Papa's Got A Brand New Holdall

OK, I'll come clean. I was kind of overdramatising when I talked about fate in the last entry. But the interesting thing is, I suppose, how a large proportion of time spent managing a band turns out not to be on the Big Picture but on the really tiny things.

What happens is this: after breakfast - or as previously stated in my case, no breakfast - we load all our gear into the van. We left it in a room behind the B&B's reception after the gig and it's still all there: guitars, amps, bags... Then Charlie and I say goodbye to the girls, who have the long drive back to Swindon ahead of them. We are off to meet an old Web designer friend of Charlie's and later to go the studio where our other band will be midway through their second day's recording on the forthcoming single.

At the studio, the single is sounding amazing - particularly considering the tiny room they're doing it in but the owners there really know their stuff, they're trained BBC engineers who do this in their spare time - I must ask them why they call the place LaChunky, it almost undersells the place, as if it's some jokey voiceover room. Anyway, plug over, it's good, OK? The Web designer is amazing too, he's Travis' and the Fratellis' guy and has been doing Web design since 1994 - i.e. Internet prehistory. He totally reignites my belief in building bespoke Websites for bands instead of dumping everything on Myspace - plus, he lives in Byers Road which is full of brilliant 1950s snack bars and riches-laden charity shops.

It's still bright sun in a cloudless sky and we're walking in the vague direction of Glasgow Central Station in order to get a train to Elvis Presley Airport. Of course, it turns out that we're walking in the complete opposite direction, as I discover when we try to board a bus. The driver raises an Lanarkshire eyebrow at me and points to the bus stop on the other side of the street. It's always the same every time I come here, it's like Soho but on a city scale - I mean, in the same way that they shuffle Dean, Frith and Greek Streets around every couple of weeks, they do the same thing in Glasgow with entire portions of the city. Every time I come, Sauchihall Street is in a different place and Central Station... forget it, sometimes they put it in a different town.

So anyway, we manage to navigate our way as far as Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (too much space, too little to fill it with; a lifesize Elvis Presley sculpture next to a stuffed heron, anyone?) We actually go here so I can have a wee, loos in places of culture generally being better maintained. As I come back out onto the steps outside the building, Charlie's on the phone:
"A blue bag? A blue bag ... I don't remember, I'm afraid."
I remember seeing a blue bag go into the van. Phew, we remembered everything. We rock! I relax, making thumbs up signs at him.
"Well, if we've got it, yes, of course ..."
He let's his mobile arm flop down, the conversation is over.
"What's up?"
"We've taken someone's bag by mistake."
Bugger.

Now, this wouldn't have been too tricky had it not been for the fact that the band were now several hundred miles out of Glasgow on route to Wiltshire. And so the rest of our afternoon and evening became an odyssey of ludicrousness. The unfortunate traveller needed his bag (naturally containing passport, plane tickets, keys, small children ...) by Sunday so we'd have to get it up by courier. OK, not too onerous. And after phoning every courier company in the world, it transpired that DHL did an overnight service which cost about 50 quid during the week. Only trouble was, it was Friday and the office in Swindon closed at 6. Would the band make it back by then?

In fact they did make it back by then. Hooray! But guess what, DHL offices, don't accept credit or debit cards - only cheques. Yes, that's right, it may be 2008 but in DHL World, it's 1975. The band knew this though and brought cash. No go, they don't accept cash either, understandable, I suppose, the money could be stolen, or be novelty cash from a joke shop or maybe have a bit of dust on it. So we missed the overnight delivery. Never mind, we could still use the Same Day Service they helpfully provide at weekends:
"Certainly, sir ... Swindon to Glasgow you say? A small blue holdall? No Problemo! Let me see ... yes, that'll be £550 plus VAT."

Unsurprisingly, this service was more than happy to take my credit card number. I didn't give them the pleasure. Instead, we spoke to the B&B, forced the mobile number of the bag owner out of the afternoon language student on reception (this took about 30 minutes of concerted Slowspeak), spoke to the bag owner, who told us the hotel had agreed to pay costs, spoke to the B&B manager, who of course strenuously denied this on hearing it was a 500 quid situation, got more quotes from other couriers who were even more costly and then came up with a simple idea that I never thought would work but which solved all. We offered to pay a couple of the band's mates to go up and deliver the bag. In the end, it was Pauline, the band's personal Velvet Hammer (gets people to do things without raising her voice) who drove up with her mate Soph (the band's guitarist). They stopped off in Liverpool on the way back and painted the town completely turquoise, but that's another story.

So a happy ending of sorts: we gave some money to a far worthier cause than DHL and the gentleman, reunited with his bag, made the flight on Sunday. The B&B reluctantly admitted partial liability without fulling confessing to being idiots and shoving someone else's bag next to ours with no ID tag on it. I'm still disappointed with their uselessness and if I was a harsher man I'd write their name here so you could avoid staying there should you find yourself in Glasgow. Their showers were rubbish too.

I must say, though, as far as management goes it was perhaps our first 'get out of that one' scenario and in terms of thinking on our feet I think we're now well-equipped to deal with any future 'band detained at airport with massive amount of drugs and porn' situation. Bring it on!

I'll have a Babyshambles ...

How nice to get all that response from people on the last post. Clearly, the anxiety of growing up in a young person's world affects more people than I thought. Mind you, I uploaded some really oafish pictures of me yesterday and that knowledge didn't make me feel any better. At least my daughter Maddy still asks me to be the handsome prince whenever we play Cinderella or Aladdin or whatever fairy tale is topping her weekly chart.
"Daddy, you be Prince Ali and I'll be princess Jasmine and then we'll get married."
"Great!" I groan, anticipating another lost half hour. I have to be the entire supporting cast in these productions, so my thespian talents are stretched to their limits but despite the plum roles of prince I'm given, I find myself warming more to playing the evil Jafar or of course, the Ugly Sisters.

Talking of pantomimes, our band supported Babyshambles this week. Relax, I'm not having a go at the Shambles - actually, the little we saw of their crew and the band themselves suggested a well-oiled machine rather than the train wreck the tabloids would have. Even the handful of songs I managed to catch live had a slickness which I was surprised and maybe a little disappointed with. I have to confess to never having seen them before but I did see The Libertines on a good number of occasions, including a heart-stopping show at the 100 Club and if there is an essence of rock 'n' roll, a spirit or whatever the more corduroyed-up music journalists write about, well, they had it. But Babyshambles seemed a little bit characterless. Maybe they were having an off night. Rock 'n' roll antics had been attempted the night before in their hotel apparently but crucially, not by them. The culprit was... get this: the support band's manager! No, not one of us, we were lowly first-on-the-bill band, it was the main support - a local Glaswegian group - whose manager decided that he'd found the essence of rock 'n' roll and indeed it consisted of throwing a telly out of a hotel window. Imagine that! A TV getting thrown out of a window in 2008! I mean, apart from the full-circle cliché (i.e. perhaps it's now so naff it's cool; seen as 'classic' band behaviour) a telly in 2008 is not what it was in 1971 or whenever it was that Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison or whoever it was that first came up with the idea, chucked one out of the Sunset Marriott. Back then, TVs were big and fat and most importantly represented something rarified and expensive. Now, your average Travelodge is more likely to have a flimsy plasma screen on a tripod from Argos; it would be like throwing a sheet of A4 out of the window. Rock and furthermore, roll. Anyway, Babyshambles' tour manager banned him from the venue and later - so the ginger singer from the group told me in our shared dressing room - the band sacked him.

The group were really nice guys actually. One of them, who looked about 15, on hearing me make some remark about Eisenstein (a director I know virtually nothing about) took me for a film buff and started enthusiastically explaining his Film Noir thesis to me and how he'd traced its roots back to Battleship Potempkin. He then went on to play a sublime version of Heart of Glass on his own in the dressing room in the style of the Proclaimers. What a chap!

Our band were incredibly nervous. And not surprising really, given that two of them worship Doherty and the band had never played in a venue in front of the 1900 people which Barrowlands holds. Added to this, the fact that ahead of the 7pm Doors time the entire crew, staff, management, and hangers-on were male, must have made them feel slightly apprehensive. Interestingly though, despite the fact that they are all very attractive girls, they were treated with the utmost respect by all concerned and I don't recall anyone trying to hit on them. I put that down to the exceptional personal management provided by myself and Charlie. Or maybe everyone there was just being really professional ...

Charlie and myself, despite almost 40 collective years in the business, were on a steep learning curve. Neither of us could count the amount of times we'd swanned into a large venue as the A&R man of the band playing and just hung out with our charges, making wry comments and looking at set-lists sagely. But this was completely different, there was no time for any louche hanging out because we were having to talk to the venue's sound man or the lighting guy (and, it turned out, having to pay them) or giving the production manager a floor plan and DI plan, or gaffa taping up T-shirts to the sales stand or indeed, loading in equipment and really quickly loading out equipment. "Is this ours?" I found myself saying repeatedly and not for the last time on the trip, regretting not stencilling our gear.

We'd bought champagne to have a belated celebration of signing the band but after two sips in our dressing room, I was summoned by a Shambles official to load up our gear again (note to self: get a tour manager next time). When I'd bought the champagne earlier, I'd found some four-packs of Babycham that I coudn't resist - I didn't know they still made it. Geoff, my other management partner, and I took a peak into the Babyshambles dressing room before they arrived to see if, you know, it was full of supermodels or something, and there was a disappointing array of pedestrian chocolate (mini flakes and crunchies) and dare I say it, fruit ... If I was them I'd get a case of Babycham on every rider.

The evening didn't end in the disarray you'd expect from five slightly tiddly girls many miles from home. We were all so exhausted that even the few of us who got taken to the Glasgow Arts School hip night out, only managed a couple of drinks before stumbling back to the the B&B. Actually I tell a lie, two of them managed to have it large and throw some pretty convincing shapes on the dancefloor. And they made it down for breakfast the next day. I got there just as the cooker was turned off and missed the deep-fried oatcakes.

As I loaded in the band's gear into the van that morning - guitars, amps, leads and bags, the one thing going through my mind was not to miss anything. We probably left something in the venue, I was thinking ... damn, we really should have stencilled our stuff. Shortly afterwards, fate decided on shaking things up a little ...