It’s 6.00PM and I am running on time, amazing ! Just a quick visit home to say “hi” and “bye” to the kids and I’m off to pick up Kat and Sid.
I’m taking the whole kit tonight, plus Kat and Sid, so it could be tight in the Leon, but hey we will give it a go ! Kat and Sid aboard we set the sat-nav for Maidenhead. The fuel light is running low but I think to myself there will be stacks of petrol stations on the way through Maidenhead (how wrong was I ?). Now, I trust sat-nav's most of the time but I’m pretty sure we went way out of the way to get to Maidenhead, it took us over 50 minutes and through an assortment of tiny back roads and villages with no street lighting.
Anyway, about 6 miles from Maidenhead my highly intelligent German tank decides to tell me I have 0 miles to go before I run out of fuel ! Shit ! Quickly we program the sat-nav to take us to closest petrol station, "ah, good its only 1 mile away". So, we go off course a little to top up, only to find its now closed, damn, now we have added another mile on to journey and still no petrol station ! So, I take a chance and say there has gotta be one further along the way, which there is thank god ! Shit it’s on the other side of the dual carriage way and you can’t cut across !
So, taking into account we are now running late and according to the sat-nav only 0.9 of a mile away we give up and leave it till later to worry about. Well, we pull in and give Ben a call to find the place and they duly come out and give us a hand to unpack. Once in there I was quite surprised, it looked like quite a nice venue, good stage and surroundings but god damn it was cold.
I start setting the kit up and the other band turns up, ‘Concept' who we have played with before, a nice bunch of lads who have had a bit of a line-up change. There was also supposed to be another band playing but they pulled out at the last minute. Soundcheck is good and it’s nice to be playing my own kit for once. It then takes around 3 minutes for Ben and Sid to take up the opportunity for Pool and we even got in a game of doubles with me and Kat, as Ben and Sid believed they both needed a handicap ! Well, they certainly both got one apart from Kat's final flurry to knock down 3 balls including the black at the end !
Neil seems to have done well in rounding up the troops, which is great because the venue would be dead otherwise and his friends eagerly await to here the ‘Neck. Whilst waiting for ‘Concept’ to come back to start, me, Kat and Ben decide to go outside to warm up, no really, the venue needs to get some heating. I don’t normally feel the cold either. We get back and it’s getting on for around 9.30, still no show for ‘Concept’ yet, we thought they would have started by now ?
In the meantime something is wrong, very wrong, at first I’m not sure what, I can feel its thickness in the air, it’s atmospheric irritation and anger. And then it hits me, Knuckles is angry, really angry! This has never happened before so I know straight away someone has pissed him off and unfortunately its ‘Concept’. As time goes by they have still not got up and started their set and Neil’s many friends are starting to wonder if we are ever going to play. "Cunts" shouts Nelly, how inconsiderate as well we all agree. Sid's mate then intervenes and goes outside to round ‘Concept’ up and tells them to get a move on.
Just before ten they start to play, thank god, as the wait was completely unnecessary and by this time I was so cold it reminded me of the days when I had to run round a frigging field at school in the middle of winter. Well, I’m pretty sure Neil would have liked to do this write up so I won’t go into too much detail :) ‘Concept’ finish with their new line up and we are up, I think we all play really well apart from a few cold slips here and there, and as usual ‘Depression Is A Young Persons Art Form’ goes down great. I love this song and can’t wait to record it. We got some good feedback from people who have noticed how much tighter we now play as a band, which I guess is just coming with experience and a great ‘Brassneck’ vibe.
So, we pack up and make a move, Ben follows us to that fuel station and we make it without running out of fuel. We then travel back at around 10 miles an hour the whole way, as it is probably some of the worst fog I have ever seen, well except for earlier when Knuckles got angry :)
Mark
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