mostly david ephgrave

Last night, while reading in bed, my mind wandered to the time I ate some chips in the green room of Trinity Arts Centre, Gainsborough. It was only after attempting to read the same sentence for the fourth or fifth time that I realised I wasn’t paying attention to my book. Not only that: it suddenly dawned on me how often I think of this seemingly unmemorable incident when my brain is in its resting state. The question is: why has this one meal become ingrained in my memory? It wasn't special. I’ve eaten a lot of food backstage through the years. It's hardly an unusual situation. They weren’t even good chips. They were pretty subpar - and not the sort of thing I wanted to eat before the two hours' worth of singing that lay ahead. That's one of the downsides to touring: you sometimes have to make do with what you can get. What if, in years to come, this becomes my only vivid memory? What if I end my days lost at sea, wrestlin...

Twelve years ago, I toured the UK with a show called ‘Rock and Roll Heaven’. One week, we found ourselves stranded at Grimsby Auditorium. There are a few downsides to touring. One of them is having Grimsby on your itinerary. The town has very little to speak of, except for the Auditorium which isn’t ; it’s a sports hall, caught adrift in the midst of a deserted residential area. You could put together a strong case suing the venue for Trade Descriptions; a theatre, it’s not. Another problem with touring is finding somewhere to eat. You can spend hours wandering a city, trying to find a decent meal before you need to be at the theatre. The only options in Grimsby were chips, chips or chips (with optional fish). One day, we visited the neighbouring town of Cleethorpes. The streets literally smelt of gravy. It was as ominous as it was savoury. Whilst sitting in a café tucking into a round of fried breakfasts (which wasn’t much different from eating chips), we looked out o...