Saturday Night- The marathon continues

I had a chance to listen to a few songs from the Western Commanders, a really great western swing band featuring three female multi-instrumentalists who sing in a very convincing Andrews Sisters style. They looked great and sounded great. I wish I could have stayed a bit longer, but we still had one more show to play.
That's right, three shows in 24 hours, and over 400 miles separating them.

First of all we dropped Cozy and his drumkit off. He had a busy weekend of his own, with two festivals to play on the Sunday, one with us in Norwich, and another in Rutland with another band. He'd arranged a friend to transport him and his kit to both venues on the Sunday, so we'd meet him agian the next day.

We drove home and dropped off our dirty washing, said hello to my wife, and set off for a local village where Chris was playing at a garden party with his band Iziggy and Some Weird Sinners. We tagged along because there were some music industry people there to see Chris' band and they'd invited Nicki to play a short showcase set as well.
We arrived as it was getting dark. being a garden party, there was some lack of organisation, but eventually we loaded our back line and Chris' drumkit onto the stage which was set up at the end of a long garden on the edge of the village. There were fields all around and the stage was open to the elements, but luckily it didn't rain.
Chris has been driving and doing our sound all tour, so he was quite familiar with the music although he hadn't sat behind a kit since the "Help for Heroes" charity show earlier in the month. Nicki chose a rocking set list and we played for about 30 minutes. Nicki and Tracy then went off to make contact with one of the promoters and Chris and I packed away the guitars and got the stage ready for Iziggy.
I declined an invite to squeeze into Tracy's already crowded car for a lift home, but stayed to watch Iziggy's show, which was very punchy and entertaining, and a vast improvement on the previous outing. I'm afraid the vegetable patch got a bit trashed as it became the mosh pit, but the party goers loved the band.
We then loaded out in almost total blackness, and I finally got to bed at about 2 o'clock with another early start the next morning.
At least I got some sleep. Nicki's party had real difficulty finding any accomodation in the Northampton area because of the World Superbike Championship at Silverstone and the Bug Jam at Santa Pod. We fixed a couple of rooms in a town center pub in Kettering, but parking was a problem and it was very noisy so they decided to drive on to Norwich.
They eventually found a hotel room at 3.30 in the morning.