A few years ago, I had descended from my hotel room a trifle early before a concert.  I was sitting in the bar having a swift half when someone recognized me.  “Aren’t you excited?” he inquired excitedly, quivering with his own.  I politely asked him what about.  He stared at me incredulously, “Tonight, the concert is tonight.”  “Oh that, no, not particularly excited,” I replied, rather too nonchalantly.  That’s when it struck me – how accustomed had I become to the world of industrial-strength touring that what to many would be a high point of the week, month or year was to me merely a date on the calendar – another city along the way?  There was a time when the thought of getting a gig at a local pub sent me into spasms of exhilaration and the anticipation had my blood thumping. Have I become so inured by the sheer volume of years on the road that I have lost that simple pleasure?  What happened to the boy that worked so hard at the paper round, patiently saving his precious cash so that one day, maybe, he’d have enough for a down payment on that red Hofner bass guitar that shined so alluringly through the dirty window of the local music shop?

Well, he grew up, with no conception of the decades ahead when guitars seemingly grew on trees.  Youth wanes but that feeling of excitement has not departed.  The bolt of lightning that hit me when I first heard Lonnie Donegan, The Vipers Skiffle Group, Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck, Eddie, Duane Eddy, Buddy, The Shads, Fats, and later on The Beatles, Stones, the summer of 68, Hendrix, Cream, etc. is in my bones like the lettering through a stick of Brighton rock.  Even so, you’d be surprised to sense that excitement in the Purple dressing room before a show.  It is calm personified, with banter about sports, food, or anything.   You might even be forgiven for thinking that there was no show. But the moment I step on that darkened stage and sense expectation in the air – from both the crowd and myself – that original impetus comes roaring back into my system, I become fifteen again and go from neutral to overdrive instantly.

That is why I can’t get excited before the show; exhaustion would set in after a week.  Every night is a thrill, even the uncomfortable ones, and mercifully these days, there are very few of those.  The really good ones I can only describe as if I was effortlessly surfing a giant wave – a wave created by the audience.  When you get back in the dressing room and the rest of the band feels the same way, it makes all the other stuff – constant travel, endless waiting, questionable food, incompetent hotels, etc. – go away, for a while anyway.  This is an iPhone shot of one such night, after the gig in Cape Town, 2010.

Don was out of the room but he is obviously just as pleased.

Good luck,

RG