The obvious question was raised: So where are The Who then? I looked out of window and saw a cordoned off section in the backstage area. Within this area there were about five units, each about the size of our portacabin, a giant white tent in the centre, and lots of nicely spread out deck chairs....but the only sign of activity was a burly security guard who was chomping away at a chocolate bar and slurping on a drink.

Naturally, we cracked on with the whole organizational thing, lugged boxes, drum kits and amps around, got guitars tuned and generally got even more excited about what lay in store. It was already an adventure. It's funny how getting to places is part of the fun isnt it? Still noted at this point was the fact that there was no sign of any of The Who boys... or Ash for that matter. Personally I don't think Ash wanted to get backstage before The Who had arrived!

While listening to The Who's tech band, I slipped by guitar out of its case and started playing along to 'The Kids Are Alright'. It was then that I noticed I was getting some unusual fret buzz from my guitar (probably when I twatted it on the tube earlier that day) so I toyed with the idea of asking Pete Townshend's guitar tech to have a look at it. Sod it, I thought to myself, he can only say no, so over I went. "Er excuse me mate, you wouldn't mind giving my Gibson a tweak would ya?" "I'm going to look at this now then am I, son?" replied Alan Rogan (one of the most saught after guitar technicians on the planet, having worked with AC/DC, Clapton, The Rolling Stones and even the Beatles. I had no idea) "Well if you wouldn't mind, I dont want to take the p*ss!" "Oh ok", replied Al, "Let me just make this phone call." After his call to Eric (?..probably), Alan took hold of my guitar, looked it up and down from every angle, then asked me to play it. He then unscrewed something near the headstock of the guitar, tightened the neck, gave it back to me, asked me to play it, then took it back, tweaked it, gave it back to me to play again, and then asked me how it was. I have to say that after 10 mins, Alan had made my guitar play a whole lot better. The guy is a genius. Needless to say, I offered him a job as my guitar tech for our future London gigs which made him chuckle. At this point I was totally oblivious to who he was and it was only when I got back home and did some research that I realised the sheer importance of the guy.  

Then we did our sound check for about 20 minutes. It was good. We could actually hear ourselves for a change, probably because we had at least two stage monitors each. Ash had four in fact and Si had about five because he was in Pete's corner. Pete has a hearing problem due to excessive exposure to loud sounds. This probably came about in the mind 60s when the only way bands could get heard in pubs was by cranking the volume up. These days we have mics and big PAs to project amp noises into the crowd.

We had lots of people helping us out for our sound check, they all seemed to come out of the woodwork. Sound on stage amazing, but Jimbo's drums were quite far forward because Zack Starkey (Ringo's son) had so much kit. Alphaspin were therefore split into two areas - I was on Jimbo's right, and Si and Ash were on his left. The performance dynamics we'd been working so hard at were in jeopardy, but that didn't bother us to be honest, we'd work around it as we were still buzzing to be on a 25 metre stage(!)

After a successful sound check we all made our way back to our portacabin, where we ate, drank and tuned our guitars. We then ironed our stage clobber and wound ourselves up for the gig.

Then....there was Roger. I spotted him walking around and we made eye contact. I made a three sign signal: I pointed at myself (me), opened and closed my hand like a lobster (talk), and pointed at him (you) and he nodded so I walked over and had a nice little chat about general stuff. Now you may be wondering why I did this and didn't just go bounding up to him. Good question. Last time I approached a celeb that way, it was Liam Gallagher and I ended up getting head butted, but that's another story......

After this we all clubbed together in our cabin, played a couple of acoustic songs to warm up our voices, and tried hard to relax.

Show time

After a bit more milling around, it was finally time to climb the eternal steps to the stage again where we waited in the wings to be introduced by Nigel of Teenage Cancer Trust. I have never been so nervous. Seven months had suddenly turned into seven minutes. We had a group hug, then it was a matter of psyching ourselves up for the performance, knowing at the back of our minds that the slightest mistake would be magnified bigger, further and louder than ever before. Everyone would hear it, including some members of the press, not to mention The Who! Ouch.