A bit of a wonky start to a tour, all things considered. A very mild bout of the sniffles that was niggling me during the rehearsals but seemed innocuous enough started to feel a tiny bit more worrying on Thursday evening. By the time the bus departed at midnight from the rehearsal room for Leeds I felt a bit of huskiness in my voice. Waking up outside the First Direct Arena my first impression was that the lurgy had departed in the night—the annoying sniff had certainly gone. But when first I tried to speak on Friday morning it became apparent that I had almost completely lost my voice: my vocal utterances were reduced to a Minnie Mouse squeak. Me not being able to sing is a serious wobble but not a Del Amitri show stopper. In fact overall I felt better than I had all week. But, shit, what if Justin got this. Or even the redoubtable Mr Kerr. I didn't have any other symptoms so was probably not infections but nonetheless self-quarantine wandering the streets of Leeds on my own (and possibly also Manchester and Dublin but surely I will be over this by Belfast) or in the back lounge of the bus was gonna have to be my MO until I got over this.

Touring as the support act on a big tour is a bit of an odd thing to do at the best of times and a lot of the pleasure comes from the camaraderie of hanging our with your band of brothers and chewing the fat in catering with the chavales working for the headliner. Wandering around Morrison's glumly looking for the Fisherman's Friends aisle on a dreary Friday afternoon wondering whether to go the park or the library or back to the empty tour bus next is not really living the dream. By show time I seemed to have recovered the very lowest part of my vocal range. Avoiding the dressing room I lurked around the side of the stage in the darkness for the pre-show half hour trying to assess what backing vocals, if any, I was going to manage. Once we were called to action the answer turned out to be almost none—most of the times I advanced on my standard issue Shure Brothers SM58 microphone absolutely nothing emanated from my stricken vocal chords, quite a surreal experience that I can't recall ever happening before in all our years of touring. And quite distracting: perversely, not singing seemed to make concentrating on playing more difficult. After successfully negotiating the bass guitar part on the middle eight of Driving With The Brakes On which is tricky but normally executed totally on auto-pilot while I concentrate on singing the three-part harmony with Kris and Justin, I got completely lost on the following verse which should have been a breeze. C'est la vie; while you are poking the shark in the eye a pesky jelly fish drifts past and stings you on the arse¹.

Justin was in fine voice and in fine form, leading from the front—engaging and humorous—he is still more than capable of carrying the show and none of my difficulties were likely to bother, or even be noticed by anyone in the audience. I returned to my solitary den at the back of the bus with a vile infusion of Throat Coat tea and a tot of liquor to see me through the night on the M62.

Footnotes

¹ You might have heard that you should punch the shark in the nose you do wind up under sustained shark attack if you find yourself under a sustained shark attack. This is probably not a good idea, says David Shiffman at the University of Miami’s Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy studying shark ecology and conservation:

In the extremely rare instance of a prolonged negative encounter, the stereotypical advice is to punch the shark on the nose. Have you ever tried punching underwater? It doesn’t work very well. As with all animal attacks, the best advice is to go for the eye. If you poke something in the eye, it will stop what it is doing.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-to-survive-the-shark-attack-that-is-never-going-to-happen-to-you-24121725/