Shepherd's Bush Empire, London
Here it is then, the biggest date on the tour, and the biggest headlining gig of Matt's career (and in fact for all of us). It is pretty exciting, what with the big AQUALUNG on the marquee and everything. It's amazing how small it looks when there's no one there. I've played here a few times in a supporting capacity, and it looks very big when it's busy. Very big.
We had a bit of a problem with my Rhodes keyboard last night so I take a little trip to Denmark Street to buy some new sustain pedals. While I'm there I decide to buy myself a "midi pedalboard" with which to "remotely control" my "guitar effects processor". It is big and silver and faintly masturbatory, and helps me to feel like a professional musician all the more (my current pedalboard is made from the eating part of a baby's highchair). It also means that I have to try and understand how the fuck to make it work in time for the gig. Experience has shown that you should never ever use a new piece of equipment on the day you buy it, especially if it's the biggest gig of your career. But I laugh in the face of experience. Ha ha ha.
We have taken delivery of an empty grand piano case for the show, which Matt is going to put his keyboard in. This is showbusiness, see, which is all about surface, effect, style, illusion, lying. It's a big stage - we have to fill it with something.
It's weird, the effect of stress on the brain. I didn't feel that nervous, but when I got onstage (to the sound of what seemed to be a small jet taking off) small holes kept appearing in my mind where there would normally be instructions about what to do with my hands and voice. It was like an out-of-body experience where you get a really shit view.
Part of the problem is the way I have set up my "midi pedalboard" allows me to turn off my guitar by moving a little pedal a few nanometres too far, so I have to spend the gig carefully balancing the pedal at just the right angle, which is quite hard to do with your foot, especially while you are berating yourself for using a new piece of equipment on the day you buy it.
However, the incredible sound of 1400 attractive, discerning music fans shouting hooray all together even if you are playing like a mule with its hooves up its arse gradually makes me forget my troubles and the last quarter of the gig is as good as I dreamed it might be. (A few weeks ago Matt had a Shepherd's Bush Empire dream that went like this: during the day of Matt's appearance at Shepherd's Bush Empire, there is a problem the computer which means that he has to go home to get something (all gig anxiety dreams include some element of ludicrous technical difficulty. I had one where I had to play in the wings because I could only plug my amp in in the dressing room and I didn't have a long enough lead to reach the stage). By the time he returns, the venue is full, but Tony is packing up the stage, saying no, the gig can't go on. The audience start to leave sadly until the promoter comes on saying he knows Turin Brakes, and they've agreed to do the show instead. The audience goes wild. Matt leaves the Empire to see them taking 'AQUALUNG' down and putting up 'TURIN BRAKES' instead. So it was a lot better than Matt dreamed it would be). Finally the rock-opera style River Song makes some kind of sense. This was what we were imagining when we first started playing it for our own amusement in rehearsals (rather than, say, a small fringe theatre in Belfast). After taking our final bow, we stand in with Roberto and Paul in the wings and watch Matt singing Nowhere at his fake grand piano with a sea of happy faces lifted towards him.
Afterwards there was the disconcerting experience of the aftershow party, where all of a sudden you find yourself and all of your friends in a bar and you remember that you have a life outside of the big silver bus. I guess I'll have to get back to it quite soon. A funny thought.
Dom is extremely touched because he got his first ever round of applause for a lighting cue, when he first turned on the beautiful blue starry backdrop as we went into the middle eight of Good times. I heard the applause but I didn't know what it was for. I just figured my arse was showing again.
