My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): The Hibbett/Machine/Plimpton Tour - PROLOGUE

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Now we come to one of the MOST GRATE weeks of ROCK I have ever embarked upon: The Hibbett/Machine/Plimpton Tour.

And when I say "tour" I MEAN a tour. Many many times in the past I had been a little profligate in using that word - Voon playing the Princess Charlotte AND The Magazine in Leicester within a fortnight of each other? TOUR! - but this was the actual real thing, four gigs in four days in four different cities, HECK, one of them even in a completely different COUNTRY!

All right, that country was Scotland, but still, IT COUNTS. The idea for doing a tour came about partly through talking in a pub to Mr F A Machine about how GRATE it would be, and partly through a desire to go back and play in Scotland again. I contacted Adam, previously of The Hector Collectors (whose farewell TOUR I had played some months before) and rather than just asking him if he could book us again I thought I'd see if he fancied coming along for the whole week. He said YES, booked us a date in Glasgow, and suddenly we were GO!

Other dates fell into place pretty easily - the marvelous Mr Eddy Bewsher was able to get us the date we wanted in Hull (although, as we shall see later, the booking of this didn't quite go to plan) and I managed to persuade Mr Nick Stockman to book a night for us at The 12 Bar in That London. Getting these dates into the correct order worked out pretty easily, and in the end all we needed was a date in The Midlands.

You'd've thought this would be PEASY, as I lived IN The Midlands for so long, but actually the REVERSE is true. People who run venues in The Midlands KNOW me, and thus know the sort of crowds I tend to pull... and so mysteriously find other events which will get bigger crowds in. Like "just opening the pub", for instance.

We went through various places in Leicester, Derby and Nottingham until eventually finding a promoter in Sheffield who I'd been in correspondence with but who'd not put us on before, and so was willing to give it a go. His foolhardiness was rewarded by the venue closing for "refurbishment" (AMAZING how often that happens when I'm booked to play), but in the end he found a rehearsal studio we could use as a temporary venue, and we were SORTED.

After spending DAYS struggling to work out how on EARTH I was going to get around the country on the trains WITHOUT spending a MILLION QUID I eventually realised that I could cut out a LOT of expense, trouble and money by doing the first bit by PLANE! THUS my great journey started with me feeling VERY pleased with myself at Stansted, hand luggage guitar in hand, waiting for the plane that would get me to Glasgow about SIX HOURS before the train would have.

I waited, and waited, and waited. The plane got later and later, and the Easyjet staff got less and less responsive. "Please sit down and wait announcements" they repeated, robot like, as people got more and more annoyed. This wasn't a tannoy announcement or anything, they just stared straight ahead, THROUGH people stood inches from them, glassy eyed and intoning the mantra of non-responsiveness.

Eventually we got ourselves queued up and slowly began to file along the gangway onto the plane. "How foolish of me to think I'd get there SO early" I MUSED to myself. "I'll only be there FOUR hours ahead of everyone else now!"

It was at that point that people started coming back in the other direction, and we were all herded back. HALF AN HOUR LATER someone told us that there was a crack in the fuselage! More waiting, a BUS trip across the airport, yet more waiting, and FINALLY we were put onto another plane. As we took off I thought "Oh well, at least now we're in the air. Nothing can go wrong now!"

Half an hour later the pilot came over the tannoy. "I've got some bad news", he said. "The landing gear is malfunctioning." PANIC! "Don't worry, we'll be able to land" he added hastily, "But we'll have to go back to Stansted, as we don't have any engineers to fix the problem in Glasgow."

AAAAAAAAAAARGGHH!!!! When we FINALLY got back, YET AGAIN, to Stansted I rang The Wings On My Plane who LEAPT into action trying to find alternate routes to Glasgow for me. Luckily there was another plane available - and this was Easyjet, so there was every chance that by now they'd have run OUT - so after yet MORE waiting around we were in the air again.

Nobody was taking anything for granted, but we finally arrived in Glasgow and I got to my hotel room (CLASSY) about an HOUR after I would have done if I'd taken the train. I sorted myself out, got my bits together, and hopped onto the Glasgow Underground, safe in the knowledge that the tour had already HAD its most bizarre episode.

I was completely wrong - the aeroplane disaster wasn't even the most bizarre thing that would happen that NIGHT!

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