Manchester Arena

This place makes the venue in Leeds seem almost intimate. Some of the people working on the show are clocking 15 000 steps just getting around the building. The eight trucks worth of stuff that seem to be required to make music happen in a place like this were once again routinely tipped, built and tested by lunchtime without fuss or stress by the itinerant professionals on the buses aided by an army of hi-vizzed and hard-hatted local crew. It can take us longer to get our back-line up and running at rehearsals.

For my part I fuelled up on sausages and bacon (courtesy of the lovely Sarah, Tom, Rob and Ellie who cook three meals a day for a hundred people—the hardest working unit in the entourage), built my trusty Airnimal Joey, and set off under cloudless skies to cycle the banks of the Irwell to the Clifton Viaduct. Curious brand-name notwithstanding (there is a pun lurking in there somewhere—animal, air, baby kangaroo, but I can't grasp it—it's not even an Australian company: the bikes are made in Cambridge) they are fantastic machines and perfect for life on the road.

The Irwell doubles back on itself in a series of horseshoe loops as it snakes north from Manchester city centre through a chain of wetlands and parks. A couple of hours and a pleasant enough cycle but the final kilometre of the towpath swung back from the Irwell along the side of a huge recycling plant—hey, we need these places, we need to embrace them as a necessary and, therefore, as a good thing. This is a site that looks like might have been lost to nature since the early days of the industrial revolution so what better place for it, but the runoff has turned the surrounding forest into a stinking quagmire that defeated the Airnimal who had to be ported for the last 200m. The Clifton Viaduct was a bit underwhelming and the cloudless skies had given way to more typical Manchester weather by the time I arrived so straight back by the most direct route available. Head down into the rain and twenty minutes later I was back in the zone at the AO Arena in time for lunch.

At Leeds we had a frantic hour before doors opened to get our shit together on a stage we had never been on before with a pa that we have never used before which inevitably leaves even seasoned professionals a bit more jangled than they would like. We were much more settled on stage in Manchester and our lovely crew were at the top of their game. I still had pretty much no voice to sing with but strangely there were about four things I was able to belt out and the Tom Waits husk that I have at the moment actually seemed to make those sound better. And there were a couple of points on stage when I usually sing but my voice wouldn't work when I found myself wondering if there might even be a marginal gain from being able to concentrate solely on playing. But I will be so glad to be rid of this, not just because the shows will be better—I still have the nagging worry that more mission critical vocal chords than mine might be silenced by this lurgy if it gets passed around.