Stevenage

[paul and sue]

Nearly five hours to get to Stevenage, what a joke, only to find that the Concert Hall had decided to move "The Legend Lives On" show over to their other theatre "The Gordon Craig". It is a rabbit warren of a place anyway, and if it wasn't for Zak (with a K), it would have taken me double the time to hump all the equipment over to the other venue.

Then guess what - the stage area wasn't ready, apparantly there was a film showing in the afternoon and they were running late. One of the theatre staff had beeen running around trying to contact everyone who had bought tickets to inform them the show wouldn't start until 8.00pm, but no-one thought to tell Matt. Instead of a 5.00pm band call, which is the same time throughout the tour, the checks couldn't be made until 6.30pm.

If I tell you that the theatre also doubles as a gymnasium, you might get the picture of what sort of venue it was. The crew were rather fraught but Zak opened the show with his own inimitable style. The audience were fairly light tonight at only 300+ but you wouldn't have known that by the noise they made with their applause. Another great show, normally I don't get to see all of it but the "Gordon Craig" had a camera set up at the side of the stage which projected the images on the stage onto TV monitors in the bar areas, so I was able to watch all of it. Zak sang a great rendition of the Rod Stewart number "In My Heart" and finished his 45 minutes off with one of my favourite songs "Danny Boy".
Matt was Matt, great as always, it gets hard after so many days of writing about the show, to find different ways of saying it was great.

Lots of management, agents and producers in and the dressing room was full of bodies, we didn't get back to the hotel until nearly 1.00am.

I have to admit we are three quarters of the way through the tour now and I am knackered, it's been six nights on the trot and in fact up to now there has only been three days off in total.

Peterborough tonight and then onto "Monro Towers" for a whole day off on Friday - well I say day off - by the time we get to Harrow it is likely to be about 3.00pm, then we have to restock the merchandise, dry clean Matt's dress suits and press the shirts and then he has to sign any fan mail that Michele has received. Michele, Matt and I will then have a meeting regarding the rest of the tour, go over any guest lists and discuss the last minute details for the Fan Club Meet on Monday.

I have to say Michele works like a dog, she is constantly in the office into the small hours and is up at 6.30am every morning. I know she is deep in the process of getting the new album ready for a January release to tie in with Valentine's Day, getting the new fan club up and running, arranging the Fan Club Meet, getting the updates ready for 1st December, designing and ordering the stock for this tour so we don't run out, answering all the fan mail (she gets over 50 e-mails a day) and working on 4 other projects for next year, I really don't know how she does it, but she seems to take it in her stride.

Until later
Bye for now
Paul

[mariana44]

Hi Paul--you are doing a magnificent job reporting on this tour---but I have to say that I am quite exhausted just reading about it !!

Hope you get a few hours break, to relax!!