Shiny Happy Old People

And so Rod and Sharon, sound engineer and top drawer vocalist, arrive back from Hawai'i, tanned and healthy and finally married.
As I've said before, may copious and effusive congratulations overflow in their general direction.

A big hotel on the north Norfolk coast has been taken over and braces itself for a wedding party full of musicians (second only to footballers for debauchery) … inflatable palm trees, virgin sacrifice, dancing with goats, dressing up as characters from Hawai'i 5-0, industrial quantities of booze, a pretty good covers band, real surf just outside the windows …

Being a professional curmudgeon, I come not as 5-0's Steve Mc.Garrett, but instead come dressed as the twat out of Miami Vice, only to meet up with Michael in the car park, who, being also curmudgeonly inclined, has coincidentally come dressed as the twat out of Miami Vice.
Crockett, a suspiciously white Tubbs and the lovely Miriam enter a plastic and neon Hawai'i to be greeted by the newly nuptualised Mr and Mrs P, who are ludicrously tanned and almost illegally happy.

Lots of beautiful women kiss and hug me, but unfortunately, they are mostly the wives, girlfriends and daughters of other musicians. However, I am distracted from any potentially available mate by the fact that - for the first time in ages - the gang's all here. Yaaay!

The gang are a hardcore of musicians who have played together in way too many bands and at way too many recording sessions for the past twenty-five years or so since we first met (a couple of years back Steve gave me a beautifully boxed set of some of his favourite sessions we had played at … it ran to eighteen CDs).

And so the night disappears in reminiscences, tears of laughter streaming down our ravaged old faces. Even though I try to keep my music and my blog separate, some of these tales have been set aside for future posts as they are so bizarre they just have to be told.

Tragically, Steve - an extraordinarily gifted bassist who originally brought the gang together as his "dream team" of pretentious, virtuoso, session prima-donnas - has been struck down with motor neurone disease and has been deteriorating for some time now, so because of this and other band commitments the gang very rarely come together on stage these days.
He is remarkably chipper, telling us how his electric wheelchair makes dog-walking a lot easier, though not for the long-suffering hound being dragged behind him.
This evening, however, he is getting about with a stick which is great to see. He even manages a dance with Sonia, bringing a lump to my throat. We all love him dearly.

Steve is organising another charity bash for us - date and venue tba - sometime in the new year, where I'll go head to head with regular guest Ron S again.
That's always fun; we try to do it at least once a year. Ron won Guitarist magazine's player of the year at Wembley two years running (they wouldn't let him back again after that), and we - the grizzled old man and the kid pretender - grin at one another and go at it head to head in a monstrously self-indulgent frenzy of pointless, widdly speed guitar, driving one another on to absurd heights of unlistenable stupidity.
All of which is tremendously popular with our fans, the drooling horde of guitar nerds we call the Salivation Army, and so raises a decent amount of cash for motor neurone research.

The wedding party is a huge success, but the upshot of all our reminiscing is that, by the time we come up for air, all the unattached attractive women have gone home.
Ah, well … yet again I miss my chance for humiliation and rejection.

And I have overslept by five hours and feel like I've cleaned the hotel carpet with my tongue.
Bleurgh …

I need coffee.

Congratulations and much love to Rod and Sharon.