Dave's Gig Guide
Alfa Centauri 11th April 1999
Perhaps the less said about this one the better.
With hindsight, we were seriously un-together as a band - tired, exhausted and fraught with nerves. I don't think the other members of the band would disagree with this appraisal.
Hand-on-heart, I accept the responsibility for the fiasco that it became. Hindsight is a cruel mistress but it's a useful tool.
I didn't allow nearly enough time for full rehearsals. I spent too much time trying to sort out the release of the difficult second album and, in the end, compromised on something that was poor in comparison with our debut release. I let my employer dictate how much time I could have away from the office, even though they knew how important it really was to us. As a result, we were always up against the clock. There was never enough time to do anything.
I underestimated the amount of space in the van so that we couldn't take all of the gear. I ended up stripping out some less vital bits of kit and yet we still managed to take too much gear. I underestimated how long it would take to drive down to the ferry terminal at Harwich and so we missed the original ferry connection. I didn't realise how difficult it would be to drive to the venue and, sadly, neither did our driver.
But the most serious error I made was with respect to our travelling companions. This decision had the single biggest impact on the success or otherwise of the operation, on our sense of togetherness, our mojo for want of a better word, to the extent that I feel that we stopped operating as a band.
Dave is a fairly quiet sort of chap. He's very easy going but doesn't like people taking the piss. Dave and I are a pair of tech-heads. We like our gadgets. We're not really into money in a big way. Our motivations lie elsewhere. Jules is pretty similar - quiet, sensible, the common sense of the outfit, whereas I am all bullshit and bluster. I speak my mind, and frequently don't think about the consequences of mouthing off but, on the whole, we usually get on pretty well. Usually.
I decided that I didn't really want to drive the van through Holland, fully laden, at night and without any prior experience of driving on the wrong side of the road. Hence, I decided to invite a friend, who will remain nameless, to come along for the trip and act as driver for the overseas leg of the trip. This news did not go down well with the rest of the band. Not at all.
There was already some tension in the van when we set off. We were already 2 hours late when we picked up our driver. Never-the-less, although we missed the first ferry, we caught the second and we were on our way.
In Holland, my friend took over at the wheel. Now, our driver wasn't/isn't the most tactful of individuals and, somehow, we got onto the subject of the other performers. The discussion became somewhat energetic and, for some reason, he blurted out the following:
"Nobody is coming to see you, Dave. Everybody is coming to see Redshift."
Huh? Where did that particular piece of venom come from?
I think that single comment set the rot in motion. As a band, I'm fairly sure that Dave, Jules and I could weather almost anything but that comment just undermined our whole sense of purpose.
A deathly silence filled the van. Dave and Jules went into silent mode. In fact, Dave went and sat at the very back of the van, with the gear, rather than sit up front. I don't think any of us said anything of any significance until we reached the outskirts of Huizen.
It was dark when we arrived in Huizen though our driver got lost on one of the motorways and nearly missed the slip road. He turned the van rapidly to the right and, with me in the passenger's seat, the whole vehicle started to roll over and I suddenly found myself looking at the road coming up at me very quickly indeed. He braked and regained control of the vehicle but I was spooked. Really spooked.
Thankfully, Jules had already booked the hotel rooms in advance so there was no messing about trying to find a room. We left all of the gear in the van overnight and I quietly hoped that someone would come along and steal the bloody lot.
On the day of the performance, we had the whole 12 hours to get nervous. We set up shop in the seller's area in the theatre and a few people stopped to buy the new CD but, frankly, the interest was pretty minimal. A few friends dropped by and wished us luck, and Dave and I slid in and out of the on-going performances, mainly to keep ourselves busy.
Sadly, our driver continued his efforts to get on everyone's tits. He'd been given a lousy sales pitch, stuffed away in the far corner of a dark and dingy hall. He asked if he could set up on our stall, which was in a much better pitch, both light and airy and with a good flow of people. I agreed, but there was a problem. I insisted that he must not sell any CDs by an artist who has caused me considerable pain and anguish over the years. He didn't like this restriction and there were some harsh words exchanged. I relented and let him sell his bloody discs but I think Jules and Dave were quietly disgusted that I'd just given in.
Then he set about annoying one of his former business partners who was at an adjacent pitch and well, the friction in the air was absolutely physical.
As the day progressed, we became more and more nervous. Finally, when we came to prepare for the gig itself, I went up on stage and began setting up the gear. I had a whole host of problems ringing in my ears, not least of which was the number of inputs needed by the sound desk and the availability of reliable mains power. It seems that my e-mail requesting multiple inputs on the desk had gone astray and the sound crew had assumed that we would only need a stereo feed. In fact, we needed 14 inputs in total and so there was an almighty panic to find another 12 lines into the desk. The sound guys succeeded admirably.
As I was setting up the equipment, I would connect a couple of keyboards, power it up and then, two or three minutes later, turn around to discover that the same kit had either been switched off or was sitting in a pile at the side of the stage. It transpired that Redshift's roadie had assumed that everything on the stage belong to Redshift and was just packing everything he could lay his hands on into their pile of gear... Worse still, whilst they were supposed to be stripping their rig, Redshift disappeared to sign autographs in the entrance hall, leaving half the stage covered in equipment and no room for us to set up.
In the middle of all this, my spirits resigned to failure, my friend Helge said the wrong thing to me at the wrong time and I snapped. I bit his hand off. That upset Helge a lot and, even though I've apologised many, many times since then, he's never spoken to me again.
Gradually, as the clock ticked ever onwards, our sound check began to shrink from the original 20 minutes to 15 minutes and then, finally, to just 5 minutes. I don't know how that happened. If I had anything approaching a backbone, I would have insisted on a decent sound check. Alas, I didn't. I was too keen to keep everyone else happy - except the people who mattered most, the band.
Back in the dressing room, the realisation hit me that we were in BIG trouble. I knew it. And there was no escape.
The announcer introduced us and my heart sank. I wanted to be a million miles away. We walked out on stage to loud and enthusiastic applause and I was shaking from head to toe. I think we all were.
Jules immediately discovered that her keyboard rig had been reset and so none of her presets were loaded. She pressed a key expecting to hear a digital chime sound and, instead, got the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She improvised a little but, at the end of the first number, I jumped over to her rig and reset everything. Quite clearly, someone had been messing around with our gear. That sort of thing doesn't happen by accident, does it? Remember the experiences at EMMA IV and the busted MIDI Thru Port. Surely lightening can't strike twice, can it? After that, I think our nerves were shot through.
The gig quickly spiralled out of control. We couldn't hear ourselves in the monitors and so our playing was imprecise and sloppy. I would raise my hand asking for more level in my monitors and it would go up momentarily, only to be reduced a few seconds later. I could hear the echoes off the back wall louder than I could hear what was coming through the monitors.
It got worse. Certain sections of the audience, with their own particular axe to grind, made sure we got a rough reception. Up on stage and nearly blinded by the lights, I could still make out faces and eyes in the gloom. I've never forgotten the look of pure resentment set hard into some of those faces. I can still see them now.
We struggled on, got into our stride and even managed to pull off one or two successes. However, the sense of fun and optimism that had been part of our EMMA performance two years earlier had all but evaporated. I couldn't wait to get off stage and out of the theatre.
We played the pen-ultimate number and I looked at both Dave and Jules and indicated that we should just stop. I'd had enough. There would be no encore. They nodded in agreement, we put down our instruments, took a bow and we began to walk off stage. The audience began to applaud, fairly loudly if I recall, but, alas, I'd forgotten to turn off the DR8 so our encore started playing up just as the auditorium was clearing. We had to go back and do one more number. I groaned inwardly and I'm sure a major portion of the audience felt the same way too.
After that one last painful number, I fled the stage, grabbed my coat and went out back to where the van was parked up. But, alas, we still had to go in and clear the stage ready for the next act and so there was no respite. The organisers cleared the hall, whilst we stripped our gear, stashing most of it at the back of the stage.
The performance had been a disaster. I felt terrible and, nearly 10 years on, those feelings still haunt me.
With our gear packed away, we assembled by the main exit as the fans thronged around us, some were happy and smiling, others carrying expressions of pure hatred and venom. I think I hated that experience more than anything else on the day and I wanted to get as far away from the theatre as possible.
That wasn't the end of the difficulties. Helge was obviously still smarting at me, both Dave and Jules had gone into silent mode and I felt really bad because their experience had been ruined.
We had already agreed to drive into Amsterdam that night, to relax, find something to eat and get drunk. Sadly, this was where those major inter-personal problems within the group came to a head. Our driver decided that he didn't want anything to eat and wasn't going to drive us into Amsterdam. Instead, he just wanted to get back to his hotel room and go to bed. 10 years on and I still remain astonished by this gross act of selfishness. Remember, the band hadn't had anything to eat all day and they were very tired and hungry. As a result, I had something of a hissy fit with our driver and, only after I'd agreed to pay for his food, did he agree to drive us into Amsterdam.
There wasn't room in the van for all of us and so I crawled into a space between the back seats and the rear doors. I remember somebody, Helge, photographed me in a foetal position and half asleep/comatose. I've seen the picture and I look pathetic. That was the last straw as far as I was concerned. I think I lost my temper pretty badly that time.
We ate in a tiny cafe in the middle of the Red Light District. I remember enjoying that bit of the trip. I ate quite a bit though drank very little and I think Helge drove us back to the hotel that night. Someone took some pictures, probably one of the waitresses though I don't remember much of what happened.
The next morning, I woke early and went for a walk around Huizen. I hated myself, hated the music, hated what we'd become. Utterly.
I ate breakfast with some of the fans but they weren't speaking to me. I'd gone from hero to zero in less than a day and they didn't want to be seen talking to a zero. Only Dave Gurr got solidly behind us. "Never mind, Dave." he said. "We all 'ave 'em...", which was some consolation. Simon Pride, Simon Webster and Tony Sawford offered words of wisdom, encouragement and solace. They helped but my gut was still left twisting.
Alas, when we got back to the concert hall, we found that someone had taken out their frustration on our gear. They'd taken the front cover off my Akai DR8 and then kicked in the main panel. My Yamaha DX5 had footprints on the front panel and was now minus a couple of button caps. This last episode left me convinced that the problems on stage and the damaged gear were not accidents. They were deliberate acts of vandalism perpetrated by someone willing to stop at nothing to ruin our performance.
We caught the ferry home and crept back into England, dumping our driver in a lay-by at Bishop Stortford. I took over the wheel and took us back towards the M1. After a few hours, we stopped off at a Little Chef on the A1 and scoffed down some really, really bad food served up to us by a waiter who was a dead wringer for Rodney from Only Fools and Horses.
I knew that Dave and Jules weren't happy. I certainly wasn't happy. Even though we knew that the problems on stage were not of our making, I accepted that I'd made some bad decisions when it came to organising the trip. Although we were fairly good humoured together and, frankly, just more than glad to be rid of our driver, we pretty much decided to call it a day as far as T-Bass was concerned. T-Bass was put on ice and that was the end of the adventure.
In the post mortem that followed, some of the fans were kind and understanding. The dream had gone sour on us and they realised that some of the problems were not of our making. Others stuck the knife in with vigour, enjoying an opportunity to pour battery acid on open wounds.
Some of the blood letting was incredibly unpleasant. Some of it was incredibly childish. One reviewer said that everything we did was mimed over a backing track and, later in the same review, said that we'd made so many mistakes that the performance was embarrassing. His argument, of course, breaks down under critical analysis. Why would we mime along to a backing track with so many mistakes? Surely we would record a perfect backing track?
What happened to our driver? Well, we're still friends but it took a long, long time to get past our differences. He refused to accept that he'd done anything wrong and insisted for months that any problems we had were all in my head. Go figure.
With hindsight, I have to come to realise that we were the wrong band, playing the wrong kind of music to the wrong audience. I've never asked to play at another European EM festival and I doubt that I ever will.