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Wednesday 11th August 04                                                                                                                              

First activity this month after our holidays, was a link up Radio Interview at Radio Merseyside with Stephen Bumfrey at BBC Radio Norfolk to promote Saturdays show at The Princess Theatre, Hunstanton.
Interview was accompanied by our version of Please Please Me.

 

Saturday 14th August 04                                                                                                                                    

Princess Theatre, Hunstanton.

Can't remember the last time we were all in the car going to a show without using a motorway.  But hey!!! this is Norfolk and its flat landscape is so far unblemished by these ugly roads so we sit out the frustration of being stuck behind slow moving "day trippers" and tractors. 
At this point Dirk announced that he couldn't stand The Hollies, and he explained why as "20 Golden Greats" was playing in the car.  This had a traumatic effect on Eddie, who had been a lifelong fan.  When he returned home, he would trash his Hollies collection.  Oh Dirk...  you know not what you do!! 
After six hours including a stop for food at a very nice cafe, we arrived at sunny Hunstanton by the Wash.
Its a fortnight since we've played, but we are a bit late for an extensive sound check, so we have to make do with a few half numbers throwing everything into the lap of the Gods.
Rick plays the first part of the solo of "And I Love Her" in the wrong key, but apart from that the show was pretty much business as usual.  On stage was incredibly hot again - Johnsons are making a fortune out of us this year!
We chatted to some of the audience in the bar after the show and they were very complimentary about the performance.  It's good to get opinions on what we are doing right and wrong.  Something must be right, because the attendance was well up on last year, in fact it was close to a sell out.  Eddie treated us to an extra encoré of "Slow Down", complete with shoulders.

Saturday 21st August 04                                                                                                                                     

The Robin 2, Bilston.

This was only our second visit to the Robin and we were very much looking forward to it cos it's got to be one of the best club gigs around.  The audience are fab, so we wanted to change the show round a bit as we only played there in April.  Only thing to do really was to play last year's show with all the 1963 numbers in.  Of course, being us, we had forgotten to remember to rehearse the songs from last year, so it was a bit of a brush up at the sound check while Ade, Dave and John made a bee-line for the food that the Robin kindly puts on for us.  When the band finally got to the food, as Eddie said, "A Bombay shite-hawk would have left more for us".
The dressing room banter became extremely vulgar before we went on for the first half, with talk of "helmets like boxing gloves" and other such male bonding talk.  We are spending too much time together!
It was a rapturous welcome from the Robin crowd, as we stormed through most of our 1963 set.  Some of it was "seat of our pants" stuff, but generally we made a decent job of remembering the "old" songs.  Turned out, though, that we only played 45 minutes, which was a shock.  We either played 'em too quick or we missed a few tunes out.....   must have been the latter.  By contrast, our second set was a bit longer than we had planned...90 minutes actually.  We threw all sorts in, including Come Together, which we hardly ever play.
All in all, an in spite of the tremendous heat in this place, we all had a great time back at the Robin, and looking forward to Xmas Eve.  Who knows....  we may even do a different set again!!

Sunday 22nd August 04                                                                                                                                      

West Park, Macclesfield.

A Family Fun Day!!.. well it didn't start off as much fun for us trying to get into the park....  it took us over an hour, but of course, once we realised where we should have parked, it was all quite easy.
We were to follow an "It's a Knockout" competition, and we arrived as it was finishing...just in time to shake Keith Chegwin's hand...   superb!  We played a somewhat disjointed set by our current chronological methods, but it was well received considering the audience were about 100 yards away.  This was due to arena in front of us being used for the RAF Falcons parachute display team, who were due to descend on the park straight after our final number.
Nice to see Simon back after his month long sexual extravaganza, we hope he has some tales to tell!

Monday 23rd August 04                                                                                                                                      

Metropole Hotel, NEC, Birmingham.

Ding Dong !!  Corporate "do" tonight for Avon.  Audience of 400 women, presumably the ones who sell your mum all those Xmas presents.  I think we would have been more intimidated by the prospect of this if it were not for our "Chippendales" experience several years ago.
<<screen goes all wobbly as I relate the said incident>>
We were booked (God knows why) to support the Chippendales, or some such "male revue" show, in Morecambe some years back. We didn't know this when we took the booking.... we just sort of 'turned up'' and they told us it was this huge hen party.  Fellas....unless you've done it, you can't begin to imagine what it feels like playing to a crowd like this for the first time.
Anyway....  I digress.....I can't remember, the exact circumstances leading up to encoré that night, who's idea it was, or how we ALL agreed to go through with it, but we ended up singing "Twist & Shout" in our underpants......... we must have looked absolute tw*ts.  I think the women realised that we were taking the piss and we went down a storm.  As I recall, the crowd had felt a bit swindled because they never got to see the "Chippendales" dangly toilet parts, no matter how much they screamed and tugged at their thongs!  Yeah!... it was a real eye opener.  Stag parties are tame by comparison.
Now you might think that by relating this story, I am making a comparison with the Avon ladies tonight....  well I'm not, they behaved impeccably and there was no hint of the rowdy behavior of the Morecambe Ladies all those years ago.....  never mind!!!

Wednesday 25th August 04                                                                                                                               

Metropole Hotel, NEC, Birmingham.

Groundhog Day!  Back for the second bunch of Avon delegates tonight.
We would like to thank all the staff from Avon for being so helpful to us on both nights at the Metropole....you were great!
Pleasant surprise to see our ex-equipment manager, Paul Acky turn up with Dirk.  Didn't get any pictures from these two shows except this one of Acky, but there is this bonus picture of Dirk on holiday......   make up your own caption!!!

Saturday 28th August 04                                                                                                                                    

Whitley Bay Playhouse, Whitley Bay.

Good turn out for this show, with numbers well up on the same fixture last season.  Helpful crew, flowers in the dressing room,...  we felt like 4 Joan Collins's.