The Tour Report
I got rhythm,
I got music;
I got my band,
Who could ask for anything more?
The tour will leave us with many happy memories, but for those who didn't go, this is the tour report, as read out at the AGM on 12th May, 1997.....
We had
done well to reach Blackpool at all, really. Stuart, in charge of the tour, had
locked himself out of his house at a crucial moment; and the random bloke he had
found in the engineering department to drive the minibus had a vital seminar when
we should have been well on our way. The only person who didn't mind the delay
was the principal clarinet, who was several hours late anyway thanks to an inconveniently-timed
essay crisis and to his boots deciding to fall apart. 
Stuart
had booked us into a small hotel on the outskirts of the town. He had deliberately
gone for one which we would fill by ourselves, which was probably just as well.
The poor hotel proprietor couldn't have really known what was about to hit him
that evening, when we all landed in his bar. A bunch of students was one thing;
a conductor mercilessly tipped upside down by the sax 'n' horn heavy mob was acceptable;
but having the UCCB concert tape playing on his far-too-good stereo was taking
hospitality to the limits. His good grace and tolerance lasted only until the
piece with the bagpipes. 
"Matey", as for some reason he had become known, finally revealed his own musical taste the next morning, as the band descended, bleary-eyed, to breakfast to the mellifluous sounds of... er... Michael Jackson. This was particularly surprising as Matey himself bore a distinct resemblance to Phil Collins. This sonic torture could not go unanswered. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, and none come more than Richard, our very own mini-maestro. His plan was ingenious in its simplicity: by arranging a mid-morning rehearsal for the band in the hotel itself, Matey would at last get a chance to hear real music.
Well, sort of. The tour band was somewhat smaller than the gargantuan horde
of musicians which had squeezed itself into Queens' Old Hall the previous weekend.
Nevertheless, most parts were covered, with the aid of Emily dextrously juggling
flute and sax, and Stuart and Naomi juggling what appeared to be an entire bass
brass section between them. The comedy was provided by the motley percussion
collection, which, in the absence of a percussionist, was distributed around
the band on the basis of who had rests. Thus Dave was responsible for the hi-hat
when his horn wasn't needed, Stuart thwacked the side drum with his free hand,
and Naomi played euph in one hand and maracas in the other whilst turning a
page. In fact, how the maracas were scheduled for six different players in the
course of one concert programme remains a feat of logistics unmatched to this
day. And poor Matey didn't know what to make of it. 
And so to our first engagement, which, as is traditional in this band, involved
busking somewhere in the cold. St Anne's, a town a few miles down the coast,
proved to be as cold as had been feared, although the Powers That Be had thoughtfully
provided some chairs for our patch in the town square, so at least we shivered
in comfort. As the band went through the familiar programme - Cockleshell Heroes,
West Side Story, The Liberty Bell - a few people appeared on the streets. Some
stopped to listen; a handful even made a contribution to the UCCB collection
bucket. Drawn by the presence of a sedentary crowd made up of Stuart's and Rachel's
relatives, a few hardy locals even abandoned their shopping to listen to the
remainder of the performance. One such random woman was so impressed with the
band that she presented our musical director with a daffodil, a gesture which
I am sure Richard would have appreciated had he not been attempting to conduct
Capriccio at the time. 
Afterwards, as we were packing up, the random daffodil woman kept asking weird
questions. She was unanimously referred to Stuart, the rest of the band subtly
retreating, discretion being the better part of cowardice. Stuart was relieved
(as we all were) to hear her proclaim "I'm not after your body," although Richard
professed himself "most offended" when she then made the same declaration to
him. Escape was at hand in the form of warmth and hot drinks offered by Stuart's
sister, who conveniently lived just round the corner. The proceeds from the
performance turned out to be £35, which was a great improvement on our previous
effort, at the Grafton Centre, which had yielded only £8 and not even a daffodil.
Them's good, them Lanky-shire folk. 
The evening concert was a performance in a home for the blind, again in St
Anne's. This was possibly the most responsive audience the UCCB has ever had,
singing along with the music in West Side Story and The Dambusters; one star
man in the audience clearly knew all the words to Maria and Somewhere. The comment
of the night, though, was overheard as we were leaving: "They're quite good,
but one of the trumpets is very sharp." He obviously hadn't noticed the principal
clarinet's (lack of) tuning on the top notes in The Dambusters. 
Saturday night is, of course, clubbing night, and the spirit of Stephen Tighe
and Charles Cooke happily lives on in the Concert Band. First base turned out
to be a somewhat soulless pub, distinguished only by the presence of the Warwick
women's rugby team, who seemed to be combining laddish drinking with the prominent
display of random underwear. Undistracted by this, and by the ability of the
Tighe twins to confuse everyone by subtly swapping places, the ever-radiant
social animals of the UCCB pondered the most pressing question: which club to
go to? 
For a town supposedly stiff with clubs, finding one was proving oddly tricky. One was full of 1970s music; another was full of sixteen-year-olds enjoying their first taste of life on the edge. Sadly, your present scribe can say very little about the outcome, as he eschewed the noise and smoke in favour of the chippie. Apparently, the die-hard clubbers eventually abandoned their attempt to find somewhere respectable, and had to make do with the aforesaid teenage haunt. However, he can report that a senior female member of the band achieved the undisputed pull of the night - even if the bloke in question turned out to be a tad young...
"It's like this: there are three of us in Two and five of us in Four; there
were four in Eight but now there's one of them in Nine, which is ten instead
of fifteen quid; and the two in Six were only there for two nights out of three,
unlike the three in Five who were there before. There were only twenty-one in
total so that totals fifty-five less five less is fifty less, OK?" 
After ten minutes of this he folded, and we went off to enjoy ourselves at the Pleasure Beach. "You just can't visit Blackpool without going on The Big One," someone said, but this cut no ice with Chairman Helen, who kept her feet gaiaphilically on the ground. "I'm not going on that" she insisted, even before we saw the cars grind to a worrying halt half-way up the ascent - twice.
Kindness of the day: Abi proved her prowess on the rifle range and won a prize in the process; she promptly gave it to a little kiddie who was upset because he hadn't got one...
Our final concert of the tour was in a hotel just beyond the pleasure beach. Our fee was, apparently, to be free drinks. When we turned up, it proved to be the classiest venue to date - a posh hotel with a real dance floor and pretty little lights set into the ceiling. The background music left something to be desired though; we could tell this was an establishment of dubious musical taste as we entered to the sound of the repeated mantra "check" set against a pointless rhythm - as Dave put it, "Spassky-Karpov 1975: The Musical".
Even if our own music was an improvement, though, the audience were not noticeably
enthusiastic - most of them paid more attention to the live football coverage
on the large-screen television. The management didn't seem too impressed, either
- the interval drinks turned out to be non-alcoholic only, and the speed with
which the resident DJ resumed his records after we had signed off with The Muppets
suggested that we were not the greatest of attractions. A chacun son gout...
Even Matey, it seems, had tired of us, for when we got back to the hotel he had barricaded himself in his room and refused to open the bar until the conciliatory negotiators in the band persuaded him to open it until midnight. And thus was happiness achieved - Kathryn tearing up beer mats, Rachel building a house of cards, and everyone else just drinking. However, it must be stressed that the Musical Director was stone cold sober when he unaccountably said "I want to have sex with a rabbit."
The final too-early-for-some breakfast, the final dose of Michael Jackson, the last goodbye to Matey. The itinerant musicians eventually took their leave of the hotel, with a smile here and a laugh there, but sadly without Kathryn's pyjamas, which had disappeared without trace and are now on the National Missing Pyjamas Register. That aside, though, the end of the tour saw us like this: several reeds the worse for wear, several concerts happier, many Stuart jokes wearier, the odd romance further, £35 and a daffodil richer. And, best of all, we returned to New Hall to find that someone had offered Helen a job. Isn't life great?
Kathryn's pyjamas are still missing. Lancashire Police have offered a reward.
We only went to Blackpool because someone suggested it as a joke. Now someone's suggested that next year's tour should involve camping in Sherwood Forest. Better check those tent pegs...
GRAHAM JAMES
With additional material by DAVE PRITCHARD
Maintained by UCCB committee Last modified 22 Dec 1999