Mediolanum, Milan

Mediolanun is a monstrous concrete edifice on the outskirts of Milan that seats 15 000. Corridors loop around the auditorium on both sides. It was a good seven minute walk around the building to get from The Phoenix to our dressing room. I took to cycling. Those that allow their hand held devices to track their movements were comparing figures as high as 19 km by foot by the time the flotilla of buses made its way out of the yard that night to deposit the entourage at airport hotels.

The last day on a long tour can be a bit scratchy: after six weeks living out of a bus and a wardrobe case and a suitcase in a series of thirty five dressing rooms and a dozen hotels, trying to repack your life into airline compliant bags is not trivial. (Never mind the lurking prospect of finding yourself back in the sur-real world.)

But once the proper business of the day begins the quotidian stresses of finding forgotten, unwashed laundry, or realising that the jacket bought in Dublin on a whim as a present for someone back home won't fit in your bags recede to their proper place.

At the risk of a stereotyping oversimplification the audience in Mediolanum was the most excited, the most animated and the best dressed of the tour. This turned out to be a fitting end.

I made the decision to grace the stage, for only the second time on the tour, with a frankly outrageous white pin-stripe three piece suit. It had become drenched with sweat on its first showing in Munchen requiring an very expensive trip to a Paris dry-cleaners. It now hung sparkling in our dressing room—it seemed rude not to wear it in Milan. (And during fashion week!)

There was dancing right from the beginning of Always The Last To Know; as the auditorium filled couples took advantage of still being able to move around and came to the front to take selfies with us on stage as the backdrop. A bloke at the barrier at my feet nodded and clapped, egging us on appreciatively. Not what happens in Cardiff, or even in Glasgow. The seats were pretty much full for Stone Cold Sober and Nothing Ever Happens. There were even a few Milanese singing along, unexpected as it is decades since we last played a show in Italy.

Simple Minds' incendiary intro music brought the 15 000 Milanese to their feet. An hour-and-a-half later they la la la la'd their heroes back to the stage with an three minute acapella audience reprise of the chorus Don't You (Forget About Me).

This was the most enjoyable Simple Minds show of the tour for me. Jim had been struggling with an infection that had made the previous two nights difficult for him but tonight he was back firing on all cylinders. He had the room at his beck and call from the count in to Waterfront and charmed the audience with his fluent Italian. The band rose to the occasion sounding the best I heard them in six weeks. Sarah's rendition of Book Of Brilliant Things that opens the encore was stunning.

When all was said and done, back in the labyrinth backstage everything felt overly emotional and anti-climactic; goodbyes to some; au revoirs to others we will see again in June on a short run of UK shows; a glass of beer and a brief chat with Charlie and Ged and Gordy before we were summoned back to The Phoenix, now a jarring environment: a chattel-house cleared of our possessions revealed as a non-space readied for its next motley crew of itinerants.

Thirty minutes later we disembarked at the Moxy, an airport hotel with boutique pretensions but a vacuous locale by definition no matter how hard it was trying to be otherwise. Things were already getting fractured. Some of the band of brothers were already, ominously, trying to get the hotel bar to open. Suitcases had been abandoned in the lobby.

I drank a final shot of tequila on The Phoenix with Simon and Jimbo (which seems to have become be something of a tradition), headed into the hotel through the deserted parking lot with my bags and snuck through the lobby to my room as inconspicuously as one can in a white pin-striped three piece suit. This is how tours end.