York

We’re playing Fibbers; last time I was there in 1998 I was playing guitar in a Liverpool trip hop band called Goldwire who recorded copiously in some of longest sessions I can ever recall at Pearl Studios in a vain attempt to woo the likes of Sony and V2 who attended showcases in rehearsal rooms where plots were hatched but alas it all come to nothing. We didn’t do many gigs and when we did the gear kept breaking down, samplers would spontaneously trigger themselves and the DAT machines time code was never its own; I suppose we were at war with the technical limitations of the times. Nowadays we’d have just got a decent lap top. Here in the present we are playing the first of five band shows is succession. James, who’s filming the show arrives early, it’s the first time we’ve actually met although it doesn’t feel like it as he has helped me out of many a technical web design scrape. It’s nice to meet at last. He sets us a couple of cameras and we sound check with relative ease. There’s a book I remember reading about a David Bowie impersonator set in York a few years ago called ‘Slow Down Arthur, Stick to 30’ [I think...]. I just can’t remember the name of the author but it was truly inspiring. He was working as a ghost at one point as there are a lot of them here. I’ll have to Google it later. We check into the hotel, mess around a bit, get ready and are back on the streets eating chips and beans from one of those city centre kebab vans an hour later. It’s a lovely mild evening and somehow we’ve missed the support bands as we’ve loitered too long in the hotel. Whenever this happens I feel like I’ve missed out somehow but I realise this is not exactly a rational thought, still, for all I know they could be the next Wishbone Ash! That was a joke only I got sorry. The gig is good, reactions are positive, and the improvisational sales man in me manages to off load CDs in exchange for hard cash which is a cut above the I owe you’s I have been known to accept in past moments of weakness. Later on we are drinking hard liquor shots in a late night town centre bar and I’m catching up on life and death with an old friend and Bonehead is threatening to play the legendary major minor song back at the hotel. I can't wait. Now where did I pack those paracetamol? VP