Three gigs in four days - first one was a last minute call - as a Port Vale season ticket holder I got an email offering some GA tickets for the Robbie Williams Homecoming charity stadium show - as I was doing nothing on Saturday - and I could walk to the ground - I went for it. It was quite enjoyable - Mr Williams knows his place - he's a popular entertainer and his set reflected this. Quite emotional too as two of his earliest homes were within yards of the ground. The crowd was largely made up of locals and he came on for the encore in next season's PVFC home top. Everyone in the Potteries has a Robbie story - I first came across him aged 16, when I was at my then girlfriend's birthday party in the Sneyd Arms pub. I remember him wearing an oversize jacket and jumping around on the dancefloor exactly as he does on stage. Then there was the time that a girl in one of my English classes brought in his toenail in a jewelry box.. (he'd been playing five a side locally with some mates and had bust his nail and somehow the girl - Stacey - had gotten hold of it...) - in 2007 when my band played in the States we used a dep guitarist Scott Ralph - Scott ended up writing for Robbie...and in addition to all that I taught Robbie's nephew Freddy for GCSE English. It's a small musical world...
The day after was somewhat different - I went to see Canadian Suzie Ungerleider in Alstonfield - a tiny (but lovely) village in the Staffordshire Moorlands on the Staffs/Derbyshire border. The crowd was roughly 0.1% of the previous night, but Suzie's sharp wit and ear for melody and a clever lyric was enjoyable for a chilled Sunday night avoiding everything to do with so-called "royalty".
Monday off, then on Tuesday it was up to Manchester to see Joshua Hedley - a non-apologetic country singer who's been playing bars since the age of ten. His main instrument is fiddle, but he's a solid guitarist and has a wonderful tenor voice. Nicknamed "Mr Jukebox" from his ability to play pretty much anything from the pantheon of country music, his set was bookended by songs from his own two albums and in the middle he took shout-out requests from the audience. He played my call for Faron Young, so I was happy. I'll be catching him again later in the year when he plays the Take Root Festival in Groningen in the Netherlands.
..and to top it all, I got asked to be the official photographer at the Static Roots Festival in Germany in a month's time! (Obviously I said yes).
Next up for me I'm promoting the Magpie Arc in Biddulph on Friday. Still tickets available!