Weather interrupts play.

The Blowzabella festival at the weekend was sublime but like all these things it brings to mind both good and bad experiences from the past. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would say that some festivals and musical experiences merge in your brain after a while especially if you are returning to a place or festival you have been before but others have specific memories attached to them that will never go away. Most of mine are good and then there are occasional ones that get stuck in the memory for not so brilliant reasons. Within all that the music carries on and that part is usually the happy experience . Certainly last Friday and the whole weekend was. I thoroughly enjoyed performing the concert itself. It’s the things that go on around those appearances that make for the not so good memories.

I wouldn’t be British if I didn’t mention the weather at least once in these blogs. At Halsway this weekend past we had it pretty good except that the evenings were cold,. In particular the Friday night. As it was a concert in the marquee there weren’t loads of heated dancing bodies to raise the temperature. So I went on stage with a long sleeved cotton T’shirt underneath a silk shirt on top of which I was wearing a cashmere jumper. To round it all off I had a quite heavy blue suede jacket and scarf. (I originally spelt that as swede and had to look it up! I can read the words perfectly but I can’t always draw them to mind to spell them correctly for myself.) Anyway..as a consequence of doing an impersonation of a Michelin man my top half was toasty. My bottom half, under thin trousers, was frozen and took until 4am to thaw out. Despite that as I said the event and the concert was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. So really i am using the weekend to trigger various weather related memories ..not all weather ones.

This put me in mind of a Token Women gig at Shepley Spring festival many years ago. It was an astonishingly cold May and wet and windy. On that occasion I went on stage and played all night wearing two jackets. I’ve never had to do that before or since thank goodness and the gazebo that was the green room for artists took off in the high winds and landed in the next field. No-one was in it and nothing damaged.

Then there was one of those Towersy’s when a hurricane came over. Packie Bryne had decided to retire, for about the tenth time and was doing his final concert on the Monday night, with myself and Ralph Jordan in the concert marquee. What ever possessed me to wear white I’ll never know but white was what I had planned and white was what I wore. Many people had given up and gone home by the time of the farewell concert. They couldn’t face another night in a sodden tent and had packed up and gone in search of hot mugs cocoa, walls and hot water bottles. So picture a marquee containing approximately three men and a dog and a howling gale outside. Probably a few more in than that but you know what I mean. The PA was still working. A miracle in itself but what was weird, from a stage perspective, was the marquee swinging from left to right and giving the distinct impression that it might take off at any time. It was quite extraordinary and I felt quite sea sick. Packie was on fine form as always and we all had a good laugh….I even managed to stay relatively mud free despite the poor choice of clothing colour.

In Italy there’s a place called Casale Monferrato. Blowzabella have had two extraordinary experiences there. The first time we went we arrived the night before we were due to perform. The main stage was in this beautiful open air court yard. Everything seemed idyllic especially as we were given, food and beer, told where we were staying and all we had to do was relax. So we did. As light faded and the twilight zone took over monsters we weren’t expecting entered the court yard in their thousands. Mosquito’s. As I sat watching the concert the man in front of me, who was wearing a white shirt, began slapping his back, you could see he was covered in them. When we were talking about it the next day we were told that about ten years previously they had planted rice fields around the outside of the town and so the mosquito hell was born. I got off relatively lightly but others were not so lucky. Jon Swayne had huge blisters on both ankles and and to go off to hospital. He was given some kind of clear fluid in a bottle that he had to apply at regular intervals. The guys were sharing a room that night and as the bottle wasn’t particularly distinctive, especially in the dark, Ian Luff started to drink it thinking it was water when over come by thirst in the heat of the night…..no harm done fortunately. His insides were just cleaner.

But then there was the music. What I remember so clearly about that first time was the screaming at the end of our concert. The crowd went absolutely crazy and no doubt the sound was amplified by the walls of the courtyard, They did not want us to stop. To the point that I was almost scared they would mob the stage but with it I have to say it was one of the most exhilarating memories of my life. To have created that level of excitement was extraordinary. During the show I used to sing an unaccompanied version of ‘The Maids of Coolmore’. As I opened my mouth and began the notes on the first word ‘from’…a mosquito flew in. I had a coughing fit and managed to say the words Zanzara…I’d learnt that one pretty quickly.! I coughed, swallowed the zanzara and carried on resulting in a standing ovation for my resilience more than my singing although they love the canzoni in Italy.

So many years later, after we’d reformed, we went back to Casale again. I lathered my body in anti mozi stuff and in we went. Not a court yard this time but a piazza with covered terraces all the way round edged by pillars. You know the type, shops set back under the terrace and some nice marble flag stones etc.

The first part of the concert went well…although there was some very obvious biting going on and then, on what had been the most beautiful scorching day, the heavens opened. On an open air stage you have no choice but to run for cover so we grabbed the instruments and crammed into the terrace behind the stage. As most of the audience had tried to get in as well we decide to carry on playing acoustically. The funny thing was I had the CDs with me. As we’d flown to the gig we didn’t have huge numbers of products and the crowd seemed to get a whiff of that fact. Consequently I kept getting tapped on the shoulder by people frantically waving money at me and pointing at the CDs…I’d play a few more notes and the same would happen again. They loved the fact we carried on playing regardless and we sold everything we’d brought with us, trousers, underpants …everything. Only joking…all the merchandise was gone.

I’ve got a dreadful feeling that that was the same place where we got taken by Maurizio Martinotti to a fabulous restaurant. Maurizio played in a lovely Italian band called La Ciapa Rusa, is a real foody and prides himself on finding excellent taverna’s serving the best of local produce. This was one of those. They served the most exquisite rabbit ravioli but Dave Shepherd’s had a tiny shard of bone in it which went straight into one of his teeth …or something like that. If he reads this he’ll have to tell you exactly what happened. Any way the poor man was in agony. Not much chance of sorting it out either until he got home.

I have found some ‘La Ciapa Rusa’ on Youtube. Mauritzio is second from the left on the black and white photo that comes up near the beginning. Still a great friend of the bands…and a phenomenal lover of cheese!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaXUGqByj9o