Gig #1: The Arts Centre, Norwich 9th April 2014

I owe you readers out there an apology. Unable to access my own memories of the gig, I had hoped to use the notes I made at the time to reconstruct for your reading pleasure an account of the evening. As a professional journalist my instinct for a story ensures that, whatever my state of mind at the time, my sub-conscious directs my hands towards my iPad allowing me subsequently to piece together from the fragments a coherent narrative of the events I have witnessed, but can no longer recall. However, on checking over my notes this afternoon I find that I have underestimated the combined impact of a red-eye flight into the UK, the maelstrom of activity that greeted me at Oaklands Road (for which I now realise I was inadequately prepared) and the anaesthetising effect of several pints of Jodrill’s Chode, Norfolk’s finest ale.

In themselves, these three factors combined would be enough to explain the incoherent gibberish which I seem to have written during the evening. But on the journey from Wolverhampton to Norwich I’d been 'allowed' to sit in the front seat alongside the Nightingales’ driver and personal masseuse Dave ‘Big Dave’ Wassell, a gesture I’d interpreted as a mark of respect towards the stranger in their midst but which I now realise was nothing of the sort. I’ll describe Wassell more fully in due course, as I will all of the band and it’s entourage. But I will tell you now that Wassell’s most distinctive feature is his ability to talk rapidly and incessantly for hour after hour, mile after mile, on a frankly bewildering array of topics, the content of which make Ripley’s Believe It or Not seem like a parish newsletter produced by the cake-baking, flower-arranging members of the local Women’s Institute.

 

I arrived in the UK exhausted from my travels. I arrived in Norwich a broken man. If I try to sleep, I hear Wassell’s voice once more recounting the malicious habits of the Honeybadger and its ancient feud with seagulls, or arguing that the conspiracy theories around the mysterious assassination of JFK are themselves part of a larger conspiracy by the Church of Scientology to cover up the fact that Kennedy was about to mutate into an Operating Thetan who would, in time, become the diminutive actor Tom Cruise, heir apparent to the throne of the soon-to-be-established earth-based outpost of the Galactic Thetan Empire (CEO: L ‘Ron’ Hubbard. Motto: “All Power To The Hubb!”) Can you blame me for taking refuge in the amniotic bliss that is Jodrill’s Chode?