The weather was still very cold as I loaded up. We were playing a Xmas Eve dinner for guests at the Norwich Ramada. The brief from our agent, Mark Buller, was: arrive by 5:45 so we could be set up by 7 pm when the guests arrive for dinner. I set off at 4:30 pm allowing plenty of time to cruise over. I’d got a couple of miles to the roundabout near the sugar factory when i remembered I hadn’t picked up my sandwiches - Shock Horror! So I went right round the roundabout and set off back home. I rang up Ms J on the way and Carl was waiting outside the house with them. As I arrived I opened the passenger window and he threw the bag of food onto the passenger seat as I passed by at about 2 mph! I soon got back on route but things were running slow up to Thetford. Once on the A 11 I got up to cruising speed and made good progress to Norwich. As I arrived in Norwich the traffic was still light, but frustratingly in my way a lot of the time. So I was a few minutes late as I parked up outside the Ramada ‘City Suite’ where the event was being held. As I got out the car up comes Nige. He knew the layout of the gig from the old days and we were able to load all the gear into a big goods lift. We had all of our gear upstairs when Greg arrived. Nige went off to help him while I started set up. Just got the mains wiring in place when up comes our compere and agent Mark Buller.
He advised us to mix friendly chat with easy listening and some lightweight dancey material. We wouldn’t be playing until about 9pm so he suggested we got changed and spend time in the bar. Great acoustics on this stage. We finished set up and loaded the bags into a very cold store room where we got changed into the white shirts. We had a word with a few early arriving guests as we came out, then we headed to the bar. The people we spoke to seemed up for a mix of 50’s 60’s 70’s - things boded well.
The bar was very quiet and we were soon making ourselves at home and enjoying a beer. After a while Nige went out for a smoke and came back to report it was snowing - we had another beer! Mark came round to pick us up about ten past nine and we got on stage ready to go by 9:15 pm. Mark gave us a fantastic introduction so it was about 9:20pm as we opened up with “Foot Tapper”. It was a really good instrumental sound on-stage and we got a warm reception from a fairly full room. I introduced the band and we carried on with “Just One look”. The vocals sounded great and I could see we had the volume pitched right for the audience. We worked through “Heartbeat” and I announced we would do some songs from some well known brothers with a weight problem – the “Heavily Brothers” quipped Nigel. As we got underway with “Walk Right Back” the dance floor filled and stayed full through “When Will I Be Loved”, so I took the boys on into “Cathy’s Clown”. I meant to stop after that but Nige and Greg carried on into “Bye Bye Love” and the crowd loved it – it had turned out to be a fortunate band judgement to play an extended Everlys medley. Next up I tried “Around the World” as a waltz but there wasn’t any dance interest so we kept it short. But they did sing’a’long and gave it a good round of applause. At this point I asked the boys to don their red hats ‘cos we were gonna do a Xmas song – “Rockin’ Around the Xmas Tree” This went very well and Nige called for the Beatles to continue the entertainment angle. So we hatted down and wigged up. The audience reacted well to the Beatles intro banter and even answered back ‘John Lennon’ when I invited the people in the expensive seats to ‘rattle their jewellery’ We got underway with “8 Days a Week” and, surprisingly, the dance floor filled again. Most of them stayed with us as we bashed through the medley and it got a great round of applause. We bantered our way through the Monkees “Daydream Believer” and Ferry Across the Wensum”. We had a few slow dancers up and Nige took us on into “Raining in my Heart” which filled the floor. Then tried out some rock’n’roll with Sir Cliff’s “Move It” and “Blue Suede Shoes – Great Balls of Fire”. After rocking them around the dance floor we got them to take a break while we did the “Halfway-Wonder-Sweet Caroline” sequence to a good singalong response. I was thinking about the next number to get the dance floor busy again. I had lined up the Searchers in my mind but it was getting close to an hour and just then Mark signalled last number. I made a quick judgment to carry on with the “Searchers” as our last number for this set - this turned out to be a good call. The dance floor was packed, the band was playing with passion and I sensed that the audience loved our medlification of the hits. As we left to loud applause, Mark took over smoothly and started his Xmas Eve competition. We took to the bar for a round of tap water! We re-grouped at 10:30pm thinking most people would drift off after the competition; but to our surprise, they were still there looking hungry for a dance! So I briefed the boys to open with “Amarillo”; Mark did his introduction and we were off. Still a good on-stage sound and the dance floor filled nicely. As we finished I took the boys into “Hey Baby” which turned out to be the right choice. The audience, particularly the ladies, sang the chorus with gusto and nicely in tune. We ran on into the “Twist” and I altered a spoken ‘whats that up there’ line to ‘Is it a Santa Claus?’ to get a great ‘Yesss’ response! Nige slipped in “Lets Dance – Mony Mony” to keep them going. We played on with some more audience involvement pieces including “All Shook Up” and “Apache”. A couple of ladies came up to do some strictly come Shadows Walk dancing with me. Unfortunately I was a bit too vigorous in the last verse and I played a few ‘avant garde’ jazz notes by mistake as my Hank Marvin glasses fell off my nose. But we got through to the end in good order after that incident and we got a great response from an appreciative crowd. We did don the red hats to do “White Xmas” as a slowie but there weren’t many takers for slow dancing so we kept it short again. I wanted to do an Eagles number so we could run the Norfolk eagle banter, but I picked the wrong number with “Peaceful Easy Feeling” because that late in the evening I had real trouble hitting the high vocal notes and ended up resorting to a weak falsetto. But we still got good applause for it. I was surprised to see it was coming up to 11:30pm already so I called for Johnny B Goode as the last number. We rocked that through doing a drum and bass solo as well as a few guitar solos. The crowd had danced it through with gusto and there was a good enough response for me to call for Slade’s “Merry Xmas” as the ‘planned encore’. This went pretty well (actually I thought the best we have played it over the years) and they were still shouting for ‘more’. At this point Mark took over as compere and asked us to do one more. A lady dancing nearby asked for “Rock Around The Clock” and off we went straight into it. Since Nige took over this song I have always been caught out surprised at the ending because his ending comes up (like the record) without a repeat of the last line. After many months of only getting halfway there with the twiddly guitar ending, this was the night I got it right!!! As we came off several people came up to congratulate us on a wonderful night, saying how great it was to hear so many memorable old tunes. Mark was pleased with the good job done and we went off to get changed leaving Mark to play out the last 15 minutes with some disco. We noticed Mark had a bit of a problem with a speaker cutting out but it was too late for him to do anything about it really. As he finished we started pack up and Nige acquired some supermarket trolleys from the kitchen so we could move the gear into the lift in just a few movements. We soon had the gear down and in the cars and shook hands to a gig well done, and wished each other a merry Xmas. There was a light covering of snow on the cars but the roads were clear as we got underway. Just as we left my daughter, Claire, rang and asked me if I could pick her up in Bury on the way home – no problem I said I’ll be there in an hour! But as I got out of Norwich I ran into fog mostly OK to continue at 70 mph, but some patches I had to slow down for. I was able to test out the inbuilt hands free and voice recognition phone technology in the car to call her as I approached Bury so she could be waiting outside the night club ready for me to pick her up. It all worked perfectly and we were home by 2 am.
