Well… I’ve been so busy recently it’s mad. The end of last year, I was quite focussed, working hard on a small number of projects. 2009 started off quietly with a few isolated gigs, but mostly teaching and getting my head down in the studio. April has exploded! I’m suddenly being flooded with gigs, getting called in for sessions, teaching, masterclasses.. the whole shebang.
Which is awesome. In fact, the only problem is that I want to do it all! I can be terribly impractical with myself about such things and take on so much work that I don’t have the time to do anything fun. As Jack Nicholson taught us,’ all work and no play makes Jack (dave) a dull boy’. To put it in slightly more relevant terms ‘if you take on too many gigs, you won’t have enough time to prep any of them properly.’ Unless you are awesome at learning stuff, it can all get a bit tricky and then you end up playing like a bit of a blagger (someone who does things in a half-assed way). Even if you are awesome at learning things, travelling around a lot can make you very tired and if you don’t let your body recharge, your ability to retain information can be severly hampered. As a result, getting as much sleep as possible is well advised. Somehow though, I never seem to manage it…
Tiredness is a funny thing…
So…. On Tuesday night, I played a gig in Telford with the Rick Parfitt Jr. band. It was awesome – we rocked in an explosive fashion and the 2000 odd people there were well into it. I always love playing gigs with Alex Toff on drums – in some songs, I feel like my head is going to explode. I’m sure I play far too hard and I know that I run around and jump about like a mental person… but that’s a big part of the gig. The only time that kind of thing goes wrong is when (for example) I jump off the drum riser, land and crouch down, rocking out. Alex thought that I had fallen off the riser and he couldn’t stop laughing. On account of the fact that we had watched this video, Alex’s inability to play the drums properly (for a good 30 seconds) was kind of understandable. I also decided to run out to the far left of the stage and rock for the ladies that were dancing there. I looked across, moved past the keyboards ran out and ‘click’ pulled the lead out of my pedal board. I arrived on the far side of the stage and didn’t rock as much as I had hoped.
The entire set was great, and the boys all played like legends. We finished the gig, chatted with some people, some of us had a few drinks and we were given many bottles of wine to take home. (I mainly hoovered up Green & Blacks Organic chocolate bars to take back… which the crew then stole from on top of my amp as they were moving out the gear. Bastards. Stealing the stuff that I had stolen. Two wrongs does not make a right. It also means I get no chocolate. Therefore, bad.)
As we left the venue, upon getting the tour bus / van backed up, we found that the back doors wouldn’t open. This was something of a problem, on account of the fact that we have drums, amps, guitars, humans, laptops, wine and no chocolate that we needed to bring with us. A good 20 minutes was wasted messing with keys and trying to will the doors into compliance. A swift kick to the back door by a guitarist (who shall remain nameless) suddenly solved our problem. At times, brute force and pig ignorance really are the best possible options.
To quote Murphy’s Law: ‘If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway….’
The bus is loaded up and we’re all inside. The journey from the venue back to the hotel seems much longer than the previous run. (We’d been to the hotel for dinner, missing Sean Locke’s stand up set so the chaps could see a football match that was, by their own admission, dull as shit and not worth the occular strain of watching. Dave, the football apathetic was not impressed.)
Upon arriving back at our hotel, we parked up the bus, gathered up our personal effects and headed for the front door. And there we stayed for the next 40 minutes or so. You see, even in Wolverhampton, the cradle of civilisation, the 4 stars on a **** hotel are meant to mean something. (other than ‘****’ as a kind way of writing ‘sh*t’, but with more stars and less letters) Arriving back after 2am, having had our time wasted on ‘blowing the bloody doors off’ and sans chocolat, what you really don’t want to happen is to find the front door locked with no night porter in sight.
There also happened to be a gentleman outside the hotel, standing in the doorway, quietly swaying in the fashion of a small, insecure tree. He appeared to be like some sort of zombie half-wit. Congratulations, drunk man, you are so drunk you appear to be the undead of the developmentally disabled. When asked how he had managed to get locked out, his answer was a swirling mess of strange noises, exasperated breathing and a general inability to string words into a coherant sentence. In a strange sort of way, this answer explained perfectly how he had come to be outside. He was a berk.
Toff and I marched off around the building, banging on doors and windows to try and attract the attention of anyone at all. While we were making noise around the back, we heard a loud, empassioned srceam from the front door. This was Owen Parker (the guitarist from the earlier story about van kicking) screaming his head off. Hell, that made me laugh. He is a truly funny man.
We regrouped to debate upon the best course of action. It’s worth noting at this point that it is cold. We have all been sweating profusely, (as a rocking band should when it delivers a large slice of sonic sledgehammering) and so it is not sitting well with any of us as the minutes pass and we get colder. Also, Rodger the special needs tree (I don’t know his name, but I’ve nicknamed him Roger) is sat on a bench and looks like he might be asleep. Admittedly, he looked like he was asleep while he was walking and talking earlier, so I couldn’t be sure.
Shannon (the keyboard legend) and I trapsed off around the building in hopes of finding an alternative route into the hotel. Our inquisitive nature paid off in the form of an open first floor window and very nearby, a ladder leading up onto a little roof, from which the portal of possibility could be reached. Shannon was up it and over the roof like some sort of experienced burgular-ing type. I was impressed. Owen showed up with his video camera just in time to see Shannnon’s little feet disappear into the light and then plummet downward (I suspect the window was a little higher off the ground than expected and suddenly bravery and enthusiasm came very close to crossing over the line into stupidity and injury.)
Shannon opened the front door and we flooded into the hotel, now slightly warmer. This was where it got really strange. There was no one around. A large LCD screen showed the notion ‘dial 0 for assistance’ Toff took on this task, dialling ’0′ and getting no answer. At all. Like he stayed on the phone for a good 5 minutes. It felt a bit like 28 days later. Except now everyone had died of swine flu and the RPJ band were the only survivors. And we’re all men, so it’s goodbye species.
Anyway… I got in behind the reception, eventually managed to loacte our room keys and just as we were about to leave, a spotty faced young herbert in a night porter costume showed up, looking rather shaken. He was in deep ****. We had a good old blast at him and he apologised profusely. I dare say he had been asleep or doing something that young men do too much, particularly since the invention of this here internet. Or perhaps both – he’d had a quick one and then fallen off into the sweetest of snoozes…
Anyhow, we didn;t get into our beds until at least 3am… up again at 8am for breakfast, the drive back to London and a 7 hour rehearsal with another band. Catching up on sleep… doesn’t ever seem to happen for me…
In an unrelated thread… check this out – for fans of the Guy Ritchie movie ‘Snatch’
