PERFECT HEAT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You know that wonderful contrasting feeling, after you’ve been in a bad way but you’ve now climbed the hill and made the recovery, been good to yourself, ate all the right things, stayed away from the bad, rested, slept and then, you wake up one morning and …well. You feel AmaZing. Welcome to my day.

Plenty of time to rebuild the pages of the tour diary left blank through inactivity and time also to rinse out a few sweated shirts and sun dry them on my small balcony over the front entrance of the Don Gregorio. The day wore on and news came we would be leaving the hotel at 4:15 for our flight down into the sauna of Seville. In reality, we expected so much heat, remember, last time we landed here, the tarmac temperature was 54 degrees. Today was a relatively mild 39 and would cool nicely for the show. The crew struggled through the afternoon as there was no noticeable wind. They’ve had worse though and the gear was up, line-checked and ready to roll by the time catering was up. With appetite returning, the Paella tempted me so I had a very small portion. Delicious.

As usual, Glenn Worf spent time behind the stage with ‘the old girl’ to try and restore some kind of relationship with an instrument rarely tamed by any man. His fingers will testify to the pre-show battle.

Glenn Saggers is pictured here assisting Dave Dixon in locating a resonant frequency on the stage. As is often the case, this was a ‘D’…

Vicente Amigo showed up with his son and spent some time with us in the dressing room. As always, it was great to catch up and share many hugs. The whole time, we could hear the crowd growing and even though we were performing to a small portion of this huge stadium, the noise was unmistakably ‘Spanish’. Audiences here are simply the best. By show time, they were in a frenzy and with the house lights illuminating literally everything, there was no sneaky way for the band to get to the stage unnoticed. Cars were chosen to drive us to stage-left and as expected as soon as we drove onto the perimeter track, the crowd erupted. When house lights finally went out, the place exploded. It never really dulled down the whole night. They were incredible. We had an absolute ball on stage and the temperature could not have been nicer. Maybe because of my rediscovered health, or maybe it really was, the best show of the tour so far.

 

The cars slipped away with band on board under cover of darkness and we left the venue unnoticed before house lights came back on and the evening ended. On board the plane again and plates of Paella were difficult for me to resist, appetite now 90% returned. No drink though as antibiotics need to complete their work. We landed in Lisbon earlier than we took off due to the time zone and were at the hotel just in time to coincide with more wonderful, healing sleep.

 

..in the old days of course, the stage used to face the other way!