Oh damn, still in this dream.

So my old chum Aaron got married yesterday. I was best man, deputising for an unfortunately crocked Steve Asher, who is stuck Down Under and under doctor's orders not to travel. Aaron's whole family pitched up: the Hollywood crowd, consisting of his Dad, Laifun, Thomas, and Alexandra, who was there with her Bulgarian Fiancé, as well as Kate and Josh, Aaron's other siblings from Ted's first marriage.

Aaron married a distant cousin of mine so I was on both sides of the aisle, so to speak.
No dramas at the church; a solid C of E service of the traditional kind.
The reception was held at Aaron's house. Which is an 1890's large family house. Two staircases, butler's pantry etc. Marquee on the croquet lawn. The wedding band did the gig, so I was on double duty and didn't get off my feet until 2.30am. Fuck-up over money so Aaron and I had to empty a local cashpoint to pay the band. Bit angry with the boss of the wedding band over that one. Never mind. Apperently Alexandra's upcoming nuptials are big news in Bulgaria. She's a very good-looking lass I suppose, and Ted Kotcheff is quite well known in Bulgaria, having some cultural significance and originally hailing from there. Mr K senior is looking a bit frailer than when I last saw him. Young Thomas is taking care of him adroitly. I like Thomas. Apart from the fact he's an exceptional musician and composer, he's also a nice guy. Mr K senior's second family are as cool as the first. First met Thomas at a UK premier of one of his compositions a few years ago. After the band packed up he played half an hour of flawless and beautiful Debussy in the parlour as antidote to the '60's and '70's soul, disco, and pop music that are the standard fare of the wedding band.

However the real stunner yesterday was Celine, who looked unbelievably beautiful. Good on Aaron, making an honest women out of her even if you had to drag her to the altar kicking and screaming... which you didn't, of course, but it still took you fifteen years and two kids to get around to doing it.

In Tiverton, Devon.

Used the Helix and the Dickinson 2 x 12" combo. Sounded good, although the sound engineer wanted to take a line out from the Helix, so I had to re-engage the speaker emulations on the four patches I used. Apparently the FOH sound was pretty damn good. Always a win when the sound balance is right. :) Everyone played well though Frankie was a trifle, um er... wired. Singers, hey?

Gigging tomorrow.

The "Wedding Band" did our first gig in yonks weekend before last. We were not at our best. (This is, as everyone knows, a euphemism for pretty damn shambolic actually.) So we had another rehearsal on Tuesday. I think the next gig will be better.

So, oddly, I'm practising more. (Which means some, rather than none.) I'd forgotten how much I love the instrument.

Go well, do good things.

The function band have a gig on the 17th of July. When I will be in Portugal. Apparently the gig has been on the FB's books since March, though I didn't receive the notification, or if I did, it completely passed me by for some reason. I'll have to find a dep, but it doesn't look too good at present.

Doghouse here I come.

Amp, second guitar, stands etc. going in the PA van. Taking my no.1 strat, fx, and cable-bag in the band bus. Leave early on Friday morning. A couple of new songs to learn. No set list as yet, which would enable me to put my 'book' in running order: oh well. Gig Friday evening. This is going to be one long day. Been trying to practice and my hands ache. Really not match-fit. Bleurgh! Tomorrow looks like a complete lock out until I've learned these newbies. Bugger.

We won't stay for the race: too many of us have too many things to do, and I'm uxorious enough, despite the normal levels of rock 'n' roll sleaziness endemic to many of my calling, to prefer being at home with SWMBO.

Gods, I grow old....I grow old,
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...

In the Waverly district of Surrey.
It was the function band's last gig of the year: a wedding. Very large marquee in the garden immediately beside the house, which was also large, rambling, and with the added attraction of some eighteenth century features.
SWMBO had departed for Cambridge and mother-visiting. I was due to travel to either Cambridge or St Neot's sometime on the Sunday morning, depending on what time I got in from the gig.
Martin (drummer), Mark (bassist), and I, each in our respective cars, gathered at the gig at sometime after 3.30pm, set up and soundchecked by 5pm. We were given a room in the main house to change in and, as the saying is, recreate. The nice female housekeeper made us tea and coffee, and the three of us got stuck into the sandwiches and crisps she forced upon us. We watched telly and stuffed ourselves until Jane and Frankie (the singers) arrived at about 6.30pm. Simon (keyboards + some guitar on a few numbers) soon after.
Due onstage for the first set at 9-ish. Supper served to us at 8.00. At 8.10 our deputising Sax player, a South African lass called Louise arrived, and sat down to food. 15 minutes before our first set Jane realised she'd forgotten her book with all the lyrics and arrangements for the vocal parts.
Panic.

Rule one of function bands: Do not let the vocalists panic - they are fragile and apt to hyperventilate.

The great thing about being adults is we can normally find a way round problems: use makes master after all.

Martin asked the father of the bride (and the house's owner) if we could use his computer and we started downloading the lyrics to the unremembered songs in the first set. Frankie and Jane booked a cab to pick up the book and deliver it to possibly the most remote place in Surrey, which ain't really saying much, but Dunsfold is a mediæval village with hardly a proper road, and the large house was really not too accessible by car, and there is no street lighting or signs to inform a driver just exactly where they may be. Bliss. Onstage somewhat late...at about 9.20pm. First number is the bride and grooms request: Iris by the Goo-goo dolls. Then we have to improvise a set-order to accommodate the fact that some songs are lyrical terra incognita. Even so, it's going pretty well. Frankie bumps and grinds like Henry VIIIth fronting Fat Larry's Band. Lots of dancing is going on. Folk are enjoying themselves. I'm a little less than pleased at some of my phrasing in one or two of the many breaks I'm given, but we're all coping pretty well.

We finish the off-the-cuff first set at 10.20pm and Frankie and Mark are sent to the road to see if they can spot the taxi carrying the book....in the pitch dark. It's a bloody cold December night.

Taxi paid off to the tune of £70. Book in hand. Arrangements and lyrics assembled we're back on stage after only 15 minutes ready to party on down until midnight. I'm expecting my hands to start cramping. Quite a demanding second set. We must have been onstage for 45 minutes and were one verse in to 'Car Wash' (I know....but it's a dance band) when the power went down.

Naturally we assumed that the bride and groom were leaving and someone had overzealously-like switched off the power. Hmm. A cappella finish to 'Car Wash' in as amusing a fashion as we can manage and then the cry goes up.

'Please vacate the marquee immediately in an orderly fashion: the marquee is on fire.' All the guests are pretty squiffy: it is 11.20 or so on the evening of a wedding. Ergo, everyone is quite relaxed and does not panic overly. Slightly chaotic evacuation of tent is managed. I grab my coat and my Number one Strat and leave everything else behind.

The fucking tent is burning down. Everyone evacuated from the house....all the kids etc; everyone out of the tent. Now this place in the back-of-beyond has little access for cars let alone fire engines. It is also, as has been mentioned, a bloody cold December night.

One hundred and twenty drunken party-goers lined the only access road for the fire engines. The band and PA guys had more than ten thousand quid's worth of kit onstage. This could all have been such a disaster....but actually we all muddled through, in some ways creating even more chaos as we tried to make temporary provision for circumstance.

The fire brigade eventually arrived. and put out the blaze quickly and efficiently. The stage area hadn't been touched. At about 1am we were allowed to reclaim out kit.

The main victim from the band's point of view, was Mark, the bassist. His coat, with his car keys and house keys, had been redistributed by someone else to some as yet unknown woman who was in danger of freezing to death in her rather skimpy evening wear. Mark had to go home with Martin, who like Simon, will be returning to pick up his kit today.

The bride though, was in tears; poor thing. And the bride's father looked a bit ashen-faced. I wish them well: they were nice to us. Fortune favour them in this time of adversity.

Now, unusually, The Wife has never seen me play guitar live with a band. She's seen me in the studio, but.....

Anyway on Saturday afternoon I packed my tux and guitars and amps and kit, and she packed a LBD and we headed off to the Hunt Ball in Gloucestershire some ninety miles away. The fact that the first twenty or so miles were crossing London from East to West added about an hour to the journey. The function band had been recommended for the gig through Jezza Clarkson's Personal Assistant. Soundcheck was at 5.30pm. We rolled up (thanks to traffic) at about 5.45pm, but I was not the last to set up, which was a relief.

The venue was a big top in the middle of a field strewn with various kinds of animal manure, but that's horsey folk for you. As an aside, I never really took to riding. The Kid Bro rides a bit, but I just don't seem to have the temperament for it. I rode a bit as a youth, but preferred motorbikes which, like horses, can kill you; but at least don't seem to have a mind of their own.

Once soundchecked (big tops are bloody hard to get a decent sound in) the band went to get changed. We had a smaller tent as changing room. Frankie (the male lead singer) opined that The Wife looked a bit hot in the LBD, and thought she might be a trifle distracting to the chaps onstage, but I told him to get over it. We had our own table closest to the stage (thanks to the organisers - kudos to them) and were generally treated more like guests than 'staff', which is not always the case at these events.

Before supper, Martin, our leader, put the 'James Bond' album on over the PA. Brilliant. Almost immediately two hundred chaps in dinner jackets started adjusting their cuffs, standing up a little straighter, evidently lost in some child-like fantasy of....gawd-knows-what, really. I mean, honestly: why does it have that effect on chaps?

After the speeches, there was an auction, and I bid for a week in a holiday villa in Malta at the height of the holiday season next year; but due to my own ineptitude was pipped at the post. As it happens it went for 2K. Still, if I ever get a chance to see Valetta, and go to the island that was home to the Hospitallers, and won a George Cross during WWII, I'll jump at the chance.

Because of delays we didn't go onstage for the first set until just after 11pm. A ninety minute set followed which seemed to get everyone onto the dance floor. The Wife was, by this time, unescorted; as the band was onstage. When she got up to shake her stuff she was the subject of attention from a couple of chaps in their twenties, which must have been fun.

Coming offstage after the first set I complimented her on 'pulling'. She replied that the minute she'd mentioned that she was married to the guitarist in the band, they'd scuttled off, tout suite, as I believe the phrase to be. Where are these young chaps' manners these days? I am not likely to call 'em out (in the sense of pistols for two followed by coffee for one) for being charming to the Missus (disrespectful would be another matter, of course) and I wouldn't dream of spoiling her fun, but there you go.

After a twenty minute break we commenced the second set which went well. Well, that is apart from the solo to 'Beat It'. Of the eight measures of the EVH solo I screwed the first part of the sixth, which is one of the easier ones. But even that one mistake didn't spoil what was overall probably the best performances the band had given this year.

Offstage at 1.30am sharp (disappointing the crowd) thanks to the noise abatement people and the organisers. Packed and on the road by 2.15am. Back home in sunny Dulwich by 4.30am. Whereupon I spent another hour sitting on the loo while the food-poisoning I'd contracted from either something I'd eaten, or the amount of animal shit in the atmosphere, coursed through my gut.

I wonder if anyone else suffered similarly? Will take a straw-poll of the band and see if there were other sufferers.
We will have to host a function band Christmas Lunch this year. We haven't quite enough room for a sit-down if everyone brings spouses/partners, but we could do the old 'eat-on-your-lap' routine quite happily.

Sunday was spent recovering and watching telly.

The wife was v. impressed by the band. But I fear she is somewhat biased. Still, she'd seen Coldplay the night before at Wembley on a work shindig, so favourable comparisons weren't unwelcome, though they were unexpected. (Also, in general, dance bands play favourites from five decades or more, rather than trying to promote a new self-penned album....and Coldplay don't cover James Brown, Chic,  et al....or for that matter end with slightly raucous versions of 'The Boys are Back in Town', 'Lady Marmalade', or 'Sweet Home Alabama'.)

Amazing how one difficult-but-good gig (nailing the 'Beat It' solo, and getting folk too cool to dance to dance like mad bastards for second and third sets) leaves one with delusions of adequacy.

Oh well, back to moving books.

Gigged last night in South Buckinghamshire: the Lambourne Golf Club.
Sound was good; we all played well; everyone had a good time: even me....excepting the sound guy laid some hash on me and I f*cking lost it before smoking any of it.
Such is, such is.
Milady's builders came round today to size up her house for the shelves required to take all of my books. I then drove us all to my flat, where they are going to 'do it up' in preparation for it being let out. This will cost some money but....
Also I'm going to have to have enough money to buy SWMBO a suitable ring, and moreover one she doesn't have to find excuses for. ("Oh, he's a stuggling musician, and it's the thought that counts anyway"....that's not going to happen: I'm fucking forty-six, I should be able to stump up for a reasonable sized stone.)

This romance and living lark ain't cheap, but still it's better than being single, by any country's mile. SWMBO continues spreading grace, goodness, and light to all. Her sense of humour helps rather too.