"A whole lot of Rosie"

They do say that old rockers never die, they just smell like they do. They also say that it is better to burn out than fade away….I’m beginning to think that this might be my destiny.

We have had a fair few gigs crammed into a short space of time, and I am quite frankly ‘knackered’.

It’s been a good year so far, and good offers are arriving frequently. However, as with Friday night, every so often a gig crashes into your consciousness, just to remind the budding Rock God that they should never rise above their station and go and get too big for their boots.

As always, I will refrain from actually naming the venue in question and shall simply call it the ‘Queens Bottom’.

We have played at the venue several times before and have always been met with a warm and enthusiastic audience who invariably refused to let us leave (in the good sense).

Tonight was not going to be quite so enthusiastic and yet they still did not want to let us leave….however, this time the reason was not quite so positive.

The whole tone of the evening met us on arrival and it resulted in one heck of a load in and set up.

A young lady had sadly lost her life in a senseless car accident quite close to the pub a week earlier and friends, family and neighbours all descended on the pub in order to raise cash in her memory.

They were dressed in the loudest and most outrageous costumes they could find…either that or they were bedecked in pyjama’s and dressing gowns. And there were dozen’s and dozen’s and dozen’s of them. Mainly young girls or children and they were all milling around the entrance ways to the pub.

This made getting our 1 ½ tonnes of kit into the building a tad difficult.

Crushing a 7 year old poppet who is dressed as a dayglo Disney princes with the sharp end of 4 x 12 guitar speaker would do nothing to enhance our reputation in the area I can tell you.

It also felt rather churlish to tell this bunch of well meaning enthusiasts to “get the hell out of the way as we are on in half an hour”, and so another route was sought and we found ourselves running the gauntlet of boys on bicycles and outdoor smokers huddled around the entrance way of the kitchens at the other end of the building, who made random comments like “that looks heavy” before collapsing into a fit of smoke induced hacking coughing brought on by the strength of their own hilarity.

One of the oddities of this whole spectacle was observing super charged Renault Clios and such careering around the pub car park driven by teenage mourners sending packs of young dayglo wearing children flying in all directions. There was a very real possibility that this event that had been called to celebrate the life of a woman that had been knocked down by a speeding car was going to end up with somebody getting knocked down…..by a speeding car.

Anyway, against all the odds, nobody was killed or hurt and we got all of our equipment into the building before it was time to kick off.

With that the hoards of brightly coloured revellers, as one departed, presumably in order to get their children to bed. However this did leave the place in the domain of a bunch of already plastered teenagers and young people. It was going to be a long night.

According to my two colleagues we were well received. However, from my short sighted perception we went down like Gareth Gates on an oil rig.

Then, much to my amazement, into this den of alcohol fuelled apathy strolled our church pastor and his wife.

Now you might not think that this is so amazing as it would be only natural for a man of the cloth to want to support members of his flock in their earnest endeavours. And this of course would be very much what he was doing. However, what you need to know is that although our pastor is a good man his taste in music is so….shall we say…twee….that it makes John Denver look like a death metal artiste.

For Dave to come to one of our gigs is, you will have to trust me in this, a sign of his love and commitments for those that he is responsible for…i.e. me and Aaron.

The horror of what was happening though was not lost on me. Dave and Elaine walked in just as we hammering through “Turning Japanese” by the ‘Vapours’, and as they took their seats just in front of the speakers, I was singing the immortal lines “No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women, no fun, no sin, no you know wonder it’s dark”……..oh joy.

Of course that particular song runs straight into “A whole lot of Rosie” by ‘AC/DC’, which without putting too fine a point on it is about a bloke having wild rampant sex with his 19 stone girlfriend.

Now, I am not one who advocates unsuitable lyrics in songs…I am now a parent after all. However, I maintain that at the volume we play you can’t hear the words anyway, and most people like these songs because of the music.

I had a bright idea to maintain my dignity. As the offending words came to their place in the song, I stood back from the microphone.

My son and heir sadly saw what I was doing and was not prepared to let me get away with this particular hypocrisy and stood up to his mic and bellowed out the offending lyrics in his loudest, clearest voice.

Thankfully, Dave’s ears had been so firmly pinned back behind his head by the volume that he didn’t pick any of that up at all.

Bless him, he made it to the end of the first half before retreating to the safety of his own home and some ‘good old ‘US of A’ gospel music from the deep south’.

It has to be said that my own parents haven’t heard me perform in a band since I was 19 years old so this was a point of honour indeed that was not lost on me.

Any roads we made it to the end of the evening, with dignity but very little enthusiasm left intact.

This was when the problem of getting back out of the building reared its drunken head.

The crowd of sozzled youths that crowded around the entrances had got to the point where they firmly believed that they were a) hard, b) funny and c) in the right to do anything they liked, including preventing the poor gits who had been from performing that night leaving.

Aaron however in a stroke of comedic genius draw himself up to his full 6 foot 3 inch height and whilst clutching his enormous flight cased guitar amp, looked straight into the face of the leading tattooed, baseball cap wearing Chav and quoted Douglas Adams at him (that would be from the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy for those not in the know).

“Do you know how much damage I would do to this amp if I simply dropped it on your head”

“Na”

“None what so ever”.

Whether said drunken Chav understood the subtlety of the quote, indeed if he even knew of it’s origins (I sincerely doubt it), either way bowing to a superior intellect or because he truly believed that Aaron would drop a hundred weight of Marshall cap on him he took the better part of valour and got he and his mates out of the way.

We still took out a few back legs and shins with the rest of the gear, but that was their own stupid fault.

You do have to ask yourself why we do this sometimes.

For balance though. Aaron and I under our acoustic duo moniker ‘The Loaders’ performed to an audience so civilised and appreciative on Sunday that we sang the old hymn “When I survey the wondrous cross” in honour of Easter Sunday.

That was just in case you think I have really ditched the entire ‘God Bothering’ and gone instead for a preference for singing about carnal relations with women of a fuller figure.

Of course, the pastor wasn’t there to hear that one was he…typical!