The summer, such that it was, is over and I have put away my golf clubs, niblick and all, and returned to my blog. Apart from anything else, I am self isolating and so it seems a suitable moment to start writing again. I am self isolating because of a gig. It was only my third gig since March.
The first was a solo gig in Fleetwood. I’m big in Fleetwood. I’ll tell you more sometime.
My second gig was at King Georges Hall in my home town of Blackburn. So good they named it once. KGH is quite a venue, one of those magnificent municipal auditoriums every once successful industrial Victorian town has. A huge theatre with other concert halls attached. I once went exploring during the break in a gig and it’s a rabbit warren of smaller and smaller halls, offices, practice areas and corridors. There is one tiny 50 seater theatres I have never known be used. It was at King George’s Hall that I helped see off The Vienna Boy’s Choir, but again, more of that another time.
Upstairs in the main hall I had the full sound rig, lights, dry ice and a sound crew of three plus a film maker. The only thing I didn’t have was an audience.
Any audience.
At all.
I was being filmed playing some original stuff for an internet venture the nature of which I am still a little unclear about. So it wasn’t a public gig, just a video shoot. I did, however, have the best sound I’d ever had in my life. (It has only just occurred to me that my first appearance there was 58 years ago, playing a piece called ‘The Jester’ in the Blackburn Music Festival. My piano teacher, Annie Almond, bafflingly, had entered me in the Excruciatingly Hopeless Pianist section, (Under elevens). There was no audience then either, apart from my Mother who sat there with a fixed and agonised smile for what might have been the longest three minutes of her life.
This gig, the cause of my self- isolating was different. It was an Elvis gig.
More accurately it was a soul gig with an Elvis section at the end. The soul stuff I’m OK with, I’ve been playing it for years but I’ve never been in a ‘tribute’ band before. Maybe Elvis tributes should be a genre of their own, there are without doubt enough of them, certainly up here in the North. In Bury there is an Asian Elvis, charmingly called ‘Patelvis’. (I may have mentioned that before, the trouble with rambling like I do is you are never quite sure which impenetrable thickets you have explored before, I should check really). Anyway, with a tribute band you have to play with a little more precision than I’m used to. Any precision is more than I’m used to, to be honest.
It was the band’s first gig. We had been booked to play a private party three weeks earlier. I was a little anxious about this, given the restrictions placed upon us by the pandemic. I messaged Elvis.
“Should we be doing this”?
“Why”?
“Well, there are 11 of us. Plus sound crew, and the DJ, that’s got to be about 15, how many are actually going to this party, given thirty is the maximum number allowed”?
“I’d not thought about that”
“Colonel Parker would have”
“Maybe best pull it”
“I think so”
The party went ahead, without us in a sleepy Wyre Valley town. The thing about sleepy Wyre Valley towns is, they are easy to wake up. The police were called by at least one irritated resident in his dressing gown. The result, inevitably, was a ten thousand pound fine with the compensation of a slot on the BBC North West news bulletin. So this, a perfectly legal gig in a perfectly legal club was our first. I wasn’t sure how it would go, largely because getting a good sound with so many players and singers was sure to be a nightmare.
I enjoyed it. The sound, expertly mixed and flown by Mrs. Elvis was great. The band was on the money and Elvis turned out to be a very good Elvis indeed, with a great range. And, in an icing on the cake sort of way, it was in Blackpool. A famous northern seaside town twinned, I’m guessing, with Beirut. If you are from the North you probably have at least one memory of Blackpool that still makes you shudder or wince, and probably more than one. No? Oh. Just me then.
It was kind of a small stage so the brass section set up on the floor. The entertainments sec, in the time honoured manner of entertainment secs the world over watched us thoughtfully until we had set up the horns on the floor, the stands, score lights, mics, all the necessary paraphernalia. Once all that was sorted he wiped the froth of his pint from his lips and ambled over. “Can’t set up there, part of the one way system” he said, with what sounded suspiciously like satisfaction. We looked down. He was right of course, the club was being very careful about the pandemic and there were signs everywhere, where you could walk, how you could get served, restrictions you had to observe. Northern clubs are hot on signs, particularly ones that tell you what you can’t do, and the unspeakable consequences that will follow if you dare go and do it. Most clubs are festooned with them. There was a particular surge in the nineties when club secretaries discovered Microsoft Publisher and Hewlett Packard printers. They are everywhere. I’m pretty sure there was one on the wall which said ‘Last sign before the toilets’. We looked at each other, (you quickly learn it is pointless to argue in these situations), and decamped the horns section to a now very crowded stage.
I was reminded of a gig in Liverpool some years earlier. It was a solo gig and a friend of mine, over a game of golf, said he would ‘roadie’ for me. There was enough in the gig to pay for a roadie and I was glad of the company. He entered into the spirit of it, insisting on carrying the gear and watched me wire up the mixer and PA. “Can I do the gaffa tape” he asked, “Roadies always do the gaffa tape, right”? “Well yes”, I said, “But it’s as well to...”. Before I could finish he was off. It was a huge stage and I have a tower PA with a tiny footprint. Even with my piano and mic set up there was enough room left to put on a fairly lavish production of ‘Swan Lake’ if you’d so desired. I stood at the bar with a pint while Bob, my friend proceeded to gaffa tape every wire, lead, plug, pedal and stand into place. You could certainly tell he’d been in construction before becoming a college lecturer. After he’d finished my gear would probably have outlasted the pyramids if I’d left it there. The entertainments sec walked in, narrowed his eyes and went straight up to Bob. “My speaker goes there” he said, gesturing to the PA tower which was as firmly attached to the stage as if Bob had put footings in. Bob looked down. The E.S was carrying a tiny little ghetto blaster arrangement. “Can’t it go next to the PA” he said. “It always goes there” said the E.S with a look that was both amiable and immutable. Bob is a short tempered chap but he held it together rather well I thought, having seen his explosive reaction to an ill-timed slice on the golf course before now. He sighed. “Of course it fucking does”, he muttered, under his breath. A further 20 minutes later Bob joined me for a pint, rather red faced with sticky hands. “That went well”, I said, amused,” you’re an official roadie now”. He glowered. “Wanker” was all he could muster.
Unfortunately, back in Blackpool, in accommodating the club’s very sensible arrangements on keeping people socially distanced due to the current pandemic, the band were now cheek by jowl on a stage intended for far fewer musicians than the 11 that were squeezed on it. One misplaced fill by George the drummer and the bass player’s eye would be out. I had to duck every time the trombone played a low B and Elvis’s dramatic entry to ‘CC Rider’ was accompanied by the clatter of falling music stands, the crash of a knocked cymbal and a very un-Tennessee like “For fook’s sake” from the king himself.
This might have been OK had not one of the band unknowingly had Covid-19. They are a friendly and welcoming bunch so by the final number we all had it. Nearly all, actually. For some reason I didn’t.
My wife did, which is worse.
Far worse.
My wife rarely comes to gigs. She has just the right attitude that any sensible wife has to her husband’s obsession with doing gigs, which is to say a healthy disdain. It's not quite contempt, but it's close. It’s not that she doesn’t understand. Her father was a 70’s musician and stand up comedian, she DJ’d for a large part of her life, and as a dancer in Texas she learnt and knows far more about country music than I ever will. She has also been a sometime music promoter so she knows whereof she speaks and I trust her judgement.
The idea of following me from gig to gig however, sitting in grotty pubs and listening to the same songs week after week and helping carry a piano to the car at 2 am in the rain inexplicably doesn’t seem to appeal to her. Nor does she see the need to check whether there are other women flirting with me at the gigs, which is both touchingly trusting and disappointingly unflattering. In fact I have only seriously ‘pulled’ at a gig once in the last 7 years. Happily it was her.
She loves Elvis though and her curiosity drew her to this particular gig. She brought a friend. By the end of the evening they had both succumbed to the deadly virus like everyone else but me and George the drummer. He’s absurdly young however, particularly in view of how good a drummer he is. I guess he must have the resilience of youth. He does look like Joe 90 though so maybe he has special powers. (He also looks like Buddy Holly so I wouldn’t be getting on an aeroplane any time soon if I were him).
Of course I was to blame. “You gave me this” she complained. “I’m negative” I said, defensively, “I don’t have the virus”. “So”? She argued, with the ineluctable logic of a wife.
So there it was, my first ever tribute gig. And a most enjoyable one too.
From Galway to Graceland, to be with the king.