17 / 5 / 2000

Bristol, I'm pleased to report was pretty uneventful in terms of acts of God. We did a very long interview with Total Guitar magazine just before the show, Jim was very much in his element. The most notable thing about the show was us not being very in touch with the audience reaction. We left the stage after Agony, and when we got back to the dressing room we started discussing how we felt we'd played really well, but the audience didn't seem very into it. It was only when Warwick appeared a couple of minutes later and said "err, they're still cheering" that we realised we may have been slightly off-base with our perception, resulting in a confused rush back to the stage, and yet more confusion as we tried to decide what to play as an encore. A really good night, though.
London was a slightly different kettle of fish. There's always that extra pressure in London, since any press or industry people who are congenitally unable to get beyond the city limits will be there and nowhere else. This was exacerbated to the nth degree by having a monitor engineer provided by the venue who had absolutely no clue what he was doing (during the afternoon he had a guy stood next to him saying 'this knob turns this up, and this button does this' - definitely inspired confidence, that did). So I frankly could not hear anything of anything for nearly the entire gig (Daylight, Solved and half of Home Again were good). As I mentioned at the show, a great audience, just a shame we felt like we didn't measure up to their quality. Just to round out this first section of the tour in a typically Unbelievable Truth way (in our world the fact that anything that can go wrong will isn't murphy's law, it's the unbelievable truth) our van keys disappeared into thin air at a petrol station. I really couldn't say how it happened. Warwick parked, walked into the Esso Shop, and re-emerged seconds later, but without the keys. We searched everywhere for them (under the van, under nearby cars, on the shelves and in the fridges of the shop), but they were nowhere to be found, so we had to bring poor Dave our manager all the back into London with the spare keys so we could get home. We all finally limped to bed around 4.30 am.
Next week it's the north of England and Scotland. Looking forward to it.