Many Happy Returns

Well there you have it - the biggest gap between postings that these hallowed pages have ever seen. Well, these have been busy times. Since last Tuesday I've been working in Balcony Shirts as well as playing 3 shows with Big Al Reed and The Blistering Buicks and appearing at The Boomtown Fair with Ruts D.C. - all of which means that this is the first chance I've had to post anything since The Rebellion Festival. 

Ah yes, The Rebellion Festival. That seems a long time ago now. And in many ways it was a long time ago, or maybe to be more accurate it feels as though it was another time. 5 days in Blackpool, during which I managed, oh I don't know, maybe 20 hours sleep at the most. No wonder I couldn't keep my eyes open several times in the succeeding few days. Still that's alright - sometimes things are too interesting to sleep through aren't they?

So - what happened?

Well some details are necessarily sketchy, while others will remain with me forever. Did I, as a teenage Damned fan, ever think that I'd be in a backstage bar discussing the merits of The Prisoner with Captain Sensible? No, I did not. But this happened, and more besides. In musical terms the two Ruts D.C. shows - one on the 'big' stage in The Empress Ballroom. the other in the cramped confines of the acoustic stage - were both as good as we ever hoped that they would be, while the show with Noel from Menace and Rob from King Kurt was better than any of us could believe! The London Sewage Company show went well, an unscheduled appearance with T.V. Smith reminded me just what a genius the man is, and a song with Bug was great fun even though my guitar chose to go wildly out of tune as soon as I bent a string. It turned out that the top nut had come loose - I spent the next morning buying superglue to repair it... all this muscling onto other people's stages (that's a joke, I was invited!) meant that I played on every day of the festival, as well as working on the Cadiz Music merchandising stall the rest of the time. Maybe it wasn't just lack of sleep that was making me tired... 

I'd attempted to use my Facebook page as a kind of 'live diary' as the festival progressed, but a mixture of bad phone signal in The Winter Gardens and being too bloody busy to remember to do it meant that I didn't manage to update it as often as I'd have liked. And it wasn't all good - I had several nosebleeds (I wasn't doing anything naughty, honest!) and received a frantic phone call from my Dad telling me that my bank had called to say that my credit card had been compromised (it seems that I'd bought several ill-defined items in quick succession while working behind the stall - the very helpful young lady on the phone sorted it out in no time) but nothing could ruin what really was a wonderful festival. But that was then, and this is now. Back to life, back to reality. Same time next year? Let's hope so.