A week's tour, 4 gigs, two countries - what could possibly go wrong? Well, we nearly didn't make it out of London, let alone to Holland or Germany. John's van (John is the wonderful John Matts, who was on guitar, backing vocals and driving duties) I was assured, had just had a full service and £700 worth of work done to make sure that it was ship shape for the tour. Nevertheless there was a strange knocking sound coming from what sounded like the front right wheel, which, though ignorable at first, seemed to get worse and worse very quickly as we were driving towards the outskirts of London. So bad in fact that we pulled over at a services, John checked all the tyres and pumped them up again; we drove a bit more; the knocking was still there. We pulled over into a side road (I should mention that it was tipping it down with rain). John rang the AA - we were told a 3 hour possible waiting time. It was already 9:30 at night and we were hoping to reach Harwich at a sensible hour to get up early the next morning for a 9am ferry (that's very early in musician time btw). It looked like we might not get there at all.
John got down on his hands and knees to look under the car and puled off a huge bit of non-essential plastic that he thought to be the problem. We cancelled the AA and drove on, but didn't get far as the sound had somehow got even worse. We called the AA again and were given a slightly shorter waiting time. We listened to September by Earth, Wind and Fire on repeat to try and cheer ourselves up and discussed the worst case scenario (having to drive back to mine, dump the van and take my car which wouldn't fit all the kit in it). The AA guy eventually arrived and took a look at the wheel - nothing seemed to be wrong with it that he could see and nothing he could do for us at the roadside. We'd have to drive it back and take it to a garage, i.e. worst case scenario. Our heads drooping, we got back in the car and started our potentially loud and slow journey back to mine. We got 10 metres before we realised this van was definitely not safe to drive. I waved at the AA man to come and help us again. When he pulled up, he said he'd been screaming at us to stop driving because he could now see the problem. It was the other front wheel and it was wobbling all over the place. On further inspection it turned out that we were missing 3 wheel nuts, yes 3, as in there was only one left on the wheel my side, and that one was loose. The guys at KwikFit had somehow forgotten to tighten the nuts on one of John's new wheels and we were about half a mile from losing the wheel completely - arghhhhh, scarily close call through someone's absentmindedness! Anyway, our AA guy then took a wheel nut from a couple of the other wheels to add to my wheel and after all of the drama we were soon on our way to Harwich singing along to Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again". What a crazy start to the tour, the rest of which went off without a hitch :-) Thanks to everyone who hosted us on our travels and gave us a stage to share some tunes.
I hope you've been enjoying August's CD and are ready for something a bit different from September's limited edition, "Honestly". See below for little preview video of my cover of A&E by Goldfrapp. All the tracks this month come from electronic bands, but I've recorded them in my own acoustic style. Here's the full track listing:
Laura - Bat for Lashes A&E - Goldfrapp Glory Box - Portishead Let Me Love You - DJ Snake, Justin Bieber With Every Heartbeat - Robyn La La La - Naughty Boy, Sam Smith There are a few copies left, which you can snap up via my 12 Months of Madness page http://www.hattiebriggs.co.uk/12-months-of-madness. Get in there quick as I'm sending out the first batch tomorrow :-) Thanks again to Martyn Royce for the awesome cover art.
My final piece of news is that I'll be performing at the BBC Goodfood Tower of London Feast this Saturday. The full festival runs from 22nd-24th, but I'm only performing on Saturday.
That is all :-) xxx |
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February 2019
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