Back to life
Saturday 25 January 2020
It’s our first show of the year supporting Toyah at the O2 Academy in Islington. For my band B-Movie it’s business as usual. We’re a slick machine these days having honed our set through regular gigging over the past decade since our second coming in the early 2000s.
There’s a good turnout to see the septuagenarian latex wearing Brummy songstress and a sizeable minority also in attendance for Mansfield’s finest, hoping to relive a snippet of their youth, when our songs ‘Nowhere Girl’ and ‘Remembrance Day’ created a buzz and scratched the lower reaches of the charts at the turn of the 80s.
A few healthy cheers greet our entrance onstage which I acknowledge with a nonchalant wave, oblivious to the five hundred or so faces trained on my every movement. I feel at home as I plug in my bass guitar and sidle up to the mic stand. There's a moment of silence, then bang and I’m suddenly no longer the Cambridge-based wine educator who’d hosted a fun wine tasting three days earlier entitled 'New Year New Wines', recommending wines for another healthy year of normal wine drinking under normal conditions, but the cool, eyeliner wearing, black suited driving force of an unstoppable, rock and roll machine that is B-Movie, the band I’d formed at school and miraculously toured the States three times with and who’d come so heartbreakingly close to appearing on Top of the Pops and putting Mansfield on the map like Alvin Stardust had in the 70s.
An hour later we’re sipping celebratory beers backstage and signing autographs from fans who’ve come from far and wide and chatting about optimistic plans for the year ahead, which included, no less, a tour of North America. I’d got used to this life. It felt normal and would just keep rolling on and on and on.
We all know what happened next.
Saturday 23 October 2021
Birdsong fills the air of the small upstairs room at John Peel's favourite venue, the Prince Albert in Brighton. A new dawn chorus for a new era perhaps? It’s time to go on, a mere 637 days since Toyah. During that seemingly interminable period, I have begun a new solo life, seen my wine business disappear then burst back to life and recorded a solo album, several songs from which we will be performing tonight. I’m nervous as the avian intro tape plays because we haven’t been able to properly rehearse. There's the reassuring presence onstage of Paul and Graham from B-movie and I’m hoping some of the old magic will get us through. Keith, my collaborator on the album sits behind his keyboards and, as the bird song fades, he plays the opening piano chords to my song Paradise, written about the stretch of river in Newnham, Cambridge. As I approach the mic, this feels like paradise. Tonight’s audience numbers no more than fifty but I would have taken five if I’m honest, so good it is to be back playing live again. The new songs which we play first are well received before we blast through some old favourites and by the end people are dancing like it's the old days.
When the pandemic first hit, everything suddenly ended. I could no longer host wine tasting evenings or deliver courses. My business had effectively ceased to exist overnight. In those first few days as we all scrambled to come to terms with this new reality, I found solace in music as I always have done. During my permitted exercise breaks I’d cycle through the Cambridgeshire countryside listening to backing tracks that Paul from the band had sent me. The words seemed to tumble out as I huffed and puffed my way over hills and through quaint, eerily quiet villages until the backing tracks took shape and morphed into songs. A new B-movie album came together. Music became a lifeline.
Gradually we got back on our feet and learnt how to adapt in the virtual world. My wine tastings and courses found a new home online and I was back in business albeit on a much smaller scale. The music industry, however, wasn’t going to be back to any kind of normal any time soon. The American tour was predictably cancelled and other shows moved back firstly and optimistically to later that year, and then when further lockdowns kicked in were either abandoned or postponed to a distant post-Covid time if there ever might be one.
I was determined to complete my solo album that had been started in January 2020. When Half Ton studios in Milton finally reopened, we resumed recording, albeit in masks and at a careful distance from each other. It was a slow process but gradually it came together. In a way the long, drawn-out recording process was a blessing because it meant there was no rush. I could take my time getting it right. At the point of writing, the album, tentatively entitled 'Audience with Myself', is finally finished and all being well should be released in the early Spring next year.
The warm response of the Brighton audience and the joy of playing live again felt like I'd got a missing part of my life back. That thrill of being in a room full of people, whether as a singer or as a host of a wine tasting or course, that sense of connection and good will, the spontaneity and senses working overtime giving and receiving good vibes. Ultimately, it's that feeling of success and a job well done.
This week I will be back hosting an in-person wine tasting for the first time since March 2020. Like stepping back on stage, it feels like a significant moment and a huge leap to getting back to normality.
At Cambridge Wine Academy we offer a range of wine courses and wine tastings for participants keen to deepen their relationship with wine, so please take a look and join us soon!