was fine, but then became a LOT different when some delinquent cloud of Icelandic ash brought the airways of the Northern hemisphere to a sudden halt, grounding our guitarist Phil in Gothenburg…which was NOT fine, not fine at all. We’ve had to work without him once before, a year or two back, when Ryanair did one of their random flight cancellation things and he couldn’t make a show in Kings Lynn, but this is different. We haven’t worked with Ellie in over a year, so we were planning on using the touring show as a template and then just adding Ellie’s numbers. With no Phil we suddenly realise how much of the set we now can’t do, so Den gets to work on coming up with a Plan B. To be honest it’s still better than most people’s Plan A, but it’s nonetheless all a bit seat of the pants. He’s had to change a lot of the visuals, too, so I’ll have to go through all of those with Tomps
( who fortunately is being his usual cool, unflappable self ), and to really cap it off Rodders isn’t doing this show, so we’re back to the Stone Age with us doing the best we can with what lights we find, and me trying to cue a house lighting guy who has never seen the show before. We’ve been more comfortable before curtain up, I must admit….! The venue’s a nice, new little theatre, though, just perfect for this show, and it’s great to see Pug, Tomps, Nick and Lids again. I’ve kind of hoped we’ll just drop back into the touring groove, but everything’s so different, from the way we have to lay the stage out to the fact that there’s no Rodders bustling about with his MACs, and to make things even more fun we’re on a later get-in; this would have been fine when Phil was still involved, but now there’s a lot of work to do and a lot of rehearsal to get through, and losing that extra hour doesn’t seem such a clever idea all of a sudden. Chris and Paul, the house lighting guys, are helpful and quick, but we gradually become aware that there’s really not much in the way of lighting in here, and without the MACs we could struggle to make a visual impact. I also realise when I come to test them that only one of the two remaining flame pyrotechnics kept back from the tour is working, so that’s going to look a bit pants too. Things are stacking up….It’s odd seeing the “ four – piece “ Overtures line-up again after so long on the tour; Den should be centre stage as usual but he’s not, he’s on stage left and Jamie’s swapped over completely ! Weird that such small things can throw you, but when you’ve had two months of doing things a certain way, they do. There’s no Black Box Of Bafflement tonight either due to Phil’s absence, so Nu Nu the smoke machine is redundant, and sits looking forlorn at the front of the stage, until I take pity on him and plug him in under the drum riser. Poor little fella. The weirdness continues as the charity’s main man gets onstage to describe what the organisation does, how they’re looking to raise money and so on, then he introduces a DVD showing some of the kids the charity helps. It’s desperately sad, showing these poor kids who have been maimed by warfare or serious medical problems, and everything’s very sombre….then suddenly it’s over and the band are due on….not exactly the ideal warm-up to get people in a party mood, to be honest, but the charity is what tonight’s all about, so we just get on with it. Everything sounds different, too, but the biggest miss is Rodders and his lights; Chris and Paul are manfully doing what I ask them to but there’s no drama, no snappiness, and it’s all a bit lame, despite the guys’ best intentions. Ellie’s entrance sparks things up a bit; she absolutely wallops “ You’re My World “ right between the eyes, then goes for the knockout punch with “ River Deep, Mountain High ! She’s got a set of lungs on her, this girl, and no mistake…..The first half seems to take ages, but it eventually comes to a close and we can regroup. We do a bit of light-tweaking and I set out my sad, lonely little pyro, then we’re off and running again. As Den walks onstage in darkness to start “ Blowing In The Wind “ I tell Paul on the follow-spot “ When you hear the guitar start, pick up the centre – stage vocal and hold him “….except that there IS no centre –stage vocal of course…he’s over on the bloody left tonight, isn’t he ? Arsebiscuits ! It’s like searchlights during the Blitz for a few seconds as the spot sweeps the stage trying to lock on to Den, but finally Paul gets him and everything settles down again. It actually goes remarkably smoothly, even the two “ playback “ songs where Phil’s guitar really does come to the fore. The lone pyro in “ Light My Fire “ IS naff, but the look on the faces of the people in the centre front row as it bursts into flame and they feel the burn from it is worth the admission price alone ! Ellie’s back onstage for
“ Shout “ and from then on in it’s game, set and match, with the old show – closers of “ Surfin’ USA”, “ Mony Mony “ and “ Daydream Believer “ before the ubiquitous
“ You’ll Never Walk Alone “. This isn’t the noisiest audience we’ve ever played to, and the band have to be nippy getting back onstage for the encore, but they’re appreciative enough, and the main thing is that money gets raised for the charity. After the show we try to remember which cases everything goes back into, and it’s all taking a bit too long, but we’re not that far a drive from base tonight so it doesn’t matter so much. It’s been great to see the band, Jill and Sherry again, and it wouldn’t be a Bootleg’s gig without seeing Marilyn bopping around in her tour t-shirt ! We also hear that the band have been confirmed onto the festival in Majorca that the German TV bods wanted them to do after the triumph in Munich ( though it turns out it’s with Joss Stone , not The Rolling Stones …something lost in translation there, perhaps!) Ellie’s also landed herself an eight-month contract in the stage show “ Sister Act”, which is fantastic news, so there are plenty of positives….but it just somehow hasn’t felt right, and it’s not just because of Phil’s absence…they always say you can never totally recreate a tour “ vibe” ( and yes, I DO still hate that word ), even if you’ve got all the same people involved, and I think that’s what’s happened here….instead of going on to the next gig, we’re going our separate ways, and there’s a bit of an “ after the Lord Mayor’s show “ feeling about tonight. There’s also the very real underlying sadness that this could be Pug’s last ever show with us; the personal issue that dogged his last days on the tour hasn’t turned out well, and he feels the best thing to do is to get completely away, so he’s all set to head off to Australia on a one-way ticket. He’s been so much a part of the team for the past few years that I can’t imagine him not being there, so we vow that we’re definitely going to take the show out to Oz, and he can be our monitor guy when we finally get to that land of convicts, crap daytime soaps and piss-weak beer. So as we shut the van doors and say our goodbyes to each other, that’s about it for The Booties…..we’re back out on August 26th for sixteen days, all being well, but for now the Black Box Of Bafflement, Nu Nu and the pyros are all going into hibernation for a bit. I’ll still keep on posting the odd message from the frontline, though….who knows WHAT might happen between now and August….?!!!

They Think It's All Over.....It Is Now !

2010-04-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

Time is a funny bugger, isn’t it ? On the one hand the tour feels like it just finished a couple of days since, but then I try and think back to Dartford Orchard on February 2nd and it seems that long ago I’m sure I remember the women in the audience wearing crinolines and bustles. I think that part of this weird timestretch feeling is that we really haven’t stopped work on the band OR the tour since it finished; two days after the final curtain at Croydon the lads flew out to Germany to take part in a huge TV show, and no sooner was that over than they were scooting off to Sweden to do some shows there, and all the while they’ve been trotting around Europe I’ve been a modern – day Bob Cratchitt, slaving over a hot ledger book trying to sort out all the finances from the tour. At the time of writing I still don’t know if the drinks are on me, we’ve broken even, or the workhouse beckons, largely because NINETEEN of the theatres we played still haven’t even given us the percentage split figures I need to invoice them for, let alone part with any actual wonga. In addition to this administrative tardiness, we’re also having to deal with what are known as “ The Contras “. Far from being some arcane South American revolutionary army, these are the ( often ludicrous ) re-charges that theatres try to levy on visiting companies. There are some that you accept without question…for example, the visiting company always pays for the house crew on the load –out, and it’s also normal to accept some kind of deduction for marketing expenses, like putting your gig ad in their “ what’s on “ brochures. Some, however, are, quite frankly, taking the piss, and these are the ones that take the longest to pay. There’s one group of theatres which shall remain nameless for fear of reprisals ( yes, I’m talking about YOU, HQ Theatres….(oops) who stretch credulity to eye-watering lengths. Huge marketing recharges with no evidence given to back up what they’ve spent it on, a charge for the bloody electricity that the show uses, for Sooty’s sake, and in one theatre the absolute piece de resistance, a charge of £ 12.77 for a “ fruit bowl in the artiste’s dressing room “. Never mind that said fruit bowl wasn’t even seen, let alone eaten, by the artistes, unless it contained the world’s rarest kumquat or ugli then someone’s having a right laugh……I can buy a chuffin' SACK of fruit for twelve and a half quid ! But I digress.
The German TV show was a big deal for the band, and although it was hard work for them and involved a LOT of rehearsal, it’s made them many friends and opened a lot of doors in Europe. Thomas Gottschalk, the show’s host, is something of a Grande Fromage in German TV presenting circles, and despite sporting shoulder – length blonde hair and leather trousers that very few sixty – year old men ( including, sadly, Thomas Gottschalk ) can get away with, he was genuinely blown away by the band, and has put them up for another TV extravaganza later in the summer. The main thing the show did was raise their profile in Germany, and judging by the amount of e-mails I got from new fans in Der Fatherland after the show, it certainly did THAT. Another small digression ( you’ll get used to these…..) Have you ever used the Babelfish free translation software ? It’s genius. Most of the mails we got were in excellent English, which made me ashamed of my fifth – form schoolboy German ( his name’s Hans and he’s very beautiful…I shouldn’t be ashamed of him at all ). Like many Brits who make a cursory attempt to learn another language, I can read and understand more than I can speak, so most of the time I’ve got along OK with these missives from Deutschland, but occasionally I’d be stumped by something, usually one of their fantastic, twenty – odd - letter compound words like “ lebensmittelgeschaft “ and so I’d run it by good old Babelfish, with interesting results. The programme translates literally, with no time for tiresome things like grammar, so often I’d be left with a jumble of apparently random words from which to make a well – know phrase or saying. My favourite was when it translated one correspondent’s surname as
“ Atrocity “. Clearly a member of the Hitler family…..( before we leave the subject, can I just say that “ lebensmittelgeschaft “ is an actual word, meaning
“ greengrocers”. However, it translates literally as “ living middle shop “. Go figure…..) . To see what the band look like in genuine German HDTV widescreen 3-D technicolour feelie-sound, go to You Tube and look for the Thomas Gottschalk Swinging Sixties stuff…there’s loads. You’ll see them backing Robin Gibb and Peter Noone among others, as well as simply being the world’s best house band. Just don’t use Babelfish to translate what Thomas is saying, otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why he refers to the band as “ a pair of lightly grilled earmuffs “.
Anyhoo, enough of this badinage…..back to the heady world of post – tour accounts.
By the time I post my next ramblings we WILL know whether we won, lost or drew, and that’ll definitely inform the length of the next post; if it’s long and rambling then we’ve made money and I’m shitfaced drunk, but if it’s short and clipped then you’d best check all your friendly neighbourhood suicide spots for a fat bald bloke in a Bootleg Sixties t-shirt. Only time will tell, so without further ado I shall sharpen my quill, fill up my inkpot and throw another peasant on the fire. It’s going to be a long night…….

Croydon Ashcroft Theatre Sun March 28th

2010-04-02T06:09:00.000-07:00

Here we are, then. Two months, forty shows and about six thousand miles after we set off all bright – eyed and bushy – tailed for Dartford Orchard, we pull up at Croydon Ashcroft Theatre for the very last night of The Organic “ It Is What It Is “ Tour. I’ve got very, very mixed feelings about today. The great audience responses we’ve been getting are pretty addictive, and I’d like a bit more of that, please, but, as with everyone else on the tour, I’m knackered and need to rest. The knee I damaged early in the tour has become really painful and needs a serious looking at, and, of course, there are all the accounts to do, including a VAT quarterly return which is due in two days, but despite that joyous prospect awaiting me, I’m actually ready to go home now. It’s unlikely we’ll ever do a tour of this size again, although you can never say never in this lark. It’s been a real baptism of fire for the band and some of the crew, and they’ve come through it with flying colours, though there have been some pretty hairy moments and some bloody hard graft along the way. Everyone’s done brilliantly; Pug’s been ever-present throughout and apart from a brief wobble near the end when he had some unhappy personal business to contend with, he’s come on in leaps and bounds. Tomps and Clive have alternated really well on AV, and Tomps has also come up with some great new ideas for the visuals which we’ve been using for the past few shows. Rodders has done his usual great job with the minimum of fuss, and there’s no doubt at all that it’s the lights which have taken this production to a new level. The real surprise package, though, has been Lids, who hasn’t got any touring experience as such but who has worked his nuts off to become a valuable member of our team. It helps that he’s a funny bugger as well, because laughter is a very useful commodity on the road. He and Pug have really hit it off, and I’m awaiting the announcement of their impending engagement with bated breath…..The Unsung Hero Award, however, just has to go to Liddard Senior, our very own Nick. Despite being even older than me he’s displayed the energy of a man half his age
( that’ll be a 39 year – old man, then ) and just hasn’t stopped. He drives the band to and from shows, helps us set up if we need it, keeps a proprietorial eye on drummer Steve throughout the set, does the food run most nights and also does the merchandise before Arthur arrives, all for a measly five bushels of wheat a week ! What a diamond ! The only problem with our hero is that he has no inner monologue, and thus treats everyone around him to his every thought as it passes through his brain. Of course, if you challenge him about this habit of talking to himself he’ll contend that it’s the only way he gets any sensible conversation ! Nicholas Jeremiah Lemuel Liddard, we salute you, O Brother In Rock ! Back to the Ashcroft Theatre ( named after Dame Peggy, and not Richard, I gather ) and it’s a jaded bunch of Booties who set about building this last show. All of the banter of last night about wizard japes to catch the band out during the show has dissipated in a blur of sleep deprivation, and as we sloooooowly put things together it’s all we can do just to focus on getting the stage set up. When the band arrive we realise we aren’t the only ones; Steve looks totally cream crackered and everyone’s pretty subdued. This is partly to do with it being the end of the tour, and partly because the finishing line’s in sight and our bodies have all just gone “ OK…that’s enough now “. There’s a funny thing about “ last nights “…there’s this big expectation of them being some sort of amazing occasion, and you talk for weeks beforehand about what you’ll get up to and how such and such is going to be, but quite often the reality is that they’re anticlimactic. Tonight’s definitely showing signs of going down that route; not only is everyone tired, but we also learn that due to a local council ruling the audience aren’t allowed to stand up or dance, so we’re not even going to get one last look at a crowd going mental to Mony Mony. It’s a late –starting show as well, and I have to say that it’s all I can do keep my eyes open during the first half, though the band seem to liven up as soon as they get onstage. As we move into the second half there’s no real sense of things coming to an end, though Den very kindly brings the crew onstage to take a bow, which is much appreciated, and at THAT point you realise that it nearly IS all over. As they go into You’ll Never Walk Alone I can feel myself choking up a bit; Den, Steve, Arthur and myself have been working towards doing a full tour with this project for nearly three years, and we’ve finally done it. We’ve had some clunkers during the past two months ( Hello Boston !!! ) but the overall tour has been a great success, and we can safely say that we’re firmly on the map now. In a way it’s like watching one of your kids grow up and leave home….we’ve been so close to this project for so long, and now it’s over. And yes, I know it’s going back out in the Autumn but nothing is ever the same as your first tour ( unless it’s your first sell-out tour !! ) and we’re all going to be a bit bereft for a couple of weeks. Being on tour is a bit like being in the army; you’ve got a small group of people travelling and living together to do this quite tough job, and you all have to look out for and support each other. You develop a kind of “ us against the world “ siege mentality, and when the circle is broken and the tour’s over it can leave you with a very odd emptiness. A real “ road pig “ friend of mine who has toured since God was a lad described it as being almost like a kind of grieving, in that something’s gone that you can’t get back. On the other hand, you can have a situation like I did back in 1991 when I was touring for nine weeks with an American band and I couldn’t WAIT for the last day. I would cheerfully have murdered them in their beds, and the only grief I felt at the end of THAT tour was that I hadn’t cut off their testicles with a rusty knife and fed them to my dog, but perhaps that’s just me being uncharitable; I’m sure they were kind to their Mums and small animals. At the end of the show there’s a quick “ well done “ among the crew, but we’ve still got to get this gear out and the set knocked down; Pug, Tomps and I are taking the truck back to Bedford tonight and have to unload everything when we get there, then I have to drive the lights over to Ipswich tomorrow. Kevin “ The Silver Fox “ Lee has come down from Hoddesdon in the band’s van to pick up THEIR gear, so there’s no time for sentimentality OR hanging about. I manage a quick chat with Jamie to check he enjoyed the tour ( he loved it ) got a brief hug from Den ( loved the tour , hated me ) and one from Phil ( hated the tour, loved me ) and then suddenly they were gone; I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye to Steve, Jill, Chris and Michelle, and it’s just because there’s so much to do and pack and remember to sort out; the band are off to Germany in two days and so we also have to make sure that all the gear that’s going out there is kept in yet another separate pile. The source of much attention is the flightcase that rejoices in the self – explanatory moniker “ The Jizz Case “. This wheeled box has become like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag….everything that doesn’t have a home anywhere else goes in it, and you never know WHAT you’re going to pull out when you put your hand in. There are three people bent over it and all you can hear is “Yours….yours….mine…ours…his….ours….yours…”as the contents are divvied up. Finally we’re ready, and we take a sad leave of Nick and Lids. Rodders is also leaving tonight and I find this particularly hard as he’s been lodging with me for the whole tour, and going home without him is going to be very odd ( OK so that sounds a bit gay, but you know what I mean…). Pausing only to get hopelessly lost in Croydon we head north, and I’m here to tell you that the cab of that truck is suddenly a very lonely place. We get back to Bedford at about 3.00am and the whole “ loading the kit back in to the unit “ thing seems totally alien and wrong….it should be in the truck and going to the next show !!! It’s going to take a while to decompress from all this. I get home at about 5.00am and tumble into bed, but I’m suddenly wide awake again, replaying days from the tour in my mind. I’ve done so many tours over the years you’d have thought that this would have been just one more, but it wasn’t….it was different….it was OURS. I’m going to miss the band, the crew, the familiar faces like Marilyn and Debbie in the front row, the band’s wives, the tiredness, the banter, the smell of napalm in the morning (?!) the voice of Doris the satnav, the standing ovations, the soles of my shoes being covered in “ rock & roll dogshit “( discarded gaffa and electrical tape strips ) the feeling when you first walk onstage at a new theatre, look around and go “ Oh f**k…..”, the sense of achievement when you’ve pulled a rescue mission out of the bag, the taste of Ginsters pies, even the smell of Clive’s gaseous emissions ( actually, scrub that one out….). I’m also going to miss writing THIS, Faithful Blogreader, and thus, mindful of the fact that I never DID tell you about the joy of soundchecks, I’m going to carry on posting up odd musings and thoughts about all things Bootleggy and tour – related. Thanks to all of you for your comments and kind words, and I hope you’ll keep an eye on this for future missives. For now, though, it’s time to sleep, so I’d just like to leave you with something that been said to me many, many times throughout my career in the music business, which is
“ What are you doing in my shed, and where are your trousers ? “

Thankyou and goodnight….

Eastbourne Congress Theatre Sat March 26th

2010-03-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

Having cleaned myself up from last night I head down for a “ Lite Bite “ breakfast of two eggs, four sausages, eight rashers of bacon, a mound of beans and mushrooms and two slices of toast. Well, I’m a growing lad…..Despite all the cross – country shenanigans last night we’re very happy we made part of the journey when we did as we crawl with infinite slowness round a car – jammed Brighton, and then run into Eastbourne’s own traffic. As a result of the hold – ups the truck arrives fifteen minutes late for load – in, prompting the wags on the crew to ask me and Rodders if we’d gone via Dunstable again. Hilarious. The Congress Theatre is another big, wide bugger…stage left is so far away it has it’s own postcode but it’s a nice, flat push onto the stage, and everything rockets up. The projector images are HUUUUUUGE tonight as we can get them exactly where we want them, and it really looks impressive….yet another taste of what the future could hold. We’re ready for the band in good time today, which means they can grab some more much – needed rehearsal time for their German trip. They’re actually sounding a lot better already, and the medleys don’t have the same train – smash impact on your ears anymore as the band have cleverly managed to come up with transitions that smooth them out. Only the oddball waltz schmaltz of What’s New Pussycat sets the teeth on edge still, and Jamie, who has to sing it, still laughs at it almost every time he steps up to the microphone. Thankfully it’s only about ten seconds long. Don’t get me wrong….it’s nothing to do with the band, they play it fine….it’s just WEIRD, and trying to fit it into a convincing bass / drums / guitar format makes your brain hurt. We have this vision of some random German TV producer sitting in a little room with his Book of 1960’s Hits, picking out the maddest and going “ Ja, ZIS von vill REALLY screw up zose Englander schnitzels “. Back to the Congress Theatre and the lads are ready to wrap up the soundcheck, which means that as we’re at the seaside, it can only be time for fish and chips again…YAY ! Rather than getting something caught fresh today off the coast, though, the only place open nearby is the homogenised, franchised, sanitised Harry Ramsden’s. Now I can’t knock old Harry ( he’s dead anyway ) but I once went to his original place ( HA ! Place ! Fish shop ! Plaice !! Geddit ?? Sigh……) with an old girlfriend ( I mean it was a long time ago, not that she was old ) and the most wonderful cod, chips and mushy peas. The fact that I can remember the meal but not the name of the girlfriend says a lot about the quality of the food ( it also says a lot about me, I think, so let’s move on… ). Anyway, Harry Ramsden’s circa 2010 is absolutely fine if you’re A) Dying of starvation or B) Have run out of cardboard. The pre-packed meals are actually made in somewhere like Korea these days using Croatian cod and Czech chips, so that “ Genuine taste of Yorkshire “ is probably something they sprinkle on it from a can as it speeds down the assembly line. However, it fills a gap, and I’ve ALWAYS got a gap. But enough of this fishy tale…..back to the show. Once again it’s a decent house….nearly four hundred and fifty…..and you can forget all that bobbins about Eastbourne being God’s waiting room. This is a lively lot, and they’re anything but superannuated. Although we’re only one show from the end of this marathon, there’s no reflection of that in the band’s performance, and if anything they’ve been energised by last night’s show in Marlborough. We can’t really get away with reprising Spirit In The Sky here, though, so it’s the normal set, the only hiccup being the light failing in the Black Box Of Bafflement when Phil does the “ Hank “ gag, but that kind of stuff doesn’t scare us anymore….Rodders just picks him up with another light and off we go. We get the now almost mandatory standing ovation, and it’s back to the Big Sleep hotel for our Nearly – End – Of – Tour drink. Steve, Jamie and Chris’s wives are here too, so it’s a nice family vibe as we take over the lounge. We can’t really cane it tonight as we’ve got a show tomorrow, of course, but it’s just good to all be in the same room together for once and to share a beer and chew the fat. The main topic of conversation seems to be what traditional end-of-tour pranks we’re going to pull on the band on the last show tomorrow night, and one by one the lads slope ( a little nervously ! ) off to bed , leaving only Steve “ King Cognac “ Phypers to hold the fort. It would be VERY easy to just say “ Ah, sod it….there’s only one more show “ and REALLY tie one on tonight, because we’ve totally earned it., but there are too many pro’s about for that to happen. Mrs Phypers, the lovely Jill, shepherds her spouse up the apples and pears before things can get too messy, leaving just the crew to think of increasingly mental ideas for tomorrow night, including such flights of fancy as gorilla masks, Batman and Robin suits, and human heads in the Black Box, and we’re having, as the Irish would say, a mighty craic, until someone points out that it’s nearly three o’clock, and we really SHOULD be hitting the hay. It’s only at this point that these six intelligent men realise that they’ll all forgotten the clocks went forward at midnight….so it’s actually nearly FOUR o’clock. AAAGGHH !!!! Cue much scraping of furniture and toppling of chairs as we bail out with the speed of many antelope and head upstairs to grab some ( now foreshortened ) shuteye…..
.

Marlborough Theatre On The Hill, Fri March 26th

2010-03-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

We’re back down in Wiltshire today, just across the M4 from Swindon, in picturesque Marlborough. Tonight’s show is an unusual one in that it’s at a school; St John’s Community College, a brand spankers new hi – tech complex with it’s own theatre, the Theatre On The Hill. We’re VERY nervous about this one; we’ve not been able to get any of the technical information back about it and have no idea whatsoever what to expect. Our suspicions are confirmed when Arthur rings us as on the way down; they haven’t got the basic power we need to run the show and are having to hire in some cable and feed it in from a different part of the building. Not a good start. When we get there the place is amazing, and looks more like a university than a school. At first glance the theatre is a great little room, until we realise that, apart from the power, none of the lighting bars move, there are no lights actually above the stage, there aren’t any stagehands, the houselights are controlled by wall switches in the hall itself so you have to run down from stage to switch them on and off and we have to wheel everything through the cavernous reception area to reach the theatre. In front of the stage is a gap of about four metres before the seats start, so it’s like playing across a moat. In addition their drum and keyboard risers are made up of what seem like a load of coffee tables joined together, and they’re very big and very high. We have to take the decision to get rid of them totally, which raises the ire of a chap in a tie and ID badge who is something to do with Building Facilities. This jolly fellow had put the risers out earlier and isn’t best pleased about having to take them away again, which he lets us know about with much huffing and puffing. The rest of the people here are really nice, though, and Rob, the house tech is almost ridiculously helpful, plus we’re now used to dealing with curveballs. It’s still a slow, slow process, however…..the central projector can’t be hung on the normal bar as it’s just too close to the stage and effectively silhouettes Steve against the screen; as a result we have to hang it from a bar in the main hall which is so high I get a nosebleed when I try and go up the ladder. Mr Health & Safety would probably have a coronary if he could see Rob take the projector off me and shin up the longest ladder I’ve ever seen like a monkey on crystal meth. Rather him than me, say I….a person of my size is just not designed to be that far off the ground; I’m built for sitting on sofas with cups of tea and big bars of chocolate. The upshot of all this fannying about is that the lads don’t have much time to soundcheck, and they’re anxious to keep practising all the stuff for Germany, but it can’t be helped….the power issue takes ages to resolve as it turns out to be a can of not only worms, but snakes, beetles and nasty big spiders as well, but Rodders manages to resolve things with a combination of various leads, plugs, string, glue and spit. We also know the show hasn’t sold as well as the school had hoped; we’re only the second professional visiting company to visit and they haven’t got the profile in the area that they need yet. All of this means that we’re not sure how things are going to go tonight, but we’re just going to have to give it our best shot. The school are certainly making the effort; they’ve set up a little bar in the reception area and have got some of the older kids running the door and being ushers….now all we need is an audience ! As it turns out a decent number of folks arrive, and the thing that’s most apparent is how eager they all are to see the show as they come in…maybe this is going to be OK after all. Right at the beginning of this blogfest I talked about how the shows you look forward to often disappoint, while the ones you’re dreading turn out be to stonkers. Tonight is most definitely in the latter category. What these folks lack in numbers they make up for in enthusiasm, and we’ve got them dancing within a couple of numbers. By the time we get to the
“ party “ section there’s a pretty solid press of people in the “ moat “, and Den has the great idea of adding another song at the end; it’s the first time we’ve done it but this is definitely the kind of place where it’ll work. The song choice is a masterstroke; they go for Spirit In The Sky, and absolutely tear the roof off the place. I’ve heard them play this a few times before but tonight is just a killer, killer version; everyone on the place is going mental and the band are unstoppable; by the end the crowd are just greasy spots on the floor and even the crew are yelling for more ! We’ve probably never had as many people come up to us after the show and literally PLEAD for us to come back again….the other nice thing is that this is going to help the school get their events off the ground as the word will definitely go out that it’s a good place to come to. Their attitude is excellent, because they realise there are technical shortcomings here, and rather than hide behind them Kate and Rob literally come up to us with pen and paper in hand afterwards for our comments and suggestions as to how they can improve things here. THAT’S the sort of approach you need, and we’ll happily come back here again to play for these lovely people. As it’s a long haul to Eastbourne tomorrow we’ve decided that the crew will go part of the way tonight, and the chosen destination is Southampton. Rodders and I borrow Lid’s satnav but I can’t even get the bloody thing to switch on at first, and by the time I’ve worked it out, everyone’s left us behind, so we ease the truck out into the leafy lanes of Wiltshire and set off for Southampton airport, which was the nearest destination I could get the machine to accept. Now, I’m not really a fan of satnavs anyway, and my dislike it compounded as the infernal thing directs us along increasingly smaller and tighter lanes. Twenty minutes in to the journey and we are, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere, in pitch darkness. I try to call Lids and Pug to get them to look at the map for us, but we don’t have phone signal either. We’re on our own, and we’re well and truly snookered, so we just have to inch on through the night regardless. Suddenly Rodders says thoughtfully, “ Tone, I think we’re on Salibury Plain…..” “ Why do you think that ? “ I reply. “ Because we’ve just gone over a crossing for tanks “ he says. He’s right. We’re in Armoured Warfare Central, and it suddenly comes to me that the British Army fight most of their battles at night. It therefore follows that they must TRAIN at night, and so the next ten miles or so are spent on the edge of our seats, waiting for a twenty – ton Challenger tank to roar up and squish us, or else blow us off the road. Luckily we make the main road without mishap, and apart from a slight “ going the wrong way up the motorway “ hiccup, finally make the hotel at 2.00am. It’s been a bit of a stressful twenty – fours hours, and so I sleep like a baby ( in other words I cry all night and wet my pants…..)

Haverhill Arts Centre Thurs March 25th

2010-03-27T12:13:00.000-07:00

Although we don’t get back from Crewe until silly o’clock this morning I’m wide awake at 7.00am with budgets, payments, invoices and bills all jostling for position in my ( totally knackered ) head. Each time I manage to knock one of them out, another creeps in through my lughole or somewhere and I’m off again. Unfortunately this has been my mental default setting for most of the tour and I have to say that it’s a smidgeon wearing, but the finishing line is in sight now, so I’ll just keep drinking my daily pint of absinthe and I’m sure I’ll be fine. We’re in the sleepy little town of Haverhill today, and thanks to an overestimation of how long it’d take to get here we have half an hour to grab some nosebag before load – in. Gay bars are a bit thin on the ground round these parts, so we make do with Gregg’s bakers, and I’m here to tell you that I thoroughly recommend their chilli beef lattice, Faithful Blogreader. Piquant, with just a subtle overtone of cumin and a dash of jalapeno, the pastry is light and flaky, and made to be savoured. I eat mine in one mouthful, but you get the picture.
We’ve sold out tonight, and discover when we arrive that they’ve also sold our “ company “ seats, the ones we use for our guests. Apparently a clause in their contract says that if they haven’t heard from us within a week of the show they can sell them, but I get a soupcon pissed off at this point by the intimation that I’m going to be able to recall every clause from forty – three contracts, most of which were signed about two months ago. Fortunately it doesn’t escalate into anything unpleasant as the house decide they can put our guests up in the balcony next to Arthur and Rodders. Sorted. It’s quite a small stage so we’re all a bit cosy, but this usually means we get a more powerful show. There’s still a lot of rehearsal going on today for this German TV show which has started to loom over the band like some huge, German looming thing, and the only good thing from our point of view is that we get to hear lots of snippets of new songs we’ve not heard the band play before. From THEIR point of view it’s a constant wrestling match, trying to force unsuitable songs together into medleys chosen by the TV folks, or working new starts and finishes into songs they’ve been playing a different way for years. Had this arisen at the start of the tour we’d have been Donald Ducked as they were still so focused on the show, and soundchecks were long, methodical affairs. These days the actual band soundcheck is knocked off in minutes to allow them the maximum rehearsal opportunity; they can literally do it in their sleep. The familiarity with the show reaches new heights for me tonight as well; I can’t find my set list so for the first time I do the whole thing from memory. Which accounts for all the mistakes.
We also have our first major potential gig-killing event….about six songs in, Steve looks up and over at us in alarm; the main bolt on his bass drum pedal has sheared right through, and there’s no spare. A drummer can no more play a show without a bass drum pedal than a guitarist could play a show without strings, so this is a terminal problem. Nick dives onstage and takes the pedal off to see if he can carry out some sort of repair, leaving Steve to try and soldier on. The lad’s a trouper, though….not only does he manage to get through two whole songs, he also plays his drum solo in Pretty Woman, and more to the point, does the whole thing pretty bloody well, and with a smile on his face. As with the soundchecks, this is something that might not have been possible when we started the tour, but Steve takes a cataclysmic kick in the cods like this totally in his stride now, and gets the applause he deserves at the end. A special mention must also be made of the tour’s real unsung hero, our very own Nick Liddard, father of Lids and general wonderbloke. Whereas I’d personally have reacted to the bass drum breakage by sitting in a corner and weeping hopelessly, he somehow finds a bolt and wingnut which will fit, and whips it into the pedal tout suite, literally saving the show. I make a mental note to buy him a Crunchie. Collapsing drum hardware apart, it’s actually a wicked show tonight…folks are up and dancing at the front of the stage , but there’s also one character in the crowd who used to come to Overtures gigs, jump up onstage and make an arse of himself; Nick keeps a close eye on him in case he repeats these antics but I take a slightly more draconian approach to security by firing off the flame projector pyrotechnic just as he looks as though he’s walking towards the steps at the side of the stage. Barnet suitably singed, he sits back down and we don’t hear another peep. We’re also graced by the presence of the three “ tired and emotional “ ladies from the Stevenage show, this time all wearing cute little matching pink and black quartered sleeveless minidresses. Alcohol may been involved again as one of them keels over while dancing and hits the floor like a sack of spuds, but apart from all the ribald heckling, knicker – flashing, general misbehaviour and falling over drunk they’re no bother. We also discover they were the source of the underwear thrown onto the stage at Stevenage as we see them hurl yet more scanties this time; there must have been some chilly buttocks on the way back to wherever they live…It’s Clive’s last show of the tour tonight, and that really brings home the fact that this is nearly all over, especially when he says his goodbyes to the band and I think “ That’ll be me in three days “. Dartford Orchard seems like it happened a lifetime ago, and yet at the same time the tour’s just flashed by….now how does THAT happen ? I’m musing on such metaphysical concepts as we leave the venue for the shortish drive home, only to be brought crashing back to reality by the incessant glowing of the “ Refuel Now “ light on my car dashboard. I check the onboard mission control computer to see the mileage left in the fuel tank, and it yields a big fat zero…Ah. “ No worries “ I think, “ We’ll fill up at that Sainsbury’s superstore on the way in. Not so bloody super, as it turns out, however…as with everything else in Haverhill it’s closed, and I mean CLOSED….we don’t see another car on the road or person on the street. It’s just like the film 28 Days Later. Only at night. And not in London. And without zombies. This could be a disaster. I phone the local police to ask if they know of a 24 hour garage in the area, and after a short delay of only about a year the nice lady on the phone finds one and “ talks me in “ to it. It’s closed. She then tells me the only other one is ten miles away and wishes me good luck. Thanks, Suffolk Constabulary. We’ve no option but to put up the sail, cross our fingers and do forty miles an hour. Amazingly we make it, but the Death Stares I get from Rodders and Pug who are in the car with me bore holes into my skull all the way home. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…….

Crewe Lyceum Wed March 24th

2010-03-25T12:32:00.000-07:00

There’s a little bit of history about today’s show; Crewe Lyceum was where we did our very first” proper “ Bootleg Sixties show outside of Broxbourne. In those days we were just playing with the format and it was totally “ seat of the pants “ stuff….we had absolutely no idea if anyone was going to come and see us, or if they’d like it, and the whole thing was a total leap of faith. As it happens we did pretty well ( significantly better than the 40 people that a top Hendrix tribute act had drawn earlier than week, anyway ! ) and it confirmed to us that we had actually something that was worth developing. Two and a half years on and we’re coming back with a show that’s light years away from that slightly hesitant debut, and even the way the house crew react to us is different; they’ve heard of us now, so there’s an element of respect that might have been missing before. As it’s only an hour or so from Preston we get here a bit early today and so decide to grab some grub before the load-in, and we find a pub – cum- restaurant thing almost next door to the gig advertising a “ small breakfast” for just £ 2.00. Being a bunch of tightwads we reason that this is the perfect place, so in we troop. At first we don’t really notice the predominantly pink décor or the peacock hairstyle of the barman, but as we look around and speak to the staff it soon dawns on us that, yes, we’ve managed to wander into the only gay bar in Crewe. Not a problem in itself, but the food takes well over half an hour to arrive, by which time the truck has pulled up and the load – in has to start. When the house crew see where we’ve been it raises a few eyebrows and a couple of them even edge slightly away, so we start talking loudly in deep voices about beer, rugby and shagging , and soon all is well. This is a great little theatre but here’s a rake on the stage so steep it that makes you feel as if you’re walking up a bloody great hill, or if you’re going across the stage it’s like being on the deck of a ship, as you have to counter the slope with this kind of rolling gait ( or have one leg shortened, of course ). The other aspect of all this incline – related fun is that our equipment is going all Isaac Newton on our asses, and is desperately trying to give in to the pull of gravity and hurl itself off the stage into the orchestra pit. It all comes in to the building quite nicely, but within about ten minutes there’s a chuffin’ great Tetris of flight cases all jostling, lemming – like, for prime position at the lip of the stage. The house lads are used to it, of course, and sort things out by the simple expedient of screwing two large planks across the stage. Lo- tec it may be, but it saves our gear from committing collective suicide. We’ve arranged with the band that they can come in early today and use some soundcheck time to rehearse the German TV stuff. I must admit I thought that they were just doing a few numbers backing the guest stars and so on ( if you can “ just “ do such a thing on a programme that goes out to millions of viewers ), but it seems that our Teutonic brethren, hilarious funsters that they are, have thought it’d be a wizard wheeze to have the lads play a kind of musical chairs thing as part of what appears to a quiz; they’ll play a snippet of a song, the host will ask a searching question, like “ what’s the next word after this;” Strawberry Fields….??”, then the band will play the snippet with the answer. Genius ! Not only does it mean they have to learn almost an entire set of twenty – second versions of songs, but the show is also, of course, going to be in German, so they’re not going to have a Scooby – Doo what’s going on, and yet are expected to hit all these sharp cues. As Arthur’s going to be with them we look at the chances of him learning enough Deutsch by next Tuesday to be able to translate for them, but in the end we decide we’re going to ask for a bi-lingual (attitudes to that sort of thing are SO much more relaxed on the Continent, don’t you think ? ) and get them to do something technical like hoist a thumb aloft at the appropriate moment. It’s a load more work for them than I realised, and they’ve really only got the remaining tour soundchecks to knock this into shape as they’re off to Munich literally right after the tour. The last thing Jamie and Den need is to be caning their voices for another couple of hours each day, but needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle, as Edmund Blackadder used to say. On to the show, then, and we’ve doubled our attendance from last time, which again vindicates this whole shooting match. The lads are on good form tonight as well, and when Den spots a group of people in the royal box he gives a little bow and plays up to “ Her Maj “. These poor folks also get a shock when I fire off my pyrotechnics in Light My Fire; for a start they’re not expecting a jet of flame to shoot up from just underneath them and singe their eyebrows, but for some reason the detonator cap of this particular firework flies out of the firing tube and arcs beautifully right into their box, prompting much leaping up, stamping of feet and brushing down of clothes. We do like to involve our audience but perhaps we should stop short of trying to immolate them….We have a lovely surprise just as the second half goes up; a hand comes through the curtain behind me and hands me a large round box of Celebrations chocolates. Taped to the top is a little “ thankyou “ note from Geoff, Glyn and Sheila at Market Drayton Festival Centre. I open the box, and far from being anything as mundane as chocolates (which I’d still have gratefully scarfed anyway ) it turns out to be one of Sheila’s wonder cakes, a coffee and walnut confection of total beauty. As everyone else in the camp hears about this over the comms, Clive and I realise that we’re going to have to circle the wagons to prevent a flock of gannets descending on us. In the end our rearguard action is all for nothing….we manage to paff a slice each but then the container is kidnapped by the band as we’re doing the loadout. DENIED ! Despite this tragic loss, it’s been a great night, though, so we’re not TOO fazed about the fact that the M6 is closed when we leave Crewe and we have to divert via Aberdeen or somewhere equally bloody inconvenient….after all, sleep is for the weak, isn’t it….??

Preston Charter Theatre Tue March 23rd

2010-03-24T03:32:00.000-07:00

It’s the long haul up to Preston today, and it’s not a happy camp as we set out. There have been some personal and professional problems which have arisen for some of the tour party over the last couple of days which have cast something of a shadow over things, and we also have some pretty unhappy memories of Preston; last time we were here a couple of years ago we found that, due to a booking error, we were doing the cavernous Guildhall, instead of the more intimate Charter Theatre next door where we’re playing tonight. We didn’t have a bad crowd considering, but they were lost in that huge room more suited to world snooker finals and the like. To add to the fun that day my car was broken into while it was in the loading bay and Arthur’s satnav was stolen., so I spent the afternoon the nice man from Autoglass having the window replaced ( I was picking glass shards out of my bum for about three weeks
afterwards ). Since then I’ve been back here with the Israeli dance show Aluminum, and that was a nightmare of a gig, so it’s with some trepidation that we pull up outside. The get-in’s no fun either, as everything has to go up in a small lift onto the first floor, but the house crew lads are friendly and welcoming and luckily it all goes pretty painlessly. We have a protracted visit from the gremlins today, though, and the little buggers seem to get everywhere. When Clive sparks up the main show laptop it becomes clear it’s got a virus, which is pretty weird as it’s never used for anything other than the show and doesn’t ever get connected to the net. We can only assume it was infected by a memory stick that was used to load on the “ local footage “ pictures in Dunstable, but however it happened Clive’s got to take it off downstairs where he can get wi – fi so he can try and clean it up. Jamie’s amp then starts picking up a bizarre regular beeping signal, and we go through the options to try and get rid of it, all to no avail. When Phil’s starts doing the same a while later we can only conclude that it’s an alien life form trying to contact us from a distant planet, but in the end it turns out to be the rather more prosaic signal sent out by the building’s fire alarm system which some electric guitars pick up. As they won’t switch off the fire alarm
( spoilsports ) we just have to get on with it. Steve then starts having a problem with his monitors, and we have to break soundcheck to try and sort this out, all of which eats further into the hour and a half or so we have to play with. The band are also trying to use this time to rehearse for the German TV show, so things get a bit tense as six thirty gets nearer. In the end Den realises that there’s not really the concentration that the process needs, so the band call it a day and we agree an earlier soundcheck start in Crewe tomorrow. By the time the audience start coming in we’ve just about got everything working and so our one remaining worry is Jamie’s voice. He says he feels OK but he developed a cold over the weekend and that’s a worry, He holds back in soundcheck but there’s a big burden on him in the show and it really is a case of just seeing what happens. We’re also a bit disappointed in the house; after we played here last time we made a really good impression and that’s why we’re back today, but it becomes clear that we’ve picked up almost exactly the same number of people this time round. This is only the second time on the tour where we haven’t significantly improved on numbers from a previous visit and it IS a pisser, especially as both have come at the end of long journeys, first to Llandudno and now here. The audience are a receptive lot, though, and of course the boys have learned the Weymouth Lesson now. They’re a bit cagey about Jamie’s voice, to be honest, but apart from a few rough-edged bits here and there he’s actually doing fine. I ask them at the interval if they think they’ll need to pull any of his songs from the second half and the reaction is “ No, we’ll be OK “, which is good news, and again I think back the early days of the tour and the panic we felt when Den’s voice was going. We were restructuring entire sets to cope with it then, but now it’s a total “ can do “ attitude….in fact I think Jamie was more upset about the fact that I hadn’t brought him an ice cream like the one I was eating when I walked into the dressing room ! Touring DEFINITELY changes everything……Into the second half and Jamie’s as good as his word, getting through some tough songs, but it’s still with a sense of relief that we bring the curtain down at the end. It’s been a hard day today. As we’ve already learned it’s not easy getting back into the swing when there’s been a little break, though I must say we’ve done pretty well today in the light of some tricky circumstances. There’s a nice family touch tonight too as Pug’s Gran has come to the show and has really enjoyed it….she gives her “ Snugglemuffin “ a hug and tells him she’s proud of him before brushing his hair , wiping a dirty mark off his face with her hankie and telling him to wash his hands before dinner. We’re staying with those wonderful Travelodge people again tonight and it becomes immediately clear that they work on different miles to the rest of us…the hotel is apparently 4.6 miles from Preston central. As we pass the eight mile mark we start to question the veracity of the Travelodge website, and when we see the herds of moose crossing the tundra we know they’ve definitely sold us a wrong ‘un. Eventually we find the hotel and to our relief English is still spoken here despite the remoteness of the location. It’s got everything we need….a bed, a shower and an ice cream machine in the foyer. SORTED !!!

Dunstable Grove Theatre Fri March 19th

2010-03-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

A bit of a Twilight Zone moment happened this morning, and once again I’m attributing it to residual shaggedoutedness. As Transmedia has been based in Bedford for yonks, we’ve had occasion to come to Dunstable many times, so Doris’s guidance is deemed unnecessary today. Rodders and I duly clamber in the truck and headed off. To avoid the fun and games of the A421, which is being turned into dual carriageway and currently resembles the Somme just after a major bombardment, we head down the A6 and chuck a right just outside Luton. “ Dunstable five miles “, the sign tells us, so we wend our way through street after street. After street. After street. Another sign pops up, and this time we’re only two miles away. We then pick up the signs for Town Centre and dutifully follow them. I’m a smidge concerned by the fact that I don’t actually recognise anywhere, but figure it can be only a matter of time before I see a landmark. We carry on, and it’s though as I’ve been dropped into a town I’ve never seen before. “ This just can’t be right “ I tell Rodders as two miles slips by, then three. “ I’ve been here loads of times but I don’t know this place “. Suddenly we see another sign for the town centre and we reckon we’ve finally cracked it…..but when we get there the town centre turns out to be Luton. Somehow Dunstable has disappeared, although we went right through it, apparently, and now we don’t know where we are and we’re late. The hardest part is that I don’t seem to be able to get my brain to function properly; years and years of touring round the world has left me with a pretty well-developed sense of direction and I hardly ever get lost, especially around somewhere familiar…..but I haven’t a Scooby where we are and I’m actually starting to panic a bit. Luckily we DO finally hit a road I know and we quickly get to the show twenty minutes late. I’ll leave you to imagine the ribbing we got for getting lost on the way to a local show……Once we’re finally here we remember how much we love The Grove; you can actually bring the truck inside the building and drop your kit straight onto the stage, plus it’s got lighting bars for days, a fantastic in – house PA system and it’s big, wide and mucho posho. Despite our tardiness everything flies up quickly and we set the house crew the Crème Egg Challenge; if we can beat our record load – out time of fifty – four minutes then we’ll buy them a whole henload of Crème Eggs. We’ve only had a couple of places get anywhere near that time since the record was set, but they’re a game lot here so the bet is laid ( eggs, laid….geddit ? ). Soundcheck is a bit of a treat for the old rock dinosaurs among our number; Jamie has been delayed by traffic so the guys give us some classic rock stuff; Sunshine Of Your Love, Purple Haze, a stonking All Along The Watchtower, Born To Be Wild and….errr…The Archies’ Sugar Sugar. Fair gladdens yer heart !! Fast forward to seven thirty pm, and we’ve got yet another good crowd tonight, with a serious sprinkling of wild and wacky Sixties outfits. One chap is particularly vocal and when Den spots him in his “ Jimmy Saville “ clobber he gets the guy up to take a bow. This is DEFINITELY what we want much more of; some of these folks look absolutely brilliant and we need to be acknowledging it somehow. Some brainstorming called for, methinks. It really is a great audience tonight, just like Aldershot they’re loud and appreciative and totally behind us….in fact, it’s shaping up to be one of the best shows so far, and by the interval we think we’ve got it nailed. WRONNNGGGGG !!!!! Although things start well enough when the lights go back down, we’re on course for a serious kick in the cods. Just as the band go into the first number of the “ psychedelic section “, the click track “ in Steve’s headphones disappears, leaving him unable to hear the metronome that helps him keep everything together on these two songs. Whilst Pug and Tomps rapidly check connections and leads to try and find the fault, poor Steve has to play quieter and quieter in order to try and somehow pick up the click. This is a nightmare situation….you can’t just stop and start again as it’s all tied in to the visuals, so Steve has to simply fight his way through the two – song section. That he makes it to the end without everything falling apart says a lot about his ability, but it’s unnerved everyone and although the audience don’t seem to have noticed, the band are definitely shaken. Worse is to come, though. Without warning, as Jamie gets about three quarters of the way through Handbags & Gladrags his voice suddenly goes. There’d been no wobble…it just happened. He’s a pro, of course, and instead of panicking he dropped the pitch of the last chorus of the song and made it to the end. We’ve still got Pinball Wizard, He Ain’t Heavy and Mony Mony to go, all of which feature him heavily, and the tension in the crew is almost palpable. I’m not sure what Jamie does offstage during the VT insert before Pinball but it must involve gargling with some kind of magic potion, because he manages to make a decent fist of the song and gets most of the harmonies on He Ain’t Heavy, but by Mony Mony he’s struggling again, and Den steps into the breach. Luckily the last two songs are both Den’s lead vocal, and finally we’ve made it. Judging by the crowd’s response they’re not in the slightest bit aware of what’s been going on, and despite everything that’s happened we’ve done it yet again. They’re standing up, shouting, clapping, yelling for more, and it’s totally, totally brilliant. Afterwards I ask Jamie how he’s feeling, and he’s totally puzzled about what happened. He says he feels fine and doesn’t have a sore throat, but that the upper register just wasn’t there when he went for it. The only consolation is that we’ve got a couple of days break now, and past that the end of the tour is just over a week away. It would be tragic to cut everything short after going through so much and coming so far with everything, but all we can do now is dose the lad with jollop, put him in solitary and cross our fingers……….

Aldershot Princes Hall, Thurs March 18th

2010-03-19T02:44:00.000-07:00

Before we get into today’s jollities, I need to mention a surreal event from a couple of shows ago that I’d forgotten to share with you. We were at the crucial point right at the start…the lights had gone down, the intro insert was playing and we were all set to go. Suddenly Tomp’s urgent voice came over my headphones….” Tony, the nu – nu’s not in it’s box ! “ Now, I’ve heard some odd things in my time in this game, but that one takes the mottled oyster. Initially I thought the boy had totally taken leave of his senses, but then I followed his pointing finger and realised that he meant the vacuum cleaner hose from the smoke machine hadn’t been connected to the Black Box Of Bafflement. Where nu – nu came into the equation was still a mystery, but I’ve since been reliably informed that Nu-Nu is the name of the little hoover that incessantly cleans the Teletubbies’ house, and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the legacy of too many hours spent in front of Children’s BBC. Be warned….it can make you talk absolute bobbins. But enough weirdness….today we’re off to Aldershot to do a show for band friend and all – round diamond geezer John Martin. We played here for John a year or so back and it was great, and we hear that tonight’s done about five hundred tickets already, which is fantastic. We knew that we’d be going through a whole mess of roadworks and so set off early, and as always happens in these situations we sail right through and get to the gig an hour early. Luckily the house crew lads are also there ahead of time, so we get stuck in and start unloading. Another slightly surreal thing interrupts the process. After the Boston show we were given a “comedy stool” by Kip, the house tech, and have been using this three-legged milking – stool jobbie in the acoustic section ever since. However, it’s not the sturdiest piece of furniture that’s ever been made, and after a few weeks of going in and out of the truck and being flung across the stage by Steve it’s actually in three pieces, so we consign it to one of the venue’s rubbish bins. Then out of the blue in mid – load we get an agitated call from Arthur. He’s had Kip on the phone and apparently it turns out that this manky little chair is some kind of family heirloom which should never have been given to us in the first place. Kip’s been frantically trying to track us down to see if we still have it and is hugely relieved when it turns out we do. So important is this thing that he’s driving to Haverhill from Boston next week to collect it from us ! We tactfully fail to mention it’s somewhat fragmented state, and make a mental note to buy a tube of No More Nails tomorrow. You really DO have to see this battered, oft – repaired bit of timber to appreciate the full oddness of the request, but as they say, there’s nowt as queer as folk….But enough of this weirdness. The Princes Hall in Aldershot is a nice little theatre of about six hundred seats, perfect for us and this tour, and apart from the faff of having to get everything up to the stage level in a goods lift it’s well – appointed and cosy. We get the soundcheck out of the way quickly today as the band are having to do some more rehearsing for the German TV show; this time they’ve been asked to wrangle together a couple of medleys from a somewhat odd choice of numbers supplied by the programme’s producers, who clearly have a musical ear that’s on a par with their nation’s reputation for humour and knockabout comedy. There are wild tempo and key changes involved, and trying to get this into some kind of flowing order is like herding cats at first, but by the end of a brainstorming session the lads have come up with a structure that doesn’t sound like the fevered noodlings of some schizo nutjob. They’re getting decent pay for this TV thing but, by Satan’s trousers, they’re having to work for it. A near sold – out gig’s going to be a breeze after this, and so it proves….in fact I’d go so far as to say this is one of the top two or three shows on the tour, and easily the best received by a very vocal and partisan crowd. It looks great tonight, too…for once there’s no air conditioning to suck the haze away from Rodder’s machines, so it hangs on the stage and picks out all the sharp beams and hot colours of the lights. It looks….ROCK !! Each song is greeted not just with applause but with a proper, roaring cheer, and the strongest impression is that these good people are definitely here to see THIS band and THIS show because they’re fans, and not just because they might have read about it or seen it on a website somewhere. The band respond magnificently, and not even the honksome act of a poorly punter projectile vomiting over three rows of seats at the interval can take the gloss off tonight. The place is duly washed, mopped, disinfected and fumigated and the hapless recipients of the technicolour yawn taken to the sheep – dip, but despite the lingering odour ( so reminiscent of school corridors, for some unearthly reason ) we’re not to be denied, and somewhere into the early part of the second set the whole thing just takes flight. Steve’s playing as if his life depends on it ( at the end of the set I’ll notice that he’s been hammering the bass drum so hard that his entire drumkit AND the carpet it sits on have been pushed forward nearly a foot, and are right on the verge of toppling off the riser ) while Jamie and Den are in great voice. At stage right Phil throws shapes and reels off lines of sparkling guitar, and at the back Chris is in perpetual motion, one moment pounding his keys, the next doing serious damage to tambourines and other bits of his percussion gear, grinning widely all the while. This is more like a homecoming gig by conquering heroes than a random Thursday night in Aldershot, and it’s bloody brilliant. As the band head off afterwards to meet the fans we start the laborious de-rig process, but tonight we’re buoyed up by knowing that we’ve been part of something special, and even the fact that it’s drizzling when we get the gear outside doesn’t dampen our spirits. It’s obviously the second night of the Roadworks Jubilee and this time the celebration of these yellow – clad, nocturnal denizens of the dark extends up the M1 and closes the A421 totally, but somehow the flashing lights and jaunty apparel seem in keeping with the celebratory mood and for once we refrain from trying to run them over and screaming for the head of the Minister Of Transport to be displayed atop a traffic cone. Even Arthur’s van ( which is well into the overdraft facility of it’s borrowed time on this earth and had steadfastly refused to start for him tonight ) yielded to my inexpert ministrations and fired up first time after the Laying On Of Hands And General Wiggling Things About Under The Bonnet. Tomorrow’s another day and all that gubbins, but tonight belongs to us, and we can do no wrong. Are you listening, Rock Gods ??? I SAID “ WE CAN DO NO WRONG !!!! “

Basildon Towngate Wed March 17th

2010-03-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

Basildon Towngate Wed March 17th

There’s no doubt about it….when you’ve had a break of even a couple of days your brain turns to bean dip and everything weighs three times more than it did before. When we cross – load the bits of gear that Arthur used on the Yamaha drum shows on Monday and Tuesday, we totter from truck to truck as though we were humping concrete blocks rather than the speakers that we’ve been tossing around easily for the past five weeks or so. It’s as though our bodies have just decided that they’ve had enough and are trying to tell us that an alternative career in librarianship or something equally sedentary would be more our forte. Pug in particular is very tired and quiet. This may well be something to do with the lovely Daniella , though he maintains it’s because he was, ahem, “ rehearsing” until late last night. Personally I’m more inclined to think it’s because he’s been ingesting industrial quantities of beer and pharmaceuticals, but that’s just me being a cynical old Hector and envious of young people. Thank Tigger that we’re doing a “proper” theatre today, which will make things a bit easier. I know it’s a bit early for Easter but there’s a definite resurrection theme going on…..not only has Arthur’s blue van rallied enough to make one last great troll round the M25, but Doris the satnav switched on this morning and started lecturing us just as we were about to peg her out the window, welcome events both. Must be our positive energy (man). We’ve done the Towngate before, something like a year ago, to about 150 appreciative souls, but we’ve doubled that figure this time, so we could be in for a good night. The band all look refreshed when they arrive, Steve especially dapper with a new buzz-cut, and we get a bit of an unusual soundcheck routine today; the band are doing a big TV show in Germany just after the tour finishes and they are backing Chubby Chekker ( still alive,
apparently ) as well as playing the Bee Gee’s Robin Gibb onstage, so we get chunks of “ Do The Twist “ and “ Got To Get A Message To You “ as well as the normal fare, and it sounds bloody good. We have a panicky ten minutes of grief with the PA system about halfway through soundcheck but Arthur and Pug get it sorted, and we’re back up and running. Once again I’m virtually hidden behind a curtain so I can’t see the crowd and it mutes the audience’s applause, making things a bit weird as you don’t know how well the band are going down. I can just about see Steve and he’s bouncing around and smiling, though, so he must be getting something good back from the auditorium. Some nights Missile Command is almost on the stage and you’ve got all the sights, sounds and smells of the show right up close and personal, and on others we’re so far back in the wings and behind drapes or whatever that it detaches you from what’s happening, but this isn’t as bad as some….at least I can see one of the screens so I know that the buttons I’m pressing are actually doing something. I can’t see the Black Box Of Bafflement at all though, so it’s a leap of faith when I fire in the light and smoke. The first half seems to fly by tonight and I’m not sure if it’s a case of just being over-familiar with the set or if the tiredness is still hanging around, but once again no-one strays too far from their positions at the interval so perhaps we ARE all a bit jaded still. Everyone says the show’s going down really well, though, and the new graphics Tomps has added to some of the inserts look fantastic, so we know we’re going to leave here tonight with another away win. I manage to burrow out of my House Of Black Curtains towards the end of the second half and get a good look at the audience who are, as I believe the common parlance has it, giving it large. Cue standing ovation and sustained applause. One – nil to us….GET in there ! As the crowd file out we can hear the house staff telling them “ tell all your friends and don’t forget to come back and see the show next year ! “ Suppose we’d better talk to them about a re-booking, then…..We’re out in just over an hour and head back to Bedford, but it would appear that there’s some kind of Roadworks Jubilee going on….I can say with hand on heart that I’ve never seen so many cones, flashing orange lights, blokes in hi – vis clothes and “ Lane Closed “ signs in my entire puff; it’s like discovering that there’s a whole new civilisation that only comes out at night and burrows into the country’s motorway network. This vileness starts on the A127 just after we come out of Basildon and dogs us right round the M25 and up the A1. We don’t seem to be clear until we’re almost back to Bedford, and as a result we get back late, shagged out and irritable. No change there, then……..

Wimborne Tivoli Sat March 13th

2010-03-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

The morning starts well; the alarm on Arthur’s mobile goes off once but doesn’t go into “ repeat “ mode, and it’s not enough to rouse two exhausted fifty – somethings. As such we’re half an hour late getting out of the hotel, and that means no time for breakfast, so we’re going to have to grab something on the hoof. Arthur’s opted for what at first seemed to be an odd route, heading south – west towards Bristol and the M4 before turning back south – east to Wimborne, but it proves a good choice as it’s virtually roadworks – free and we maintain a steady speed. Things get a bit more gnarly when we find that the journey takes us right though the centre of Saturday – morning Bath and it’s attendant traffic jams before meandering through some beautiful countryside towards Blandford Forum. Due to the usual crop of weekend drivers, farm vehicles and caravans we’re held up again, and don’t get to the venue until 2.30pm, but find that Rodders, Tomps ( who drove down here straight from home ) and the house crew have already unloaded the truck. I’d like to state for the record here and now that the person who said he saw us crouching in the bushes and watching until they had finished is a liar, a cad and a bounder. All joking aside, we ARE knackered, though…..a bunch of us have been on the road already for over four hours today and are sluggish and slow with the build. We know it’ll get done it time….it ALWAYS gets done in time…..but everything seems like a real effort and all the equipment seems to have put on weight overnight. At least the venue is a good size so we’re not scrapping for space to put things, and the crew are very helpful, even Tom, the bright –eyed, bushy – tailed trainee who is fascinated by our Tales Of Tours Gone By. It’s an odd building, actually….it’s got a sort of oversized Nissen hut shape about it and a slightly crazed colour scheme....from the stage the seats look camouflaged...and it’s almost impossible to guess it’s age, but the stage is much bigger than Pocklington ( mind you, so are my boxer shorts ) so we can get the whole production in without any worries. As we start to get over our car – lag and our cramped and aching muscles begin to ease we gradually speed up, and rugger bugger Tomps even has time to somehow get my laptop screening the England v Scotland match, sneaking quick peeks each time he passes. It’s this very same match that gives me the clearest indication yet of how tired I am, though….I was setting up my pyrotechnic firing unit and Scotland had been awarded a penalty. The kicker was down on his haunches, carefully placing the ball. He seemed to be taking a long time about it, but there was no outcry from the crowd. I wired in a connection and glanced up. Still placing the ball. Another connection, another glance….he’s still down there. I went and ran out another cable, then came back to wire it in a few minutes later. On the screen the Caledonian warrior was in his original pose. Not being a rugby man, I scoffed at this tardiness. “ Yeah, like a footie ref would ever let someone take THAT long over a penalty or a free kick….stupid game ! “. One more cable – run later, I sat back down, looked up, saw the squatting Scot…..and realised the screen had been frozen for about five minutes and I’d been watching the same scene thinking it was live action. As Homer Simpson would have it, D’oh ! I’m also a bit alarmed when the band arrive at about five o’clock. For reasons I can’t remember now they’d driven home after Pocklington rather than stay out, and then got down here a bit later for soundcheck than normal. This would have involved an early – hours arrival back at base, followed by a three or four hour slog down here; they look tired as soon as they walk in, and we haven’t even started yet ! There’s the usual chat and banter but it’s definitely a bit subdued, and the band seem keen to go off to their dressing rooms as soon as the soundcheck duties are dispensed with. There’s an inspired moment when it’s decided to get a Chinese takeaway for everyone rather than us all head off to do our own culinary thing, and apart from some slight confusion over what was duck and what was some other, unidentifiable meat, we trough down with gusto. Speaking for myself, it’s the finest food I’ve ever tasted, but apparently I say that after every meal. Although we got here late today, we’ve done everything we need to do within a couple of hours, and time seems to drag with leaden boots towards showtime. Suffused with the glow of post – prandial wellbeing that a humungous bowl of house special fried rice and curry sauce brings, I can feel the fatigue kicking back in and my eyes are heavy and gritty. When the curtain goes up, not for the first time on the tour I find myself in a kind of daze watching the band play, and I suddenly realise I’ve missed some slide cues and hurriedly slot them in. Steve seems to be struggling tonight, too….he was very quiet when he got here, and he’s puffing and blowing a bit, especially on his drum solo. The solo itself is fine but it all looks like harder work than normal. I also notice that Jamie’s face is dripping with sweat after just a couple of songs, and that’s not like him either. We’ve got a three - day gap coming up after this show and it looks like we need it. This has been the longest run of shows where we’ve stayed out, and it’s taken it’s toll on everyone. Despite the weariness, though, the band are as bang – on as ever, and by the time he gets onstage Den looks lively and box-fresh. The banter goes down really well and Phil’s “ Hank “ gag gets one of it’s best receptions of the tour. We’ve got a good – sized audience here tonight and despite all the ominous warnings of the house guys that it’d be wall – to – wall Zimmer frames, they seem a fairly animated lot. At the interval I get up and set the pyrotechnics before buying an ice cream from the nice lady selling them at the front of the stage, but then have to sit straight back down at Missile Command. I normally go out for a breath of fresh air at the break but even that’s too much effort tonight. I’m wondering if it’s going to be a “ show of two halves “ for the band, and that this half will see the tiredness affect them, but I needn’t have worried…they storm into the second part of the show and, to the genuine surprise of the house crew, get everyone on their feet for the party numbers. Stage manager Phil raises an eyebrow and remarks he hasn’t seen this kind of reaction for a long time, which is always nice to hear even though we’re getting a bit blasé about it now. Once again we have the house manager asking about our availability for a return booking, and we mean it when we say “ we’ll be in touch “….this is a really cool venue and definitely one we’d like to come back to. The load out is a bit of a weird affair….although it’s a nice, fast, flat push out through the scene dock to the truck, Arthur’s spending two of the upcoming break days doing a drum clinic for Yamaha, so he has to pick the gear he’s going to need and make sure it’s on the back of the truck so it can be cross – loaded into his vehicle on Monday. We have to make sure that flight cases don’t get loaded in until all the relevant equipment is sorted, and we’re a bit worried it’ll drag things out. Luckily it doesn’t cause too many problems, and we’re ready to pull out by 11.30pm, which is pretty good under the circs. Arthur’s taking the truck home with him tonight so he and Rodders rendezvous with Pug and I in the car at Winchester services on the M3. We swap drivers, buy the requisite crap like crisps, pies and chocolate, then head off. Rodders falls asleep almost immediately in the back and I only make it as far as the M1 before having to hand the keys to Pug. The next thing I know we’re pulling up outside my house at twenty past three in the morning. Pug climbs wearily into his own car which has been parked on the vertiginous slope of my driveway for sixteen days, and with a loud, parting crack of unsticking handbrake, beetles home to Northampton. I make it into the house and briefly toy with the idea of a snack before making do with a wash and a clean of my Hampsteads. There’s a voice whispering in my ear, and it’s saying “ Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…….” I realise that this in, in fact, extremely good advice, and so I shrug on my Winnie the Pooh jim-jams and slip off into the Land of Nod. See you in Basildon……

Pocklington Arts Centre Fri March 12th

2010-03-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

A little snapshot for you of some of the poo that goes on behind the scenes which is neither seen or appreciated...on the drive to Pocklington this morning I ride in the truck with Arthur so I can do some work. The main object of today’s exercise is to chase up the many venues, councils, trusts, cartels and quangos who still haven’t paid us for the shows we’ve done for them. We’re in the truck for around two and a half hours, yet I only manage to physically speak to TWO people; the rest is frustrating round of voicemail, “ he’ll call you back “, she’s in a meeting or “ I’m sorry, he’s having a head transplant…he’ll be back on Monday” I’ve now wasted two hours of my life, run up a chunky mobile phone bill, and have got precisely nobloodywhere. We’re rapidly running out of money because we depend on these people paying us promptly, and while they fart around with their purchase orders, bought ledgers and procurement departments, Arthur and I have got musicians and crew asking daily when they’ll be getting their wages. Can I just state here for the record that I don’t care what venue you’re from, there’s absolutely no reason or excuse why figures can’t be calculated within 48 hours of a show taking place and the artiste told how much they have to invoice the venue for. There’s ALSO no excuse for us then having to wait thirty, sixty and in some case up to ninety days for payment. It’s not YOUR money, you know, and we’re not buying the Town Hall off you or driving a new motorway past the town, for crying out loud….we’re talking small, manageable sums of cash here. And as for all these delaying tactics like cobblers about problems with “ the cheque – writing software “….I’ll come round with my OWN cheque writing software in that case…it’s called a 50p BIC biro, and guess what…it always works. Right. Spleen vented…..time to move on. So Pocklington, then. This is a really pretty little town just east of York, though until this tour I don’t think any of us even knew of it’s existence. One thing we DO know is that the contrast between last night’s venue and the Arts Centre here couldn’t be greater. Whereas the Plaza was all wide open spaces, the Arts Centre is the very essence of compact and bijou. There’s not even a stage….the band are playing on a flat platform at the base of the tiered seating., but it’s a really nice venue…..apart from the fact that a) you have to unload your truck in someone’s garden then remove it to the next county b) we’re back in the Alps again with fifteen steep stairs to the stage c) there’s nowhere to store cases except for the art gallery, which is great…except that you have to cart the cases down about three feet to the lower level, d) there are no moving bars, just like Market Drayton, so it’s a case of humping MACs and projectors up wobbly ladders, and e) the absolute piece de resistance, you can’t load back out the way you came in, because the person whose garden it is has some kind of bizarre objection to a load of uncouth road crew crashing about among the gladioli in the early hours of the morning. I mean, where’s their sense of humour, dammit ? As a result you have to either lump everything up to the top of the tiers in the theatre then put it in the disabled lift and bring it back down, then wheel it right through the theatre and out of the front door. Alternatively you can take it from the art gallery…… and THEN wheel it right through the theatre and out of the front door. Unsure what to do when faced with such a cornucopia of attractive choices we opt for tossing a coin. We lose. There are many good things about the venue, though...the folks here, all volunteers, are extremely friendly and helpful, and the whole place has great atmosphere. There’s also a belting fish & chip shop just down the road and some wicked pubs and bars, plus we’ve been told we’ve virtually sold out, so there plenty of reasons to be cheerful( part three ). There does remain one small stone in the sock – heel of our lives, however…..after tonight’s show we have got the near three – hundred mile, six-and-a-bit- hour haul down to Wimborne in Dorset. What we NEED is a nice, comfortable, flat load out with plenty of helpers. What we’ve GOT is a slow, awkward obstacle course with two keen but inexperienced guys, AND a late –finishing show to boot. But that’s for later…first we have to do the show…and what a show it turns out to be ! The audience are so close and at the same level as the band that they can’t help but connect, and they’re a noisy, enthusiastic lot to start with. It’s a hot, tight, intimate gig, and the lads really get stuck into it. Everything gets a fabulous reaction….the crowd even cheer the slides of the local footage !….and not a single person stays in their seats. The band look like they’re loving this, and everyone else here CERTAINLY is. The place is so small that the roars and cheers at the end are magnified, and just like South Shields, when we play the “ outro “ video insert at the very end of the show they’re extremely vocal in their disappointment. Not for the first time we hear things like “ best band I’ve seen in years “ and “ best show we’ve ever had in here “, and I have to say the show WAS great, but the crew are starting to flag now, and there’s still the prospect of the drive from hell in front of us. The load – out is as slow and gruelling as we’d feared, and it’s a good hour later than our normal finish time that the truck door is finally closed. Rodders and Clive are driving the truck to Wimborne overnight, partly to avoid the road works on the M1, M25, M3, M27 and every other M we go anywhere near, and partly to drop Clive off near Bedford as he’s working with another act tomorrow. They’re brave men, and I salute you, Brothers In Rock ! Arthur, Pug, Lids and me aren’t being QUITE so suicidal; we’re only going as far as Leicester Forest East services and the delights of Day’s Inn. It’s still getting on for three am when we pull up there, though, so we stagger in and crash out almost immediately. We’ve got to be back on the road by ten for another four – hour minimum run. Tomorrow’s going to be SO much fun……

Stockport Plaza Thurs March 11th

2010-03-15T14:23:00.000-07:00

Only one unsavoury incident arose from the room – tripling last night. Allegedly Pug leapt out of bed in the early hours, grabbed his duvet and held it in outstretched arms before shouting “ F**k a duck ! “, and climbing back into bed. He has no recollection of this, of course, but “Lids” and Clive were both awake and can confirm that no sexual congress with aquatic birds took place, so the point of the whole somnambulistic business will remain forever a mystery. It DOES make you wonder what they all get up to in their own homes, though…..We leave the North East behind with mixed feelings this morning, and set off across the Pennines for Stockport, gateway to……another part of Stockport, presumably. We’ve had two bereavements in the camp in the last couple of days, sadly….firstly, we heard that Arthur’s infamous blue van has finally passed on, and secondly, my satnav Doris has expired without warning. The death of Doris is the more immediately problematic, as we haven’t a scooby – doo where we’re going. It’s a sad state of affairs that not SO very long ago you’d set out on tour with a notebook, a calculator, a map and a pocketful of change for the callbox. These days you’re considered to be lagging behind if you don’t carry enough technology to get you to the Moon and back, and even bog-standard mobile phones have on – board GPS and sat nav systems that could direct you out of the middle of the Amazon via the A13 if you wanted. Except mine, that is. I DO have a programme called Co-Pilot which works on the same premise but it uses so much processing power that the battery is sucked dry before you even enter the address you want. Looks like we’ll have to rely on old – fashioned methods of navigation, so we dig out the sextant and telescope. Luckily Clive’s poncy phone has Tom Tom on it, and despite it displaying a marked reluctance to let us enter anything useful like the street name or postcode we’re looking for, we somehow manage to find the venue. I realise immediately that the place I THOUGHT we were coming to isn’t this one….I’ve been telling everyone for the past week about the Plaza being this nice old cinema – cum – theatre that I did a show with Country & Western “ hat act “ Don Williams in some years ago. Well, one look at the outside of the building and I twig that I’ve got my Plazas in a twist. This place is MAHOOSIVE, and is full of beautiful, art – deco features. It’s what was once known as a “ picture palace “ and still has the old Wurlitzer – styled organ that came up through the floor and was used to accompany the films. It’s like a slightly smaller Hammersmith Odeon
( cobblers to all this Labatts / O2 / Live Nation Hammersmith Apollo corporate sponsorship nonsense, by the way….it’s the Hammy O and always will be ). It’s still big though, PROPER big, and a small crowd in here are going to be dotted around like pimples on an elephant’s backside. Let’s hope they’ve sold a few tickets...It’s also a mark of what we’ve gone through on the tour that when we’re told we have to load in the through the front door, roll all the kit the length of the building and then hoik it up onto a 5’ stage we just shrug and get on with it. At the minute we feel like we could probably span Niagara Falls with some gaffa tape and a couple of flight cases if we had to, so this is no big deal. It slows things down but it’s not the buttock - clenchingly stressful process of the early days. We’re getting good at this ! As it turns out there’s quite a decent crowd, although from the stage they seems miles away because of the orchestra pit, and their applause gets a bit lost in the cavernous room. The band are getting good at this, too, though; there’s all the verve and effort of a sold – out show, and Den brings the audience even more onside by talking enthusiastically about the fantastic venue. The band seem so far away because of the stage width that when I take the stool on for the acoustic set I virtually have to have a breather halfway across, but they generate such a good ( and how I hate this word ) vibe that the vast stage and cavernous room don’t seem to matter. Everyone sings along and guess what….at the end of the show we get a standing ovation and the manager asks us back. Now where have we seen THAT before…… ?!

Consett Empire Thurs March 10th

2010-03-11T04:12:00.000-08:00

We’re still in the North East today but moving south west, to Consett. I had some great times around this area back in my college days ( yes, I CAN remember that far back, thankyou ) with a fantastic bunch of lads from the little towns and villages like Rowlands Gill, Whickham and Burnopfield. I’m still in touch with a couple of them ( Hi Chalkie and Simmy ) but as so often happens I haven’t seen the others in absolutely years. I’ve got family living not too far away as well, but it always feels odd coming back here now….so much has happened since those days and I can’t really recognise the young man I was back then. Returning now gives me mixed feelings; this area is where I’m from and it’s in my blood but everything reminds me of an unrecoverable past. It’s also sad to see how the place has changed; I remember when the steelworks here finally closed down and the town virtually died. A lot of new business eventually came in and a kind of recovery took place but the streets are still full of places like Aldi, Lidl, and Booze Buster. It’s got the drab, somehow hopeless air of a lot of towns and cities that have lost their industrial heart. Corby, close to where I live, is exactly the same, another community decimated by steelworks closures and massive job losses. In the full, unforgiving light of adulthood I can see the dirt and desperation that youth once hid from me, and it’s profoundly depressing, like seeing a favourite relative becoming alcoholic or drug – dependent. To my surprise ( and sadness ) I find that I can’t wait to get out of here. There is, however, the small matter of a show to do first, so let’s kick the maudlin reflections and social commentary into touch. We’re playing the Empire today, a quaint little theatre on the main drag, and it’s sold reasonably well. The band were really taken with the South Shields crowd last night and they’re hoping for more of the same….after all, we’re only twenty miles or so south west, but Consett’s a very different place and I’m not so sure. At least there’s a good atmosphere about the theatre and the two local crew, Ash and Dean, are funny, helpful blokes, but it seems like it’s not just me struggling today. Lids is feeling out of sorts and can’t really put his finger on why, and the rest of us are tired and sluggish, so everything happens sloooooooooowly. What we need is an infusion of lard, so off goes Nick to the local chippie and he brings back enough cholesterol to kill an elephant. It’s absolutely gorgeous. However, trouble looms. Clive has munched his way through the largest kebab this side of Istanbul, and is starting to do “ that
walk “ which presages all things intestinal. I suddenly remember his Incredible Exploding Arse, and realise I have to sit next to this bubbling cauldron of noxious gasses for the next two hours. For those of you with more tender sensibilities I shall draw something of a veil over what happened next; suffice to say it started with a toilet cubicle right next to our side of the stage and ended with a resuscitation team being called out and large fans being needed to dispel a cloud of poisonous fumes. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to do a show with an oxygen mask on, but it’s all part of life’s rich pageant, I suppose. The boy DOES need medical assistance, and soon…. As I mentioned earlier I was a bit unsure about tonight, and it turns out to be one of the oddest shows on the tour. It’s a decent – sized crowd but the raucous abandon of the South Shields mob is conspicuous by it’s absence here. Everything is applauded but in a polite, almost reserved way. The jokes get chuckles but not belly – laughs and the best – received numbers are the ballads and acoustic tunes. It’s hard work, to be honest, but the band learned their lesson on the South Coast and there’s no chance of their “ doing a Weymouth “ again. Every show they play is full tilt now, and they don’t let a subdued reaction get to them. The singalong to I’m A Believer is a bit half - hearted, truth be told, and it’s just quiet enough to let us hear one lone voice somewhere near the back, bellowing atonally at the absolute top of his lungs to a melody that only he hears in his head. Priceless. The second half seems to liven the audience up a bit, though, and while we don’t get the whole house standing for Mony Mony there’s till a good number of folks bopping away. However, when the band take their bow at the end of the set you’d have though The Beatles had just played, so sustained was the cheering, and when we run our end of set audio insert you can actually hear the audience groaning in disappointment ! It’s funny old game sometimes, this…..Back at the hotel we discover that due to two of the rooms being flooded the crew have to actually triple up. Fortunately we’ve seen each other hungover, tired, pissed, throwing up and throwing strops too many times to be fazed by the sight of one of us lurching out of the shower with undercarriage lowered, so no-one minds too much. It’s all a bit uncivilized but that’s the nature of the beast sometimes. As Rodders says, and as has become the tour motto, “ It is what it is “. Deep, huh ? Oh yes, it’s all here in the tour blog…comedy, pathos and philosophy, all in bite – sized chunks !

South Shields Customs House Tues March 9th

2010-03-10T01:43:00.000-08:00

We’re back in my native North East today, although I must admit that when I lived in Newcastle South Shields was pretty much Indian country. Cheryl Cole and Joe McElderry may have put it back on the map recently, but it’s certainly not the most lively place; when we arrived last night the town was all but deserted, although we’re reliably informed at the hotel that the place is jumping at the weekends. On a Monday night in March, though, the streets are empty and almost everything’s shut. It’s depressing, to be honest, and the opulent surroundings of the Travelodge don’t exactly do much to lift the spirits. We spent our “ day off “ yesterday, including the drivetime up here, chasing payment, advancing shows and just doing general housekeeping, so you don’t actually get much of a rest, and before we know it, showday’s here again. At least we’re close by the gig, and so we can have a late start and catch up on some much – needed sleep, plus there’s the exotic promise of an Olympic Breakfast at the Little Chef just next door. Are you green with envy, Faithful Blogreader ? South Shields ? Travelodges ? The Little Chef ? What wouldn’t you give to swap places with us and live this wild, exotic rock ‘n’ roll life ? Form an orderly queue, now…..Cut to the Customs House, tonight’s venue, a theatre that used to be….errr….a customs house ( see what they did there ? ) It’s another perfect venue for us and, most importantly, it gives me the chance to talk about Newcastle United with the local crew guys. Apart from Arthur and Steve “ Lids” Liddard, Spurs and Arsenal supporters respectively, this isn’t really a footie – loving crew, so my almost pathological need to discuss whether or not Mike Williamson was a good buy for the club or if Andy Carroll really is the next Alan Shearer meets with a mixture of bemused looks and yawns. Philistines. The band are doing the long haul up from Hoddesdon today, but it seems that after our previous request for something different at soundcheck they’ve put the travelling time to good use and treat us to a blast of Status Quo’s Down Down. We decide we’re going to get them to rehearse ALL our favourite 70’s rock classics while they’re travelling from now on; it’ll help the motorway miles fly by and give us a little lift every day into the bargain. Sweet deal ! soundcheck over, I’m standing outside the gig about ten minutes before the doors are due to open there’s literally no-one to be seen. The venue’s on a little stretch of quay by itself, so there’s no passing traffic or pedestrians, and, not being aware of advance ticket sales, I start to get a tad nervous. One couple turn up, then another, but it’s not looking promising, but then suddenly cars, taxis and even minibuses start arriving as if they were in convoy and in no time at all the place is heaving. Weird. They’re a boisterous lot too….they even sing along to the Ready Steady Go theme on the intro video, and they’re making noise WAY out of proportion to how many of them there are. There’s a big old St James’ Park – style cheer when the band hit the stage and one or two folks are dancing in their seats within a couple of numbers. There’s also one guy in the front row who, if he wasn’t so follically challenged, would be doing what can only be described as headbanging….to The Beatles, mind you….and when Jamie announces four songs in to the set that they’re going to slow the tempo down, the audience actually moan in protest ! This mob are here to par-TAY, but even so the quieter numbers like Sound Of Silence are still rapturously received. They’re laughing at all the jokes and even joining in with the banter, and the first half seems to fly by in about twenty minutes. That’s about as good as it gets for me, though; after the break I do something wrong with the computer and start to have problems with the slides. I also forgot to do a couple of things at the interval, and this takes the edge off the enjoyment of the show for me. I really hate it when everything’s not just right, and I ESPECIALLY hate it if I think I’ve been sloppy. I know it may seem churlish to just focus on my own issues when it’s been a great night but if you’re professional and have certain standards then I believe you SHOULD be bothered if you fall below them. I also know that in the grand scheme of things the visuals aren’t the most important part of the show, but they’re the part I’m most involved with and so I’m not happy. There’s a bit of dissatisfaction elsewhere in the ranks, too, as it turns out. Rodders has had something of a ‘mare with the house lighting today and ended up having to use two lighting desks
( fine for an octopus, not so easy for just two hands ) so he was frustrated that he couldn’t do his normal show, and Steve felt his playing just didn’t click tonight. It sounded fine as ever, but at the end of his solo on Pretty Woman he turned to my side of the stage and mouthed “ Rubbish !” at me. It wasn’t, of course…. he’s too good a player for that….but I know how he feels. All in all, though, tonight’s been a success, and the band decide to have a celebratory pint, so they head over the road to a pub called The Steamboat or The Waterfront or The Skipper’s Nostrils or something. It had an aquatic flavour to it anyway, but what I DO know is that it was advertising eight guest real ales and forty malt whiskies. We won’t be seeing the chaps for a while, then….After a speedy load – out the crew decide to have our own celebration at the Golden Arches ( oh, the, glitz, the glamour, the glory…..) but there’s the obligatory sting in the tail for us. Despite a sign proclaiming the drive – through to be open twenty - four hours and all the lights inside blazing like Blackpool illuminations, it’s totally, thoroughly and resolutely shut. We’re resigned to the prospect of a warmed-through Ginster’s pasty at the garage by the hotel, but even there we’re denied. It’s night service only and the dead – eyed drone inside blatantly lies to us that the microwave’s out of order just so he doesn’t have to shift his fat arse off his seat and shuffle the few feet over to it and do the backbreaking task of putting in a pie and pressing a button. OK, so he’s got a shitty job and I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than have to do it, but I still hate him and wish the fleas of a thousand camels to infest his armpits. We make do with a bag of crisps and some chocolate from the vending machine in the hotel. Still jealous ?! For some reason I go to the wrong room and try to open the door with my key. Realising my mistake Arthur and I hurry away down the corridor to the right room. Behind us, the door I’d tried to unlock opens, and Clive pops his head out. “Ah, are you the two Vietnamese strippers I ordered ? You’re a little heavier than I expected….”

Loughborough Town Hall Sun March 7th

2010-03-08T11:12:00.001-08:00

Another shortish hop today; just a couple of hours down the motorway to Loughborough, and we’re a bit early, which is a good opportunity to grab some nosebag before we start the load – in. Some of us have been here before with Peter Green Splinter Group, and, like Scunthorpe and Wakefield it’s the perfect venue for us. The house tech guys, Kevin and Andy, are well on the case, and it’s another one of those days where the build happens really quickly, giving us yet more time to have one of Doctor Tony’s DIY Surgeries. Today the patient is an elderly bass drum case who has lost a wheel and is finding it hard to get about, so the recommended treatment is a total wheel replacement operation. The procedure was a complete success and the case was moving freely by the end of the day. The next scheduled patient is the laptop I’m doing all this on, which badly needs a crapectomy. The wear and tear of going in an out of my tour bag every day plus the unfortunate spilling of half a bag of Sherbet Dip-Dab onto the keyboard has created a great deal of gunky residue, and the patient has been intermittently absent from work over the past week. We’ll probably carry out the operation at the South Shields surgery in a day or two. Soundcheck is quite interesting today; Phil often warms up with snippets of classic rock riffs, and today’s guest tune is Status Quo’s Roll Over Lay Down, which the rest of the lads join in on. We’re happily nodding along when suddenly we see Arthur and Rodders at the front of house positions doing the “ Ace “, that wonderfully pointless 70’s rock “ dance “ that involved you hooking your thumbs in your belt and dipping first one shoulder down and then the other. Seeing these two going for it effectively ends the song as everyone cracks up, but we decide that to make soundchecks more interesting from now on we’re going to insist that the band play a 70’s rock classic every day ! The advance sales for tonight’s show hadn’t been all that clever a while a back, but they must have had a surge lately as the foyer’s heaving when I pop out to check on the guest list. To our delight we discover there’s a minibus full of people who saw us in Derby and enjoyed it so much they decided to come again ..THIS is what we want !!! The place is filling up rapidly and they’re obviously here for a good time as they’re even cheering the curtains. When the band finally come onstage we realise we’ve got probably the most noisy audience of the tour so far, and the atmosphere’s great. All the banter is well received whilst up at the back a whole gaggle of women, some of them a little over – refreshed, it must be said, are leaping around the sound and lighting desks with wild abandon. They’re bloody loud, too…..when Den gets everyone to sing the chorus of Daydream Believer we can hear one of them above everyone else, her stentorian tones sacrificing any pretence at melody on the altar of sheer volume. They sound more like a rock crowd, and it’s wonderful. This is what it’s all about, what all the graft and expense is for. We have a great show here; we know it and it seems that the audiences know it too. On nights like this you feel unstoppable ( are you watching, Rock Gods ?! ) and you just don’t want it to end, but as ever, it does, and the band scoot off for a swift drink after the show while we start another speedy load out. We’re losing Tomps tonight as he’s heading back home with the band to go on another job, but he’ll be back after the Great Trek ( Pocklington to Wimborne ). I’ll miss his calm presence and understated humour next to me at Missile Command, but on tonight’s evidence I WON’T miss his Subway – fuelled flatulence, which created a stench so vile it singed the hairs on my nostrils and melted my smoke machine controller. Bad boy. Another fun hotel tonight, which is ALSO having a refurbishment….we think
“ refurbishment “ is actually a hotel trade euphemism for “ nothing actually works and we don’t give a stuff because you’re leaving in the morning and I’ll have a new boss soon
anyway “. The problem with this one is that the shower ( and I use the term loosely ) doesn’t seem to be connected to the tap properly….in fact, at all. As such when Arthur switches it on and turns his back for a minute to have a shave in the washbasin, he’s soon aware that he’s paddling ankle deep in the water that’s flowing freely from everywhere except the shower head. Add to this the fact that there’s no service at all for T Mobile anywhere inside or even near the hotel, and you may get an inkling that we weren’t best pleased at checkout today, especially when the receptionist told Arthur he should have phoned for maintenance and they’d have come “ immediately “ to fix the shower, and that they were “ unaware “ of any problem with the shower. Judging by the pattern of water stains around the bath it’s been that way for about eighteen years, so call us cynical if you must, but such a speedy act of resolution by a spanner – wielding workman sounds about as likely as me replacing David Beckham as the new lunchbox of Armani undercrackers. Apparently they were also “ unaware “ of any issues with T Mobile. I asked if they seriously expected me to believe that any travelling businessman or woman on T Mobile who had to make that vital call or send that deal – clinching e-mail and found themselves standing on wardrobes and leaning out of windows to try and get even one bar would just shrug and say “ Oh well, never mind….I’ll do it tomorrow “ . Our friendly receptionist said that she thought that was TOTALLY likely, and that was why she’d never had anyone mention it to her before. I actually think the reason that no-one had mentioned anything to her was more due to the fact that she had a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle and was genuinely scary, but perhaps that’s just me being a little uncharitable……

Bridlington Spa Hall Sat March 6th

2010-03-08T04:26:00.000-08:00

Yet another out – of – season coastal town today, this one with added road closures and biting winds which blast straight from the Siberian steppes and whistle round your gusset. If it’s Saturday it must be Bridlington, and I must admit that even on this bitingly cold March day the wide strand of golden beach looks beautiful under a clear azure sky. Even the gently breaking waves of the North Sea look inviting, the sun sparkling off them as they ripple across the sand, and for about a nanosecond a primal, instinctive return to childhood and the urge to paddle in the shallows almost galvanizes my legs into action. Fortunately my adult brain kicks in and so I narrowly avoid losing my feet to the freezing ocean. The Spa Hall has had a major spruce – up since the last time I was here way back in the early 80’s, and it’s looking VERY posh these days. Tonight’s show is going to be a bit of a weird one; the main hall actually seats about 1,800 to 2,000 people in it’s normal theatre configuration, and that’s WAY too big for us, but what they do to make the place more intimate is set it out in what’s known as cabaret style, with loads of tables for six ranged around a dancefloor in front of the stage. It looks like an odd cross between the theatre shows we’ve been doing, a regular Overtures “ party “ gig and a bingo night, but the pre-sales figures are quite impressive and thus validate the whole exercise. We don’t really know what to expect, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing….sometimes a little unpredictability can be quite exciting. What is DEFINITELY exciting is the prospect of freshly – cooked fish and chips ( always a bonus at a seaside gig ), and I have to say it doesn’t disappoint…they fry it differently up here, in things like beef dripping, and although it’s not exactly Tesco’s “ Healthy Options “ range it tastes absolutely fantastic, giving you that lovely thick coating of lard on the roof of your mouth….unbeatable ! We draw the line at sticks of rock, though….got to make SOME kind of concession to dietary restraint. For all that the venue is a big old gaff, the stage is actually quite small, and the wing space is almost non-existent, so Tomps and I end up rammed against the wall and sitting on a trapdoor cover. As neither of us are exactly lightweights, there’s a certain degree of trepidation as we lower ourselves into position; there’s a six – foot drop right under us and we can actually feel the boards bending. Tomps is also completely cut off from the stage AGAIN by side drapes, and all I can see is a small triangle of Steve’s drumkit and a tiny bit of one screen. Not really what you need when you’re supposed to be doing all the projection stuff and firing the pyrotechnics….we’re going to have to rely totally on the lads at front of house telling us if it’s safe or not. Ah well, adopt, adapt and improve……As the crowd start come in it’s clear that this is going to be VERY different to anything else we’ve come across on the tour yet…..as far as these folks are concerned they’re just out for a Saturday night party, and, rather brilliantly, loads of them have come in 60’s kit, but we don’t really think they’re going to be ready for some of the longer bits of dialogue that we’ve been doing on the tour, so it’s decided to keep the set exactly as it is but to bin some of the chat and jokes. There’s a bit of a disagreement within the ranks about this at first, but good sense prevails and the new streamlined version is what we go with. As it happens, it’s a perfect call…..we have people up and dancing almost from the first number, so keeping everything tighter and snappier helps the set move along at a cracking rate. We’re actually surprised how well the slower numbers are received, but as we get towards the end of the set and the “ Power Portion “ songs, the floor’s completely full. Under normal circumstances the band would play on until these folks are just greasy spots on the dancefloor, but we stick to the normal set tonight and leave them after just the encore. It’s been an odd, really good show, with only one potential bowel – loosening moment, when Jamie hadn’t stepped back from the pyro firing pot lying almost at his feet. To have hit the “ fire “ button at that point would have been to deliver a charge of hot sparkly stuff right up his bugle, so I back off, but just at the right moment he skips backwards and I have just enough room to fire. As such he only suffers first degree burns and mild hairloss, which is fair enough, really. We shouldn’t be surprised by now at the alacrity with which venue managers come bounding up to us after a show wanting to re-book, but the chap here is almost hopping from foot to foot in excitement. We sniff haughtily and tell him our people will speak to his people ( it’s not the done thing to appear too keen ! ) before heading off back to our hotel in North Ferriby. I’d be most remiss if I didn’t at least give a mention to this bastion of 70’s tastelessness and inefficiency, by the way. The brown, beige and cream décor, the showers that produce a spray so fine you have to run around the bath to get wet ( and that’s assuming you can get them to go hot in the first place ) and the friendly and helpful staff….all three of them, to cover reception, bar, kitchen and, for all we know, cleaning duties as well….it’s hard to know where to start eulogising. Apparently it’s going under new management tomorrow, but under a bulldozer would probably be more appropriate. When we checked in we were told their “ systems were running slow “ , and they weren’t joking…they were SO glacial in tempo I half – expected to see the receptionist using an abacus and quill pen, but eventually we got our room keys ( hewn from finest flint and daubed with interesting paintings of buffalo and woolly mammoths ). We were told the rooms were a
little “ tired “; well, ours was so knackered it must have just run the London Marathon, but it’s a place to lay a weary head, and that’s all that matters…plus it’s cheap. We wish them good luck with the re-fit and re-brand, though we couldn’t help but think that “ Maison Smeggy “ was an ill-advised choice of new name…..

Scunthorpe Plowright Theatre Fri March 5th

2010-03-06T02:34:00.001-08:00

It’s a gratifyingly short run to Sunny Scunny today, so after we’ve had a quick mooch around the sights of the town ( VERY quick, actually ) and a bite to eat we get stuck in to the load – in. The Plowright is a neat, modern theatre with good facilities, and although it’s quite small it has great access and plenty of storage space, not to mention a very capable and helpful crew, so to our surprise and pleasure we’re pretty much set up and ready to soundcheck by 2.30pm, which must be some sort of record. There’s no time for loafing, though, as there’s always something needs a bit of TLC or even impact therapy to get it working again, and this is the perfect time to catch up on this stuff. Arthur and I also have to deal with a thorny logistical issue; it’s become clear that Ol’ Slowcoach, the truck, is going to take about a week to make the near 300 mile trek from Pocklington to Wimborne, and the minibus won’t do much better, so we’re having to look at the possible option of getting the truck and band driven to Dorset overnight. This will involve a tour bus being hired in and a relief driver found for the truck, all of which will cost money…and that’s also assuming we can persuade someone to do it for us, so we get on the phones and start calling in favours. Just to make our day go even smoother we find when the band start soundchecking that three of our PA system “ tweeters “ may have blown, so Pug and Arthur get the screwdrivers out and start disembowelling the speaker cabinets. Luckily it just turns out to be loose capacitors
( whatever THEY may be ) and a swift application of the soldering iron has everything ticking along again. We rarely have the time to even run tests on problems like this so it’s a major relief that it’s something the guys can fix quickly, and not for the first time we appreciate the luck that’s brought us so far with no real major technical issues to speak of. We can’t really carry too many spares on the road so if something went VERY badly wrong we’d find ourselves having to explore other avenues, like theft or prayer. For today at least, though, we’re still in the game. At soundcheck the band decide that they’re going to replace Do You Love Me with On The Beach as the question they’re asked the most by the people they meet after the show is “ Why is there no Cliff in there ? “ It’s a measure of how well we’ve nailed this whole touring lark that this change is met with an accepting nod rather than the abject panic we felt about the changes which were forced on us in the first couple of weeks. I also feel I’ve got my part of the show completely under control now. With the one – off gigs we did in the past there was no continuity and no chance to familiarise yourself with the thing, and as such I had to have the comfort blanket of a set list plus a full numbered index of all the slides and video inserts we were using, and these had to be spread out in order around my control position, properly illuminated and so on. If they were out of my sight even for a second I’d have a total cow, yet here I am running with a hand – written set list complete with doodlings and crossings - out whilst happily moving slides around during the show to give them more impact. It just goes to show what a bit of routine and repetition can do ! The lads have made another small change to tonight’s show, and it’s one Arthur and I have felt has needed making for quite a while. When they do the “ Mods & Rockers “ gag the main build – up is between Den and Steve, but Chris has been delivering the punchline, As he’s standing at the back and to one side the sudden shift in visual and vocal emphasis seems to dissipate it’s effectiveness, and we’ve felt the dialogue should stay completely with Den and Steve. I found out earlier that Chris DIDN’T forget the punchline last night, they’d just been talking about changing it beforehand and there’d been some confusion as to whether it was going to happen that night or not, hence the pregnant pause. There’s no such uncertainty tonight and the whole thing works 100% , getting big laughs from the crowd. I’ve been asked by a couple of my more cynical acquaintances if I don’t think the between – song banter and little comedy moments are just too “ cabaret “, but my answer to them has always been “ Up your nose with a rubber
hose, matey “ followed by a swift crossing – off from my Christmas card list. The answer is no, it’s not cabaret at all…..it MAY be a bit corny here and there but if you look at the bands of the Sixties many of them incorporated some element of comedy into their acts; don’t forget they were still classed as being part of that catch – all category “ light entertainment “ so they were just maintaining the showbiz traditions of the day, and I think that’s where we’re coming from, with the emphasis on the word “ entertainment “. Another issue these nay-sayers raised was the fact that the verbal aspect of the show is quite tightly scripted and pretty much the same each night, and my response to THAT is “ Of course it bloody well is ! We’re doing a two – month tour, for Flipper’s sake, are the band expected to come up with different witty banter and repartee every single
night ?” The Barron Knights have been doing the same set with exactly the same jokes for nigh on fifty years, and even the top comedians like Connolly, Evans and McIntyre work to a script….they don’t make the whole thing up as they’re standing there onstage every time ! They key is to keep it sounding fresh, and the lads are doing absolutely fine with this. It REALLY gets up the back of my goat’s nose when people are negative about something so forehead – slappingly obvious. Anyway, rant over….back to the show, which easily makes it a hat – trick of belters after Coventry and Wakefield. This is a very vocal audience who need no second bidding to sing lustily along at every opportunity, and the inclusion of On The Beach at the end of the second set proves an inspired decision. I’m also really pleased to see our Superfan Marilyn bang in the front bopping around with her chic white and pink tour T – shirt on….the girl’s a trouper, and no mistake ! The only odd thing about the theatre is that the bar is tiny and actually in the auditorium, so the band have to move with the speed of many antelope to get out there after the show before the ushers have cleared the building completely. One chap sidles up to Arthur and tells him that two of the photographs we used in the “ your town in the 1960’s “ section behind Handbags & Gladrags weren’t, in fact, of Scunthorpe. We apologise and tell him that everywhere looked the same back in the Sixties when it was all in black and white. Pedant. Actually ( and I digress unashamedly here ) that reminds me of the time my youngest daughter Sarah, who was about six at the time, was watching an old monochrome programme on TV. It was probably from the Sixties, actually, as it had modern-ish cars and the fashions were way past crinolines and top hats, and she kept looking from me to the screen, the screen to me. Eventually she furrowed her brow and asked “ Daddy, when you were a little boy, were you in colour ? “ Genius ! Back at the Plowright Theatre we’re getting the place cleared in very good time, and set off for the hotel. We’re driving about thirty miles north tonight, to North Ferriby, and we will be staying in this hotel for two nights as it’s well placed for both Scunthorpe and tomorrow’s show in Bridlington, plus it sets us right on the M62 for Sunday’s drive down to Loughborough. We drive over the Humber Bridge for the first time, which is the Largest In Europe With a Bendy Bit at One End or something, trying to keep our eyes on the road and NOT on the terrifying quarter – mile drop to certain, horrible death in the icy waters of the river ( I don’t like big bridges….did you pick up on that anywhere ? ). What IS good is that they only charge the measly ( though somewhat odd ) amount of £ 2.70 to use the bridge. Why, then, do you need a mortgage to cross a similar structure just to get into Wales…and then NOT pay anything to cross back out ? I know I mentioned this before in a previous blog but so far neither the First Minister of Wales nor the head of the Department Of Transport, both of whom tell me they religiously read this, have had the courtesy to reply. Does anyone out there know the answer to this burning, all – consuming question ? Replies on an e-mail please……

Wakefield Theatre Royal, Thurs March 4th

2010-03-05T01:22:00.000-08:00

There are some weary faces this morning as we leave the Coventry Hill hotel, but, pleasingly, no sense of anticlimax after yesterday. Instead there's just a workmanlike "let's get on with it " vibe as we pile into the vehicles and head onto the M1 bound for Wakefield. Arthur and I ride in the truck today as we have to use the time to plan another project for Transmedia, and I'm ashamed to say that shortly after we'd finished, my tiredness overcame me and the next thing I knew we were sixty miles north and pulling off the M1. I REALLY need to try and cut that out when I'm driving.....The Theatre Royal is a lovely, ornate little theatre with two balcony levels, very much like the Theatre Royal in Lincoln, which is still one of our favourite gigs. There's a crew of impressively chunky lads waiting to help us load in, and apart from the pain of having to stick the truck in a special park about a quarter of a mile away and walk back on me poor old suffering pins, once again everything flies in and gets built quickly and efficiently. There's only one drawback with the theatre, and that's the orchestra pit which yawns hungrily some ten feet below the front of the stage, filled with nice convenient things to break limbs on should you stumble over the stage lip and take a header. In today's health and safety obsessed society I'm more than a little shocked that there's not even a rope barrier, but I'm even more disappointed when Pug refuses to " accidentally " fall down there and break a leg, thus allowing us to make an enormous insurance claim against the theatre and underwrite the tour. You just can't get the staff these days. Later in the afternoon we find that we have something of a treat on the culinary front today...there's an Italian restaurant right next door to the theatre which does special discount for performers and their crews, so rather than doing the McDonald's Two - Step we get an aromatic bundle of freshly - cooked goodies delivered to the stage door. Once I've got on the other side of my superb chicken risotto the world is a MUCH better place and I'm raring to go again....such little pleasures become your markers or reference points when you're on tour, and you'll remember a place more because of good catering, a nice hotel, a cosy pub or free laundry facilities backstage than because of it's history, culture or architechture. For example, Venice, which is a bit good on the old history, culture and architecture front, really, is forever in my mind as the place where we found that a member of one of my crews had relatives who ran a restaurant on the waterfront, and these lovely people closed up to the public and threw a special July 4th meal for the American band and crew I was touring with. Yes, I KNOW there's the Doge's Palace, the Bridge Of Sighs, St Marco's Square and the Campanile, but there was also pasta carbonara and the finest tiramisu known to man, and guess which one was more important to us at the time ?! There's lots of other good things to commend today's venue, though, one of them being an almost sell - out crowd, and that also helps keep any possible post - Coventry blues away for the band. The balconies tower above you here and the audience is very, very close, so it has all the potential to be a cracking show. This was one of the gigs, like Derby, that had us scratching our heads when we saw the ticket sales in advance. We've never been here before; in fact we've only ever been NEAR here once, and that was quite a while ago, but for some reason we've caught the imagination and, as with Derby, we've got great attendances on our very first visit. It makes things like Llandudno even more puzzling; how can we do numbers like this on our debut appearance somewhere when our numbers actually went DOWN on a return visit somewhere else ? It's not as though we went down badly last time in North Wales...quite the contrary in fact...but it just doesn't add up, and trying to explain it to the band isn't easy as we don't know the answers ourselves. We can really only put it down to the efforts of the theatres themselves; some of the smaller places like this know their clientele well and have databases which they can target with e-flyers and the like, and some of them do a lot of work with postering and the local press. Interestingly one of my guests tonight tells me she visits the theatre quite regularly and she hadn't known the show was on until I called, but they've clearly been doing SOMETHING right here. It's a great turnout for a cold March Thursday, and once again we get that cheer as the band walk on in darkness during the opening video footage. The boys are getting good at working the big stages now, but they are absolutely irresistible in these more intimate venues. They're enjoying it too, and there's no doubt that this communicates itself to the crowd.There are a couple of odd moments tonight such as when Chris doesn't come in with his normal line on the chat before I'm A Boy, and Steve's " comedy stool " on the medley section actually comes to bits as he flings it back to Nick, but this is another one of those nights when nothing can stop us. We've even managed to overcome the shock of having to paint our lovingly - crafted Golden Box Of Wonderment, so that it's now the Black Box Of Bafflement, but it seems to have worked, as Phil gets a big laugh with the " Hank gag " tonight. It's been another corker of a show and I'm ridiculously pleased about that fact that my guests ( Hi David and Sheena !) both loved it. I AM proud of all this and what we're doing with it....we're probably just a bit too close to it at the minute to be totally objective. Just as we leave we hear that tomorrow's show in Scunthorpe is also on the verge of sellout, so it's a happy bunch of Booties that tumble out into the cold Yorkshire air. Wonder what those Rock Gods are thinking.....

Coventry Belgrade Theatre, Wed March 3rd

2010-03-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

The portents weren’t good this morning. We filtered into breakfast to face what looked like the charred remains of something found under Jeffrey Dahmer’s floorboards, although we were reassured it was “ finest British pork bacon and sausage “. I’d hate to see what their economy pork bacon and sausage look like…… Having manfully chewed our way through this train smash on a plate we left Llandudno behind, only to run straight into stationary traffic on the A55 as soon as we got out of town. A serious crash at Colwyn Bay had closed the road, so before we’d even LEFT we knew we were going to be late arriving at Coventry. Not good. The truck can best be described as a kind of large, wheeled lead weight, with all the aerodynamic properties of a blancmange, and despite it’s professed top speed being a thrilling 56mph the harsh reality is that we’re only averaging fifty, which makes each journey seem as long as the gestation period of an elephant, or the average Party Political Broadcast. As we stoically inch along the road towards the diversion, I look over at the truck in the next lane, and see Rodders leaning forward on the steering wheel, a look of the most mighty pissed – offness writ large upon his face. I deal with the frustration in a more direct way, screaming abuse at the drivers of adjacent cars for no apparent reason, hurling rubbish at traffic police and continually thumping the wheel with both hands as if this will transport the car through the gridlock and out onto the open road. It doesn’t. Bugger. It takes us an hour to get past the poo, and although I can then give the trusty Volkswagen Passat Of Love the old lead boot and make up some time, the truck is going to be at the mercy of the winds, tides, moon and the Road Gods ( who are bastards, by the way, every last one of ‘em ). The only plus factor is that Coventry is another large theatre with plenty of space and great technical facilities, so we know we can make up SOME of the time when we get there. Despite an involuntary detour when I missed the turn for the M6 toll road because I was doing a crossword with Pug, the car pulls up at the venue just after 1pm, and Rodders must have either hoisted the mainsail or fitted rockets to the truck, as HE pulls up only forty minutes after us, which is not too shabby at all. We’re totally locked into this whole “building the show” groove now, and although I possess the technical ability of a hippo, even I am now plugging things in and setting things up with a degree of confidence that would have been unthinkable not so very long ago. OK, so the things I plug in don’t work and the things I set up fall back down, but it’s the thought that counts. The upshot of all this finely-honed teamwork is that even though we got badly held up, we’re still ready to go when the band arrive for soundcheck ( I still haven’t told you about soundchecks yet, have I ? Patience, patience… it’s coming.). We’ve pretty much sold out tonight, and this means that we've achieved our highest - ever gross sales figure for a single show. This is a Really Big Deal for us, so we all congregate in one of the dressing rooms and crack open a bottle of champagne to celebrate ( Sainsbury’s own budget range, of course, and we only get a centimetre each in a plastic beaker…can’t be too profligate, you know ). We’ve also seen a review of the Newport gig, and it was so full of superlatives that the band actually thought I’D written it, so it was almost a literal validation of everything we thought and hoped was happening. These little gee-ups seem to dispel any of yesterday’s lingering malaise, and there’s a real sense of expectation in the camp as showtime approaches. Coventry’s always been special for us; it’s our third time here and we’re back very much as the conquering heroes on this visit. The difference is palpable from the moment the lights go down and there’s a proper roar from the crowd as the shadowy figures of the band take the stage. The sheer volume of the cheers and applause at the end of the first two numbers are proof that there really ARE a lot of people here to see us tonight, and you can see the band giving each other daft grins of pleasure. THIS is what it could be like every night, and you can see them realise it. The whole thing is a shoe – in right from the start, really…..all the lads have to do is just not spectacularly cock up in some way and tonight’s in the bag. Oddly enough it’s not their best performance, although Steve ( or “ Dave “as he is referred to in the Newport review, for some reason ) is on fire; his solo in Pretty Woman gets extended and draws admiring glances from the crew as well as the audience, and he’s having one of those nights where he knows everything he tries will come off. Den’s in his element here too; there’s a lot of off – the – cuff, good natured banter with the crowd and he knows just how to play them. When he and Jamie kick off Sound of Silence the audience actually applaud as if it was their song rather than Paul Simon’s, and the same thing happens when Blowin’ In The Wind opens the second half, but the real clincher is when everyone gets up for Mony Mony and not only are we getting great gales of sound back from the seats, but there are people standing up, dancing and rocking everywhere you look. I must admit, Faithful Blogreader, that I felt a tear come to my eye. This isn’t one of the band’s party shows in their own Hertfordshire backyard, it’s a proper big theatre show in a proper big theatre on a proper big tour, and these people have all paid to come and see US. They’re going, as I believe the phrase has it, totally apeshit too….the cheers are so loud at the end of the last encore that for a moment I’m almost thinking the band will come back on and do another, unscheduled song, but good sense prevails and we finish the show as normal. The lads quickly dry off and run out to the merchandise area to meet and greet the fans, and they’re out there a long, long time. They want to make every moment of this fantastic experience last, and why shouldn’t they ? After the downer of Llandudno we’re all right back on a high again, and they deserve it. Tonight has been a kind of culmination of everything we’ve tried to do on the tour, and we’ve had a little glimpse of what lies behind the curtain….we could be having this reaction in venues like the Belgrade with crowds this size EVERY night in the not too distant future. Thoughts of Lamborghinis, Bahamian holiday homes and private jets flit through my mind, right up until the moment a flight case runs over my toe. Great show, BRILLIANT show, in fact, but it’s over now…...time to pack up and get on to the next one. That’s the nature of the beast, but tonight we think we’re starting to tame that beast a little bit. I smile to myself. How about THAT one then, Rock Gods ? Stick THAT in your corporeal hash - pipes and smoke it ! We’re ready for whatever you can throw at us now……bring it ON !!!!

Llandudno Venue Cymru Tues March 2nd

2010-03-04T00:57:00.000-08:00

We’re by the seaside again today in sunny ( and it actually is !! ) Llandudno. The horrors of Boston are now two days behind us; we had a travel day yesterday so the crew came up early. We’re all battered and bruised from the rigours of that last load – out, and as such don’t mind too much when Pug, Rodders and Steve go out to sink a few jars while we swim in the bracing waters of the bay ( NOTE : one section of the last sentence may not be totally accurate ). Like good little producers Arthur and I stay in the hotel and try and catch up on our admin ( don’t forget that apart from keeping the tour going we’re trying to run our company Transmedia from the road as well ! ). We also resisted the temptation to go to the theatre last night and see Peter Andre play, though we DO take advantage of the theatre’s hospitality and park the truck there overnight. A sobering moment occurred while we were there.....as Arthur and I locked up the truck and left the backstage area to head back to the hotel we passed a big group of young women near the stage door clutching their Team Peter photos and scarves, hungry for a glimpse of their hero or those who merely exist in his orbit. They eagerly clocked us to see if we were anything to do with His Andreness and thus worth being nice to, so we straightened the shoulders, sucked in the belly and tried to disguise the limp as we approached, but they were obviously clearly pretty astute and dismissed us as two harmless old duffers with a single glance. It hurts, oh how it hurts……We’ve played the Venue Cymru before, and the theatre is fantastic but BIG, probably the biggest venue on the tour; we could fit the whole of Market Drayton Festival Centre on the stage here and still have room for a game of five – a – side. As I’ve said before, these “proper “ theatres are great for the crew, and on a fairly brutal tour like this one you need all the advantages you can get. However, not long after we get there we discover we haven’t sold especially well for tonight. This is always a downer but normally we just get on with it. It’s been a long drive up here for the band today, though, and when they hear about the ticket sales they’re a bit negative, which is not like them. As we keep saying, the whole point of the tour is to get the name out there and to consolidate in those areas where we’ve already done well, so we just have to make sure we send everyone who comes to see us away with a real wish to see us again. It doesn’t matter whether there are ten people or ten thousand out there; we just have to give them the best show we can every time. It’s hard work after that, though….the day seems full of little niggles; and everyone’s tired and snappy. A big part of it, I think, is that we know we’ve got a long trek ahead of us tomorrow before we play what is potentially the most successful ( and thus pressurised ) show on the tour, in Coventry, and the prospect of that long trip isn’t exactly filling us with joy. After working for so many years in the music business I’ve heard the “ why are we doing this show ? “ argument a bazillion times, and occasionally it’s justified, but at our stage of development with the Booties we’re still knocking on the door marked “ Breakthrough “, and THAT’S why we’re here. Here’s the weird thing, though…..despite the fact that the band are a bit lacklustre tonight by their own high standards, they still get a standing ovation at the end of the show, reinforcing what I was saying in a previous blog about the best bands being successful by still winning people over even when they’re not playing at their best. No matter how far we’ve travelled or what we’ve gone through, every single night of this tour so far has had the audience on their feet, dancing and singing, and that is really all you can ask. The atmosphere back at the hotel is still a bit subdued after the show, and even the vocal tics and idiosyncrasies of possibly the worst lounge entertainer in the world who is over in the corner cheerfully murdering the pop classics of the past forty years don’t seem to help too much. This is the first time we’ve gone back to a venue and not improved on our previous attendance, and it’s shaken the band’s confidence a bit, I think. With no disrespect to the good people of this very pretty Welsh town, it’s probably better if we just draw a veil over today, and move on. The importance of tomorrow’s show in Coventry is now even greater; the band need that boost again. We, however, just need to sleep, but there’s still work to do, e-mails to write, budgets to recalculate and so on. It wasn’t like this in the recruitment brochure ……..