If Music is the Food of Love….
….then cake is the food of music.
It was after 1am on Sunday morning when I finally ate the tuna pasta salad I was supposed to have eaten after we’d set up my P.A. at St. Mary’s Church in Penwortham before the gigs kicked off on the Saturday night. It’s okay though. It was still in a cool box, so food poisoning does not appear in the list of ailments from my weekend at Penwortham Live.
Our weekend of music started the previous afternoon when Matt arrived from Leicester for our 50 minute drive to one of Penwortham’s fish and chip shops, where we ravenously devoured our cod and chips. There was still an hour before we went to our separate venues, so we camped in Bon Bon’s Coffee shop where we had enjoyed cake last year, and enjoyed more cake. Our eyes were definitely bigger than our bellies, but soon the cake was no more and we waddled back to the car park for our instruments.
Actually Matt added a slight limp to his waddle because he had arrived with a bad back, for which I had donated a half tube of BioFreeze. The waistcoat I was wearing was full to bursting, and as I took to my shop window stage at Aphrodite’s Health food Store there was real concern about the possibility of popping buttons causing injury or death to the wonderfully attentive audience. This was my ‘quiet’ set, a more folky feel for a small venue and it seemed to go down well. Then off to park up at St. Theresa’s Community Hall before a solo gig between two rock bands.
Marginally less bloated, I was able to watch most of the set for the band on stage before me as I supped on a pint of horribly sweet orange squash, then it was my turn. It was a big village hall with seats around the side and a big empty dancefloor in front of the stage. So I would be projecting my sound about 30 yards into the distance where a bunch of people were hogging the area much closer to the bar. As I was setting up with the sound engineer we found there was no sound coming from my preamp. We tried everything, changing leads, trying leads direct into my cittern, checking batteries, but it was having none of it so I had to ditch the effects.
The fabulous thing about a cittern in a large hall is that its resonance becomes more resonant. It is one of the loudest (if not the loudest) acoustic string instruments, so plugging into any kind of amp tends to fill a hall. By the number of people approaching me afterwards to ask “what is that instrument?” I don’t think there were too many people in the audience who expected a one man acoustic set to carry such beef! This was the first time I had played “How Do You Grieve?” live and it was well received for such a miserable song!
Emma and Kate were playing at Bon Bon’s, having already wowed the Golf Club. So Matt and I reconvened there, watching from outside the open doors and not daring to venture in for more cake. However, there was no resisting the M&S chocolate orange marshmallows that the girls sent us away with for our drive home. Tea, whisky, sleep, then the customary quality sausages from Taylors of Sale, before a dining room rehearsal of the band set for the evening. Matt is supporting Sam Jefferson in his lunchtime concert at the Bridgwater Hall in Manchester on 7th June, so Sam arrived just after lunch and I had the privilege of listening to the two of them rehearse “Sing Beneath The Sun” as I bollocksed about with social media.
Back to Penwortham, complete with cool box full of salad where we set up the P.A. Matt set off for his solo gig at the Tap and Vine while I managed the sound at St. Mary’s Church, where there were tables full of tea… and more cake. More cake than you can shake a stick at. Luckily because I was too busy for salad so I was also too busy for cake. With Matt and the girls also having gigs at 10pm, we rejigged the 9pm band gig set to enable them to get to their venues, which left me playing a few solo songs to close the set.
It was during “Where The World Is” that I suddenly felt a crack in my right foot. For about 15 years I have had a calcified fusion of my big toe bone with the one next to it. So when the crack sent a pain up my leg I thought said big toe bone may have broken. I got through the set and forgot about this inconvenience while I watched the final band, and then single handedly dismantled the P.A. and loaded it into the car … “can’t be broken then” I thought.
By the time I had unloaded everything back into the house the damn toe was swollen and painful and kept me awake for much of the night, but I was up bright and early to drive over to Hebden Bridge to meet Kieran for a fabulous lunchtime gig at the Trades Club by The Unthanks, with Tim Dalling in riotous support! I was a complete waste of space for the rest of Sunday afternoon, but today helped to reconstruct a wall at my son’s house and have a foot that feels freer than it has for a very long time. Music cures everything except cake gluttony.