Tour 2000

Left Newport around 9am and got ourselves to Exeter and settled into a B&B for noon. We found a cybercafe and checked email and then went to a pub for lunch and decided to get rather drunk. Luckily I got the message that I had a photo pass for the evening before we managed to do so. Met up with an ex-flatmate around 5pm and then headed over to the venue about 6:30, where John decided to sell some fanzines to the rather large queue. We stood outside with the fanzines for a while, while John tried to score a cheap ticket off a tout, but ended up having to buy one off the box office at full price.

The venue was pretty crap, with the bar downstairs and no booze allowed in the hall itself, which was only 2/3 full at most. There was a huge balcony which was virtually empty, in fact. The crowd down the front was completely mental, however, and included a young man who is going to be Tim on Stars in Their Eyes whom Tim brought on stage to help sing “Destiny Calling” to the delight of the crowd. It's great to see such interaction between the band and the crowd as it makes the show a more personal affair and, in the end only improves the atmosphere, which in Exeter was already electric.

Oddly enough, Saul and Adrian swapped places on stage and Adrian’s mic had been taken away, it made for an odd look. And Jim still had his scribbled notes for the chord changes on the new material which he was carrying on and off stage with him. Again, the set was pretty similar to the other nights. The drum machine went during “Saving Grace” and Tim, as a result, sang a rather unusual intro before the band started over again. He also said the song was going to be a single, as it should be because it's one of the more catchy and immediate tracks they've been playing, particularly with the lyric "Drink like Richard Burton, dance like John Travolta" which John spent the rest of the night singing back to me. He told the audience that they were playing so many new songs because the band reckoned their audience was intelligent enough to concentrate through it. When we went back down the front for the last 2 songs the crowd down front was amazing, people were madly dancing everywhere we looked like it was the only release they’d ever had. And the gig must have gone down well cause we sold an unusually large number of fanzines at the end. Then we went down to a local pub and got incredibly drunk, and the girlie man Mr. Pude from Change of Scenery showed just how much he couldn't hold his drink by ordering halves of Guiness! If you see him selling his fanzines anywhere else on the tour, make sure to point and laugh. (Justhipper)