Tulips from Rotterdam

Life on the road can be fun....it can also be flippin hard at times.

I thought I would share with you one of those hard times. I wrote this short article for Bristol Rocks and it is taken from when 'I were a lad' in a band called Amaziah.


The band was called Amaziah. I was 18 years old and it was my first (and last professional band). This was our first big European tour, and we were as arrogant as hell.

We had met a band called Liquid Gold in a café on the Dutch docks. They were currently at no.1 in the UK with a song called “Dance Yourself Dizzy” and were sick of the whole thing. We on the other hand were at the beginning of a two month tour and we believed that we were going to be the biggest thing on the planet (that’s what comes of listening to a manager who talked it rather than putting it on his roses). The Liquid Gold crew wished us well, but you could tell by the look on their faces that they suspected that by the end of this tour we look even more hacked off than they did at the point in time.

Hey, guess what! They were right. Talk about a nightmare tour. And it would seem that the Dutch eat nothing but cheese….our tour bus smelt like the inside of a packet of dried roasted peanuts and the nightmares the cheese induced were terrifying.
Anyway, after several weeks of weird gigs in prisons, tents, army camps and Borstals we were booked to play a gig in Rotterdam.

Now bear in mind that as a band we had three and a half tonnes of kit, with at least one tonne of that being attributed to the keyboard player (that would be his keyboards and not him in case you are wondering). You can imagine our unbridled joy when we arrived at the venue to discover that we were playing on a barge. Not just any barge mind you, no! we were playing on a barge that was four barges deep out into the river that runs through the centre of Rotterdam.

The first barge was owned by a congenial Dutch alcoholic called Klaus who was eager to share his Dutch beer with this scruffy bunch of youths…….at 6:30am in the morning. Now I have sunk a few in my time, in fact I got alcohol poisoning on that particular tour (something that I am neither proud of or endorse) but there was no way that I was going to drink beer at that time of the day. The trouble is, he was very persistent and every time we slipped, fell, stumbled and crashed back over the four barges to get yet another bit of kit from the bus, we were greeted with “You drink beer now please”.

Dave’s keyboards were the peist de la résistance. A Mini Moog…..no problem….a Clavinet…..okay. A Fender Rhodes…dangerous….a Leslie cab….flippin ridiculous and as for a full on rock & roll Hammond organ….well for goodness sake.

Then, that manager I mentioned earlier, well he doubled as our tour manager and sound man, he wanted the full PA. Personally I would have turned the fold back around and let the audience get the music from that. But no, our very own Harvey Goldsmith wanted the full enchilada. Pratt!
It took us the best part of a morning to get everything into the barge without a single bit of kit ending floating down the Nis River, although our manager got pretty close to taking an early bath I can tell you.Setting up that much equipment in a combined space it not easy, but we did it….eventually… and we were just about ready by the time the doors opened.Now, the secret of a good gig, and I mean a REALLY good gig is that you tell people that it’s actually happening. You can see where this is going can’t you.

There we were, four young energetic band members, leading the new wave of British heavy metal. Our small road crew including the manager/sound engineer, our publicist and of course the event organiser and NOBODY else. Nada. Zip, diddle squat. Not a single person turned up! The argument that followed between our Harvey Goldsmith and the organiser was not pretty, especially as the organiser kept on swearing at our boy in Dutch. I don’t think either had checked what the other had been doing, or not doing as it turned out. I kind of think that the organiser had assumed that we would get a crowd by osmosis.

Do you know what really hurt though? In order to save money, we were booked to sleep on the barge after the gig……and it leaked!I completely ruined my day, if that were possible, when the drummer and I slopped of to a late night showing of the Omen and helped by all that cheese, I had nightmares that ensured I would never sleep soundly again.Mind you the keyboard player, for ever the optimist, did a deal with Klaus and exchanged one of our albums for a Dutch Bicycle, which we had to cart around with the gear for the rest of the tour.

The rest of the tour went as smoothly as this fiasco and ended up in my making myself seriously ill when I emptied somebody’s drinks cabinet and as well as the medical bill had to foot the bill for all the booze we had drunk. That just about blew any money I might have made from the tour. No wonder we musicians suffer so much from depression.

As a foot note, our manager did a Reggie Perrin several years later and staged his own disappearance/suicide. They found his clothes, glasses, wallet etc by the Feeder river in Bristol. Made a Crime Watch reproduction and everything. He’d only gone a done a runner, left everybody financially totally in the lurch.What a pratt!

Piece of cheese anyone??