There and back again

The rock & roll life can be somewhat of a roller coaster ride at times. One minute you are riding high, heart beating fiercely, white knuckled as you race with the birds on top of the world and glad to be alive.

The next you are plummeting down towards the puddles of child produced vomit, loose change and pocket bric-a-brac that you lost the last time you screamed this way. Only to find yourself 30 seconds later hurtling back towards the stratosphere with the wind whipping through your hair and looking forward to another heady session of head butting seagulls.

I have experienced the rock & roll equivalent of this twice in one week.

The hurtling downwards experience was as we performed at the Louisiana last Sunday.

On the face of it all went well. The hard Core Punk outfit that had been supporting us had pulled out at the very last minute only to be replaced by the talented songster Julie baker who was a dream to work with and extremely friendly tuboot.

We also had a small but enthusiastic audience and they clearly enjoyed themselves.

However; for me my entire evening was back to front, upside down and yanked through a hedge backwards.

As we hit our opening chords of our first song something went horribly wrong and my bass nearly brought the back wall down. Clearly I have developed a technical fault with my guitar transmitter.

Anyway the sound engineer quickly solved the problem front of house and all was well. Sadly my onstage mix had been shot to hell. I was slowly being lifted off of my feet by a sheer wall of noise being produced mainly from Aaron’s guitar and my vocal in the monitor mix.

Being an old fart I normally wear ear plugs as I am becoming concerned at the long term damage I am doing to my hearing (it’s bad enough being as blind as a bat without adding ‘deaf as post’ to the equation). The trouble is with this level of volume the plugs were simply distorting the sound to an unusable mess and so I had to rip them out.

What I then experienced was the audible equivalent of leaping from a toasty warm bedroom window into the English Channel in January. Shocking.

My head was spinning and within almost no time at all I couldn’t pitch a note to save my life though saving my reputation at the point would have been of more value.

Now you would have thought that after 33 years I would have developed the communication skills to inform the in-house engineer of my dilemma and get him to ‘sort it out’.

Sadly this skill has always eluded me and in melt down situations like this I generally proceed like Bambi caught in the headlights of a forty tonne juggernaught on full throttle.

In the past my guitarists have wised up to my disability quickly and risking me look like a complete incompetent in front of the sound guy told him exactly what I needed on my behalf. This is a responsibility I have been more than happy to hand over to somebody else no matter how ‘retarded’ it may or may not have made me look.

Perhaps it’s time to pass this particular mantle on to the next generation and get my son and guitarist to communicate in that ancient language of ‘technical’ in that dark and mystical way to the shaman of sound and volume while I simply recite the time honoured incantations of “One, two, one, two, testing, testing”.

As it was I had to try and play, sing, pitch and remember all the words whilst my eyeballs were slowly being pushed to the back of my skull.

It was a losing battle and I began to get more and more lost in songs that I have been singing for years. This tragic outcome wasn’t helped by Aaron announcing to the crowd that ‘This is another song that the old boy wanted in the set, watch him mess this one up’. Maybe I need to have a gentle word with him at some point, preferably tooled up with a nice stout piece of two by four. You may not be allowed to smack your children any more for lack of obedience but there is nothing to say that you can’t beat them senseless at the age of 25 for humiliating their old man in front of a laughing audience.

Anyway, the long and the short of it was that as soon as the last chord had been struck I was off that stage as fast as my knackered old knees could carry me. Packing up was a daze and goodness only knows how I managed to drive home at the end of the day.

As I sat crashed in front of my television set with the tinnitus in my ears threatening to explode my head I pondered the premise that I may just be getting a little too old for this lark.

That was the bottom of the roller coaster ride. However; just as surely as you career downwards you normally whip straight back up the other side.
The slope back up came the following Saturday when my mobile phone rang.
“Hi Paul, this is “Gareth Chillcott here”. I instantly snapped to attention. I mean, this guy is rugby royalty.

Now from my blog stats it shows that the large majority of my readership comes from the US and South Korea (clearly you guys like your rock & roll down there) and so you would not have a clue who Gareth Chilcott is.

In rugby terms I wouldn’t say he is the equivalent of David Beckham (Lord no) but probably more of a Wayne Rooney (you’ve heard of him as he plays for Manchester United and it doesn’t matter what part of the planet you come from you ALL know Man United). Anyway, Gareth was a famous and much respected rugby football legend who played for England and who just happens to hail from Bristol and we are all very fond and proud of him.

Anyway to keep himself in his retirement Gareth purchased himself a music venue and puts on some of the best gigs in the South West and here he was phoning me and inviting myself and Aaron to support ‘From the Jam’ (made up of two of the original members of The Jam).

I was a big fan of The Jam in my teenage years and had rushed to get tickets when they had kind of reformed with a new lead singer. Talk about made up…..I get to play with my heroes and all the frustration and negative thinking of just under a week ago melted away.

The roller coaster at this moment has reached the highest point, the view is incredible and air is clear. For now at least I am going to stay there…….roll on the end of April.

“Now that’s entertainment”