You’d think leaving at 10.30am to travel 200 miles was leaving a reasonable buffer in case of traffic problems. Oooops. this is New York City. I’ll never complain about the M6 again. Fair enough, we’re in a big old tour bus with a top speed of 60mph, but by the time we got to 110th street, we were doing an average of 1 block every 5 minutes. We were heading for 16th, and well, as they say here, you do the math. The venue tonight is The Fillmore at Irving Plaza. I thought it was Fillmore East - the iconic venue that hosted classic gigs by Zappa, Hendrix, John Mayall etc, but Live Nation (more big-business) has just rebranded what was 'Irving Plaza'. In any case, it was a fantastic, dark, sweaty NYC club. Easy to imagine the Burlesque acts of the 20s and 30s here. Stage was the size of my hotel bathroom, and the crew were having a nervous breakdown, but it was still a great vibe. The other bands were also late arriving and had overrun soundcheck so we had to make do with a line check from behind the curtain, 10 mins from showtime, while the place filled up. Had to plug straight into my amp for the show and ditch my pedals, because the 110v to 240v transformer wasn’t working. No time to investigate why, Tom was about to count us in. “…2,3, 4”.
Had a great show, everyone dug deep and it was a loud, responsive crowd. Ironically, the guitar sounded great, even without my gadgets – it does annoy me when Birch is right, he’s been saying for years – “One amp, One Guitar” I may be reconsidering my setup in the next few days…
Romantically, we had a chicken salad on Broadway and then climbed back in the bus for the trip to Atlantic City. Oh. The glamour.
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