Beer's Eye View

8am thursday morning I'm holding on to a 20 meter parking space across the road from the Alhambra.
This is for the truck with the equipment that is expected to arrive before 9am having driven in overnight from Lucerne. Load in is scheduled for 12 noon I've got my team of humpers lined up for 11-30 to be on the safe side. The team is made up of Steve (I'm just a friend) Cass, Jon (funkymaps are lighter than a flight case) King, Terry Lee (I've done this before and that's why I'm wearing gardening gloves) Hale, Olivier my regular sound guy and Kevin the Witty. At 10am I get a call from tour manager Eric Frankenhausen telling me that the truck has been held up at the Swiss border and won't be in Paris before 3pm. So much for the noon load in!
I call off the team and put them on hold.
I hang on to the parking space for two hours until I see (to my surprise) the tour bus coming up the street.
In the schedule they were going to drop Lucinda and the band off at the Crowne Plaza hotel on Place de la Republique and park the bus over in the Bercy coach parking lot. After three tense, traffic backed up to faubourg du Temple, attempts they manage to squeeze the tour bus into the equipment truck's parking space.
There seems to have been a change of plan!
Though the band have been dropped off at the hotel, Lucinda still asleep in the bus, has opted out of hotel accommodation and will stay on the bus until show time which means the bus will stay outside the venue until it's time to go time. 2pm and the gear truck is 300 kms out of Paris. We hang around checking ut the venue, Alison Young errands off to find organic honey, herbal mint tea and Starbucks coffee cups.
"Just the cups not the coffee. 5 please."
I keep my eye on a suitable 20 meter parking spot for the truck to park in.
When it comes, which it does at 4-45pm a parking space is secured
and the truck fits like an oversized glove.

I've got the humping team back and at 5pm we start to unload an extraordinary amount of flight cases, wheeling them down the road past the cars parked right outside of the venue,
back up the pavement and up onto the ramps into the auditorium.
With doors scheduled for 7pm we/they have 2 hours to set up, there won't be any sound check just a line check and on with the show. They bring their own front of house and monitor mixing consoles,
one of which has to be hauled up onto the balcony. It's all a pain and strain in every part of the body
but we get it done and by 6pm Lucinda's crew is wiring everything up.
Hats off to Nick Close (guitar tech) for being so coherent, cooperative and polite with his instructions.
Just as well they had english speakers to give orders to.
Of course the 5 hour delay has thrown everything off kilter, last minute shopping is just that
when Heather Price and Djamel go off in search of Gatorade and Makers Mark whisky
around 6-30pm by which time Lucinda is in the building and if she wants it we need to get her
an early dinner. She doesn't feel like eating I guess 'cause she just stays ensconced in her dressing room.
Tour manager Eric has some issues about the load in, the eventual load out, the security, the parking
and the pizzas that need to be delivered (sliced) to the tour bus after the show.
Ordering a bunch of Pizzas should have been the least of our problems. It wasn't.
7-30 pm and after some negotiating, which involved asking all of those who had been let in already to leave the auditorium and wait outside, we finally get to "officially" open the doors.
Buick 6 go on at 8 pm we're only running 10 minutes late, the sound is good despite the eclipsed sound-check and the room though far from full feels as though it is once the house lights have gone down.
Those who saw the show said it was really good, the audience were a bit reserved compared to 2007 but this was probably because they were seated. Or maybe they could feel the tension on our side of the stage?
We managed to stretch the 10-30 pm curfew (thank you the Alhambra management) and as the pizzas were on their way Lucinda did a three song encore including ACDC's "It's A Long Way To The Top" during which someone flailing his arms on the edge of the top of the balcony looked alarmingly like he might fall off onto the seats below before things became a little more sedate for a solo acoustic version of Hendrix's "Angel".
11 pm and it was time to go and get the gear out, with an extra three pairs of hands Eric needn't have worried about clearing the decks efficiently. I hear it was done in record time.
The pizzas arrived and they were the wrong sizes though they were the sizes ordered.
Lucinda came out of her dressing room and chatted with fans who were still hanging around.
Later I gave her some posters for the band and she signed some for my team.
After a hug and a kiss the vehicles (for some strange reason) drove in reverse along the rue Yves Toudic and off into the night, direction Calais and on to Gateshead.
Those of the team still standing grabbed what drinks remained after the night-rider had been loaded into the bus and we all went back to the sound gallery to wind down and make some of our own music.
I lost money and didn't make friends with everyone involved
but I made some new friends and kept some old ones
including Lucinda I'm glad to say.

Karel