Day 9: Henham
Welcome
Yesterday we drove to the east of England to perform at Latitude festival.
Our day began with a pleasant reunion as Amanda Cheng, friend of the band, had arrived to join the tour for a few days. She was down in the restaurant enjoying the complimentary breakfast spread of our Holiday Inn Express, and we all made our way downstairs to enjoy a catch-up and a plate of food. A breakfast cereal that I don’t turn to often is Weetabix, and yesterday I served up four of these racetrack-shaped wholegrain bricks, and topped them with sliced banana, yoghurt, and semi-skimmed milk. Alongside this I had a piece of buttered toast with baked beans.
We were on the road by 10.30am and it was only a couple of hours journey, a large part of which was spent winding through the villages and back roads of Suffolk County. Our arrival was met by a nicely organised festival workforce who directed us first to a building to pick up accreditation, and then to our stage, down an access road that was very clearly signposted. We set about unloading and found that the backstage area was calm and organised, and that there were a couple of wheeled risers ready and waiting for our drums and amps.
There were plenty of hours left in the afternoon before our set time, so we set out on a side quest that had been lobbied for and organised by Jonathan Pearce. A few kilometres east of the festival grounds is the seaside town of Southwold, a tiny settlement characterised by colourful beach huts, a historic lighthouse, a model boat pond, and a pier that once serviced tourist steamers from London but is now home to a number of more modern attractions. The attraction we were here to see was a penny arcade with a twist, a collection of coin-operated machines created by engineer/cartoonist Tim Hunkin that are all unique, hilarious, and homemade.
We had an extremely enjoyable hour in this charming town before it was time to return and prepare for our set. Latitude had a comfortable backstage area with green rooms, catering, nice bathrooms, and clean drinking water all within 100m of the stage. It is these small things which make you feel looked after and we were all in a great mood when it was time to go out and perform. The BBC Sound Stage was housed in an enormous quadruple-peaked tent, and at 4pm when we walked out to perform, we were faced with what looked like a full house, the space packed corner to corner with keen festivalgoers, many of whom must have turned up full of energy after a late lunch and a beverage. Having Owen on the team had made our changeover incredibly smooth and we performed with an unstressed confidence, able to relax into playing our instruments and enjoying the songs.
After an hour we ended to a large applause, and it was right then then that I witnessed the most powerful moment to date in Liz’s career as a performer. Deftly vaulting off the stage without a thought for her own safety she began a jog along the crowd barrier, grinning while high-fiving the outstretched hands of her most enthusiastic fans.
We took our time packing our equipment back into its cases and then headed to catering for dinner. It is worth mentioning at this point that the catering tent had a soft serve machine along with an assortment of toppings, and that some of the band members were very excited about this fact.
There weren’t many bands on the festival bill that we were familiar with but there were a pair of NZ comedians doing a live podcast at 7pm that we very much wanted to see. We found our way to the podcast tent and took a seat on the floor right before Alice Snedden and Rose Matafeo walked out onto the stage, ready to present a live, one-off special episode of Boners of the Heart, their romance and celebrity themed podcast. When I say ready, I am slightly exaggerating as they had turned up two hours late and had to push their time slot back, but what they did have was a small piece of paper with some ideas scrawled during the journey. They turned these ideas into a hilarious hour of banter and everyone attending was thoroughly entertained.
A beautiful vermillion sunset was taking place as Berend drove us away from the festival, heading towards Cambridge where we would spend the night. The mood was good; the day had been a success and we were looking forward to a relatively early night. It was a rattling sound that alerted us to a problem, thirty minutes into the journey. In a historic first in Beths touring we had succumbed to a flat tyre. As a man that was raised with an oily rag as a diaper, this was Tristan’s dream come true and seconds after we pulled over, he was under the back of the van trying to figure out how to remove the spare tyre. It took us quite a while and a couple of youtube videos to find the secret compartment that housed the tools and the jack but eventually we were able to get the van lifted after removing all the gear from the back and stacking it on the footpath. The old wheel came off and the new wheel went on, and after 45 minutes after stopping we were back in business.
While this was a nice intermission in our drive and a great piece of blog content we were all glad to get back on the road, and we were grateful to the new tyre for carrying us safely the rest of the way home.