I Wish

This was the view from the stage where we played our festival gig on Saturday!!!

These were the nurses from the First-Aid tent at the back of the stage!!! We were 10 minutes late starting our set because Delbut kept coming over all faint and had to go to the First-Aid tent for treatment!! He also went twice after we'd finished the set and three times before we left just to make sure he was in top health!!!

The stage was brilliant!













We were ten times better than the bunch of amatures on before us! The one in the middle kept harrassing Del for his autograph!! So Del told him where to go and tried to insert a drumstick in him! The guitarist on the right plays a Telecaster, the same as me, and he tried to walk off with mine pretending that he didnt know!! I told him to go fall out of a tree! Cheeky bugger!







I wish, I wish, I wish!
The truth will follow after the trauma has passed!!

Shaken, not stirred!

Two weeks since the last post! Bad innit! But there are reasons!!!
1. I've torn my cartlige in my knee!!! I did it last year too and had an operation which didnt work! It's all James Bonds fault!! Stay with me here ok!!..... I was in the mood to watch a Bond film and went to my shelves to get THUNDERBALL. I bent down to get it off the bottom shelf and POP...out came the old Tibea from the cartlige. The pain of it popping out was not good, the pain of me having to put it back into place was REALLY not good!! Anyway, thats one reason. Number 2 is...We are still having an amazing heatwave here and I took some time off work to make sure my knee was better and to take advantage of the weather. I just couldnt be arsed to sit at the puter and type. So I didnt.
One week after my knee problem Spiny Norman (the band I play in) had our first gig for quite a while. We played for a company party in a place called Sully (just outside Cardiff). It wasnt really our kind of thing, but we had a bit of fun. We actually played outdoors in the glorious sunshine, which was all very nice but the sound was rubbish and I had a hangover which wasnt very proffessional and I made a few mistakes in the first few songs (like singing over Paul's solos and missing my own solos). I was not my finest moment and it wont happen again!! The punters seemed to enjoy themselves tho, and thats the main thing.
We have the biggest gig of our 10 year career next Saturday! We are playing the Welsh Boarders rock Festival!!!! Up until a few days ago I was really bricking it about this gig!! There are a lot of real heavy prog rock bands playing and I thought we would be a bit out of our league, but after seeing the final line-up I am a lot happier about it. There are a few other covers bands playing so we wont be on our own.
We will be playing a 30 min set and choosing which songs we are going to play isnt easy!! It's funny to see what each individual in Spiny sees as our strong/weak songs. Alun (Bass/singer)and myself think that Substitute (yes, the Who song) is one of our strongest songs but Delbut thinks it is weak! Now Del is a true Who perfectionist and Spiny's version is more akin to the Rammones version and so is a bit rockier and faster than the original so it's understandable that he's not 100% for doing it infront of a big crowd. So far we will be playing Rocks (Primal Scream), Hard To Handle (Black Crows), Keep Your Hands to Yourself (Georgia Satallites) and Whatever You Want/Rocking all Over The World (Status Quo). Paul, guitar/bass, is indifferent about the whole thing. He thinks we are going to get bottles of piss thrown at us anyway so he doesnt care what we play!! lol. It will all probably change a couple of times until we get the final list sorted so watch this space!
The Festival is for Charity so we're not getting paid anything. This is not good, I am skint at the moment and need all the money I can get! I have to give the Ducks in the local lake IOU's cos I cant afford bread!
I'm off into Cardiff now to do some shopping with this week's allowance, I was going to get a pet for my appartment but I dont have a good record so far of keeping pets here. I used to have a chameleon but he accidently walked across my tarten rug and died of exhaustion!
Right, time to move all my Bond movies up to the top shelf!!
See ya's later

Stirring things up!

I'm in work writing this so shhhhhhhhhh!!!
Being a chemist is all good fun but it does have it's boring moments!! Making stuff and occasionally blowing things up can be quite invigorating, but just sitting there watching something stir is as about as exciting as snail racing. So I thought I'd ramble for a bit on here to help the time go quicker until I can go home.
I've been a Blogger for two weeks now! wooohoooo, No longer am I the "new kid on the blog"!!! I dont think I've managed to upset anybody (yet) and it's only Delbut who's threatened me with bodily harm! So all in all it hasn't gone too bad! There are some really nice, fun people out there, this is truely a global thing isnt it!? It's so nice to meet people from the other side of the planet!

Let me go check on my stirring stuff a mo.....

......right, I'm back, sorry about that! My stuff has gone black!! I hope that's supposed to happen!!!
Anyway, unlike a few people I've met on here I'm not big into writing my own music or songs. I am not afraid to admit that I am totally telentless when it comes to that!! I tried writing one a week or so back in honour of the soccer World Cup. It was entitled "Balls Bouncing off the Crossbar" and was quite catchy. I sent it off to the BBC to see if they'd like to use it for their TV coverage and they replied saying that they already has something for the soccer but they would love to use it as the theme tune for their coverage of the Tour De France Cycle Race! We'll see.

My brother and I wrote a song a long time ago that we wanted to use in Spiny, it was about a shepherd boy who has found a world war 2 bomb in the field where he keeps his sheep and he has only 5 minutes to get the sheep out of the field before it blows up. We called it "let's Get The Flock Out of Here" but it never sold! Shame.
Right, back to some chemistry....man, I hope it's supposed to go black!

The good old days?!!

That's it!! Summer's over!!! We had 2 weeks of sun and now the cloud has returned with a vengance bringing rain and floods!!!! Well that's what you get for living in Wales I guess!! Bugger.
Nevermind. The weekend looms large and it should be a good 'un. We have the 3rd place game in the World Cup between the Germans and the Theatrical Portugese (I say "theatrical" because I cant spell "cheating bastards"!) on Saturday night, then we have the final between the French and the Italians on Sunday night! I have a day off work on Monday so I intend to have a good weekend!
Now in my younger days (a long LONG time ago) a good weekend used to consist of getting home from work, a quick dab of Blue Stratos behind the ears, clean underware and if I was feeling particularly lucky I would have a bath regardless of whether I'd already had one that week or not!! Then it would be out into Cardiff with the lads! It was like 7 Brides for 7 Brothers! We would meander amoungst the night-clubs and bars trying to look cool in a shirt that didnt fit and shoes that were impossible to dance in!
Now, I can dance!!!!! Infact, when I was giving Ricky Martin dance lessons recently he commented on how good a mover I really was!! But back then it was break-dancing that was all the rage, and when I tried doing that I looked like a frog in a blender and I did my back in, so I used to concentrate on the slower, more seductive numbers like Lionel Ritchie's "Hello". This soflty soflty approach was usually a hit with the ladies who by this time of night were so drunk they didnt care who they were dancing with as long as they could get a free drink! (classy company eh??). Then after some smoothe talking (or begging, depending on the girl!) it would be time to invite her back to Chez Andy for coffee and show her my then fledgeling collection of odd socks (I only had three back in those days, but it was a start!!)
Sadly those days are gone now, these days it takes me all night to do what I used to do all night!! The last time I went into a disco some kid got up and offered me a seat!!! Sad innit! Nevermind though! At my age it's more about quality than quantitiy, the exuberance of youth may be just a distant memory these days, but I still have my moments!!

I was going to write something interesting at the beggining of this post, but I've totally forgoten what it was, I got so lost in memories there for a sec that I've gone blank!
That's another sign of getting old, your memory starts playing up!!!!
Only 10 days untill the next Spiny Norman gig!! BRING IT ON!!!!

BETTY SWOLLOCKS?!!

It's hot! It's 90 degrees plus in Wales! Now, to some of you that might not seem very hot, but for a country where you'll normally find your eye's freezing shut when you blink it's pretty damn hot!! We're just not used to it, not that you'll find me complaining, I love the heat, I am half Jamaican on my Dad's friend's side!
Farmers here are feeding their chickens ice cubes to stop them laying hard boiled eggs!
We've had about 4 or 5 days of it now, which is classed as a major heatwave here. I know that in other parts of the world this is only a minor heat "ripple" but we like to exagerate!
I got bad sunburn yesterday on my legs and on my shoulders, I put moisterising cream on my shoulders but my legs were so bad I had to take a viagra just to keep the sheets off them while I was sleeping! (the old ones are the best eh?? lol).
Enough of this tomfoolery!
Portugal beat England in the World Cup soccer quarter-final! England lost on penalties and had a man sent of!! Deja Vu??!! Portugal now play France in the semi-final on Wednesday and once again my loyalties are torn. I have a few very good French friends plus the guy who owns my local bar is French and he gives me the odd free beer so I dont want to get on the wrong side of him now do I??

Sunday night is usually guitar rehearsal time for me, I usualy practice the Spiny set and try a few new things to see if they are Spinyable! However, cos we dont have a gig for another 2 weeks I gave it a miss last night and had a bit of cooking to do for a "mate" of mine! Earlier in the day I asked her what she wanted and she said "anything". So I made Morrocan Lamb on a bed of spicy rice only to find she didnt like lamb or rice!!! So I ordered Nandos instead and put the lamb in the freezer! Then I tried a new chat-up line that I've been working on for a few months now...I said....."baby, tonight I want to be your ventrilaquist!!" "What do you mean?" she replied. "I want to stick my hand up your skirt and make your lips move!" came my witty retort!
On her way out she told me where to stick my Nandos! :-(

Still, life goes on eh. Next time I'll practice the Spiny set and forget about the cooking! I guess that's why Spiny have taken 10 years to become an overnight success!! I should pracitce more. I've been invited to form a SuperGroup with myself as the frontman, but until David Soul, Nana Miscouri, Barry Manillow and Richard Clayderman are all free I'm not interested!

Right, time for some shade, the heat is getting to me! There are two occasions when an ice cold beer seems like the drink of the gods, one is the very first beer after a gig once all the gear is packed up and I've driven home and just sat down to relax, the other is on a mega-hot day in the sun, sitting outside a bar watching the world (and scantily clad females) go by!
Gimme a beeeeeeer! mmmmmm. Later, hic, hic!