Broad Farm Caravan Site Club House Fleggburgh

Set off on a sunny afternoon about 5pm. I had a good run to the A11 via Garbolisham. Then the radio piped up ‘delays on the A47 East of Norwich’. But traffic looked fine, so I continued to “pootle on” thinking it would have cleared by the time I got there. And yes, as I approached Cringleford (East of Norwich) I ran into the holiday traffic tailback of about half a mile. It didn’t delay me much and I was parked up near the club load in door by 6:20pm. As I started to walk round to get the door unlocked Dave’n’Jen’n’Laura rolled up and so I waited for Dave to come in with me to unlock. We soon had the seat shifted from in front of the load in door and opening it up we could meet and greet Nige who had just rolled up. Load in went fine and we set about dealing with the assembly of the Bose under the low ceiling. I set my system up off stage and edged it up and onto the stage and slid it into position. Nige discovered an ingenious way of setting his up at the front of the stage on an angle then as he carefully brought it to the vertical, there was just enough clearance to get it upright; and then we all helped to slide into position. The room begin to fill early and (once again) Dave’s old ‘Mississippi Delta’ band mate Graham (stage name Bobby Graham) and his missus Ann arrived. Apparently it was Ann’s birthday – so Dave got the birthday hat prepared. I dished out a new KAM Starlight Mini (clip on) music stand LED light to Dave; it runs on batteries or an adapter. Graham was so impressed he asked me to organise one for him! We got dressed into the smart red’n’black and made a prompt 8:30pm start playing to about 50 in the club. After ‘Foot Tapper” and the short version of “Just One Look”, I did a: ‘Hello--- Broad Farm’ introduction of the band. Then we got on with a typical set 1. I wasn’t on top bantering form myself, probably due to playing 3 squash matches in the week? But Dave and Nigel seemed to handle the audience interaction well. This audience weren’t quite as instantly appreciative as the previous gig, but they seemed to enjoy it more as we bashed on. We got a couple of girls up to do the Shadows Walk - they did a fine job and the camera phones were out capturing the event for history! Towards the end of the set, I got the boys to do the Beatles medley. Dave came up with a good ad-lib about picking up small furry animals from Banham zoo for wigs! We were all a bit nervy as we set off on this. I recall it was a tad fast and once again the transitions were a bit rough. I managed to miss a bar or two of the link from “I Feel Fine” to “She Loves You” which meant I had to mouth the early drum link to Dave who was a bit confused at this point. But we got through it and learned from the experience I think. The hour was soon over and, as per last time, we finished with rock’n’roll (was it Peggy Sue?) rather than the big ballad finish. After a short break I intended that we open up set 2 with “Let There Be Drums”; but Dave started with “Wipe Out” by mistake, so Nige and I got behind that and we ended up doing a good performance of “Walk Don’t Wipe Out”. Next up was “Eyes at Me For” which went well and then we got onto a typical set 2 routine with the Searchers. The timing on this was good and it brought a few up to dance. Only trouble was I sang the second verse of “Needles and Pins” first which brought us to the middle 8 very early - but the boys followed me with barely a beat lost! A fairly standard set 2 from then on: “Shine” went well and the “Bay Cities” got ‘em on the floor in force. I had a good look round the room as we ploughed on through this set and I could see that quite a few family groups were singing along. We wrapped up with “Love is All Around”. For Set 3 we got several dancers up as we played through the party dance sequence from “Amarillo” to “Hi Ho”; then we did a long version of “Unchained“ as a prelude to wrapping up with “Pretty Woman”. Then there were sufficient shouts for ‘more’ for us to do “I saw Her Standing There” and “Wonderful Tonight” as an encore. Nigel and I are counting bars differently for the solo in “Saw Her Standing There”; he is getting to the middle 8 about two bars ahead of me! Might be a one off ‘cos I’m sure we got it together last time we played it. We got packed up away by midnight. Despite an annoying rattle in the car disturbing my drive home I had a good run and was tucked up in bed by 1:45am.