Back and forth I go between the van and the house, mentally preparing myself for the 14 or so hours I’m about to spend driving to Bideford and back with just the shortest interval in the middle to play a show.

I mentally check with each back and forth from the understairs gear storage place to the van. Guitars – Check, Clothes – Check, Merch – Check, Vinyl – Check. This is a good thing because recently being the dumbass I am I forgot these. It was for the sold out Aces n’ Eights London show so not like I’d have sold much merch. Driver and singer? – Check, I’ve got it all. I pack some cooked chicken away from the air fryer and make myself a coffee and confirm with myself a mere 14 times that I have the obligatory wallet, phone and heart attack spray trio with me. OK, just the first 262 miles to go then.

I can never make a decision on which is best, daytime or night time driving and regularly spend entire journeys cursing myself and my decisions, not about life, not all the time anyway, but about which one I chose. In my head driving at night is infinitely more difficult, my eyes just close. I would just normally be asleep right? So my body frequently reminds me of this fact, sometimes it just takes over and shuts down. As someone whose woken up and thought where did those few miles go I can confirm its a particularly high cliff to descend and for a short while sharpens the senses. I was never like this before but my girlfriend Angie travels like a toddler and is often asleep by the time we’re off the driveway. It seems this affliction is highly contagious and for 3 or 4 years I’ve had the sudden urge to sleep when night driving too! The advantage however is a distinct lack of traffic. I hate traffic, it makes me savage and at night we just see less, this is a good thing.

Sadly that’s an offset positive because the night brings road closures and crazy diversions and sleepy drivers and wildlife choosing to cross or live on the road. The difference is just day time travel means more people on the road, more people mean more cars, more crashes and usually more delays. It’s going to be there and back with no sleepover, I’ve decided.

That said, the run South is good, minimal traffic with a couple of stops for a pee and in 2 shakes of a 6 hour audiobook I’m pulling up outside the venue and attempting to find somewhere to park. If you’re interested I listened to “The Moth and the Mountain” by Ed Caesar, an excellent book of eccentricity, adventure, quite beautiful stupidity and bravery.

The Palladium has become one of those venues on the tour circuit we trudge around annually that we all play. Taken over by Ben Nigh 9 years ago following a phone call from his then boss announcing her retirement. Ben had worked there for 3 years and knew exactly what the venue needed. The Palladium has been through tough times and some great times and more than one project of renovation. Moving the bar from the middle of the venue to the end facing the stage, making the stage deeper, a complete revamp of the back stage area too. The Pally has become a really comfortable and cool place to play with a welcoming, friendly audience.

Ben managed to keep the venue going through Covid by diversifying into putting on shows at the outdoor Big Sheep venue and taking a job at the local hospital. Thanks to that the Pally is still open and the future looks bright, just like it does tonight.

I got asked to play this show by Blackballed’s bassist Tom, who also plays bass for me so that wasn’t a tough sell for him and in honesty I love Blackballed. It’s not exactly my type of music, I mean it’s not Radiohead but mix some killer riffing with a thumping, soulful bass, and clever drumming and you can see why Marshall, Tom and Alex have that type of loyal fanbase that know the words and the drops as well as the band, probably better depending on the Guinness levels swilling about in the bands bloodstreams

Joining the line up tonight (and for most of this tour) are Stevie Jones and The Wildfires, the East Midlands rock band who walk a path somewhere between Steve Earle and Tom Petty. It was proper lovely to see Stevie again, we’d not played together since a gig in between Covid lockdowns where he and I supported a New Model Army live stream shown on a big screen at The Musician in Leicester. We laughed about the fact we played the gig from behind a see through plastic screen resting on the microphone to keep us and the audience safe and stop us all from dying. Bizarre times. I believe the parties at Downing Street used a similar concept.

Back to Bideford and my set went ok. I learned a long time ago that you need to know your place and do your job as an opener which is basically warm the crowd up . When I was young and stupid I would approach every support slot uber competitively but I since learned that I’m there to do a job, to get people singing and now, accepting of my place, I thoroughly enjoy that task. I get a freedom with that role that headliners don’t get. I played a new song “Voila, Irony” and some of the usual shout longs like “Shenanigans”, “Adventurer” and “What if?”

Its a weird feeling playing new songs. I’ve obviously spent a long time drafting and rewriting the songs and in my head I can pinpoint exactly where the sing a longs will be yelled back at me. It’s a bit nerve wracking, will people get it? Will they like it? Will they sing in the right bits? Will they just walk away? I bloody hope not! Of course, nobody in the room but me knows the song, its my job to sell it. It’s a good pressure to feed from and something I really enjoy.

As I play the last chord of the last song I’m planning my stage escape. I step on the tuner pedal, check I’m muted and hang my guitar on its stand. Coiling the leads and chucking my stuff in my “rucky” Stevie’s band start getting on stage as there’s a 5 min change over which is just not a lot of time. Just as I’m stepping over some amps and leads my beautiful JWJ guitar, named Bella J, drops from its stand and hits the floor. I can’t look, I truly can’t. You get a real affinity with some instruments and I just know she’s hurt. We name guitars and cars and stuff, we care for them and very often spend some of our most vulnerable moments in life with them. I know I have. You don’t want to see them hurt, I didn’t want to look, I couldn’t look.

When I did look I saw something horrific. A huge split up the front of the guitar, I felt the churning in my stomach and just looked down on the guitar who’s played every show with me for 2 or 3 years, I felt sick as packed “Bella J” away and walked up the stairs backstage as Stevie and his band kicked into their opener.

I can be quite unsociable at times, I don’t mean to be and its not a personal thing, its just when my head is buried in something else or I’m worried about something I don’t always feel “peopley” and I feel the need to escape. I went and got some food and left the venue with all my stuff backstage and merch table set up. I took the obligatory kebab back to my van in the carpark and ate it illuminated by Bideford’s streetlights to a backing track of drunken pub crawlers.

I’d taken a few pictures of the damage and sent through to Rich, the guy who brilliantly built my guitar and after what seemed like a lifetime he confirmed that Bella J will play again albeit with a scar. He made me feel better by sayin that “Scars are just part of the journey” and that he was sure all would be fine, this somewhat made up for a truly terrible kebab.

I went back to The Pally and watched Blackballed and found them in truly fine form. Marshall said nice things about me as some in between song banter which always makes me emotional until Tom wrecked it by discussing my genitals.

As always it can take some time for a venue to empty at the end of the night and get everything loaded up. I wasn’t sure what Stevie and his band were up to sleeping wise but Marshall and Tom were in their van and I was heading home.

Once again the roads were blissfully ok and I headed into Audiobook 2 of the day, a delightful deep dive into the papacy of Pope Francis. I made the endlessly repeatable rookie mistake of filling myself to the brim with Coffee’s and sugar free energy drinks. I forgot that everything going in will need to come out at some point so began the seemingly endless list of service station stops divided up by a couple of naps to keep my head in the game. I think I stopped at them all bar Michaelwood and twice before I reached the M5.

At 8.23am Saturday morning and I’ll pulled into the village, unloaded, grabbed a coffee (Because I wasn’t shaking enough) and thought about the 524 miles round trip I’d driven. I thought about the show and the guitar repair bill I’m now facing. I thought about the finances behind the show, Net profit says I’m about £30 better off than I was before I left for the gig and I don’t know that repair bill yet.

I head to bed and soon realize I can’t sleep.