I'm thinking I should listen to that concerto again, and then a big chunk of it comes flooding into my mind. It's in there! Like a record or a tape, it's actually imprinted on my brain. I can hear the part where the lyrical second theme of the first movement soars up an octave, gathering perfect little embellishments around it. Every time I hear that part, I feel tears pricking my eyelids. There's no other way the music could possibly go at that point, not one note you could add or subtract or change; and I start to wonder whether the composer really wrote it at all, or read it in the mind of God.

And here I am worrying about a gig in Basingstoke at something called the Pen and Parchment Club. How it got a name like that I can't imagine. But, who knows, it could be the best gig we've ever done. There's a musical equivalent of the Hair of the Dog. You can be less than excited about performing--dreading it, even--but once you get up there, with real live people in front of you, something happens. Suddenly it's for real, you have to deliver, and all your senses are sharpened. And sometimes the worst places can turn out to be the most fun, if you can get the audience on your side. Someone is tapping on the van window. I sit up with a start. A face with bushy black eyebrows is peering in.

"You the band?" asks the face.
"Are you the minion?"
"Wot?"
"Yeah, we're the band, of course we're the band, open up, will you?"
Keys rattle, and the rest of the band are sauntering across the car park.

Once inside, the Pen and Parchment Club looks like a pretty typical 'Social Club': a place where, for an annual membership fee, working men and their wives and girlfriends can go and drink cheaper than they could in a pub. And, on certain nights, be entertained by a raffle, or a comedian, or a struggling pop group. In this case, a struggling pop group on the way to becoming a struggling rock band.

Either way, tonight we're going to have to struggle without the aid of a stage. What passes for a stage at the Pen and Parchment is a nine-inch high platform about 5 feet square.

We never know what we're going to find when we walk into a gig. The stage might consist of six rickety tables held together with electrical tape, or there might be no stage at all. So we have some staging of our own in the van: a pile of wooden boards with slots in them, which fit together ingeniously to form either one large or two smaller platforms. We stole them piece by piece from the Drama department of Fareham Technical College, where Dave, our drummer, works as a 'groundsman'--in other words, as gardener and general dogsbody. At first, we took just enough to make a drum riser. But the slotted-wooden-board habit got into our blood. We had to have more! Now we can make small stages bigger. Provided, that is, that the height differential between 'our' stage and 'theirs' isn't too great: on some nights people trip up in the middle of guitar solos and go crashing into my keyboards or knocking over cymbal stands. Where the platforms really pay off, though, is on those rare occasions when we get a big stage, a real, honest-to-God theatre stage, and we can create two tiers: the drums and keyboards towering over the front line. Like a real concert!