Chants R&B - the Diary

19.11.07 – I’m writing this on my mum’s PC, (which is far more up to date than mine incidentally), on the day after I was originally due back in Melbourne. There was a heavy fog in Dubai apparently, which threw the entire Emirates network into a tizz, and as a result I’m flying back a day later on a QANTAS flight instead.
My right ear is still fizzing away from the Chants’ gig on Saturday here in Auckland, and I’m sure there’ll be some more lasting reminders of the two nights’ reunion gigs to come. But let me take you back to the beginning.
To be honest, I wasn’t that thrilled when John Baker first proposed the idea. It seemed an unnecessary diversion as we approach the end of the year facing the annual post-Christmas gig vacuum. I’m not sure what eventually changed my mind either. Maybe it was the touching enthusiasm of Matt Croke, AKA Max Kelly, that tipped me over the edge, but I’m not sure. He did get very excited, ringing me every other day to check on some detail or other. In any case, it got to the point where I felt that I would be letting the team down by not doing it, so eventually I waived my objections and agreed.
I’d decided that we should base the set on the Chants R&B Stagedoor Wichdoctors CD released by John Baker quite some years ago, and with just about everything on it that was known to have been recorded by the band at that time – which was considerably more than we’d suspected. Apart from the eight more or less known studio recordings, the live material content had been recorded on his flatmate’s tape recorder at the Stagedoor by the original Chants’ guitarist, Jim Tomlin, as a memento of his time with the band. (Jim had ‘retired’ from his position in favour of Matt, feeling that he couldn’t contribute any more to the band’s direction).
I did go over to Matt’s place in Boronia a couple of times, ostensibly to look at the song list in more detail, but inevitably we ended up talking guitars and guitarists (Matt’s passion) and not a lot of actual work was done. I’d passed on the set list to the others per e-mail – Martin Forrer in Napier, Trevor Courtney in Queensland and Jim in Dunedin – and imagined they’d given the tracks a listen at least, but with no real idea of how prepared we were going to be at our first rehearsal in Christchurch just a matter of three days before our much-heralded appearance at Al’s Bar.
I’d had a meal at Dick’s place on the Tuesday night, less than a week before I was due to fly out, and as I left he casually mentioned that he hoped I had everything together, like my passport. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it before, and after finally locating it my worst fears were realised – it had expired some eleven months earlier.
Immediate panic! I contacted John Baker and advised him that we had a potential situation and then tried to contact the NZ passport people in Sydney.
After finding my way through the usual smokescreen of recorded messages, I eventually spoke to somebody who confirmed it might be possible to get my passport back from Sydney by Monday morning if I paid the prescribed penalty, but there were no guarantees.
I downloaded all the requisite paper work, filled it out as thoroughly as I knew how, got a new photo witnessed by a perplexed newsagent (who I’ve been unilaterally boycotting ‘cause he doesn’t sell Met cards) in his role as a JP, (‘Tell me, how long have I known you?’) and sent it up to Sydney on a wing and a prayer. On Friday morning I was overjoyed to find a courier at my front door with a shiny new NZ passport, and we were back on track.

The Diary
Mon. 12.11.07
Matt picked me up in plenty of time to get to the airport. He'd decided to use the long term multipark parking next to the terminal, rather than the one with the shuttle bus you pass on the way in to the terminal, so we ended up on top of the carpark (and therefore exposed to the elements anyway) and facing quite a walk to get to the check in. It was only when we got to the Jet Star counter Matt realised he'd managed to leave his wallet back at the car - so I waited until I thought he'd had time to get there and back before rejoining the queue, and was gratified to find my guess was spot on. It turned out that his wallet had actually dropped out of his pocket by his car, so he was quite lucky to find it at all.
Inevitably the flight was delayed, but only about an hour late we thankfully embarked. Matt was sitting on the aisle seat next to me, and the combination of his substantial girth and Jet Star's cramming the seats closer together, meant that he was wedged uncomfortably in his seat unable to move in any direction. Quite a bit of him was spilling onto my seat on one side and into the aisle on the other, the latter providing the cabin crew with some target practice as they moved their trolleys of merchandise up and down the aisle.
Next to me in the window seat was Val from Cheviot, which I ascertained in the first few seconds after I realised we were both effectively trapped in our seats for the duration. Cheviot's not far from Mendip Hills, the ancestral home of my mother's family, the Rutherfords, so we had some common ground to chat about. Val had been visiting her daughter's family in Broadford, who'd run foul of the local council by clearing some bush to create a fire break without permission. She also mentioned that she'd seen a perfectly wonderful train engine preserved on a siding, but all fenced up so kids couldn't explore it. We solemnly agreed that it was no fun to be a kid these days.
I've never flown with Jet Star before, so it was a bit of a learning curve. After some time regretting I had nothing to read, I began to get pretty hungry. What I bought for myself (at 10.40pm NZ time) sounded interesting enough, but the reality was far less enticing. It was a Ready To Eat Gourmet To Go Chicken With Vegetables (see pic) concoction under a
French name I recognised as a maker of very good jams in silly shaped bottles you can't possibly get all the jam out of. Typically they supplied a fork which would not be useful under any circumstances, so the slightly sturdier Jet Star version was a necessary duplication. The label was repleat with various serving directions suggesting you could mix the product with this and that, oblivious to the fact that if you had real food you wouldn't be eating this muck. For some reason I was swept back to the trenches in WWl while I was eating it, so it may have had some hallucinogenic qualities.
In any event, we arrived shortly after midnight, having survived a quite hairy landing with a blustery Nor'wester crosswind, and there was Tony Brittenden, looking even more distinguished now that his hair and beard have gone quite white, but looking ineffably pleased to see me and not a bit cross I'd arrived so late. I left Matt struggling in my wake to catch the shuttle to the Cashmere Hills, where he was staying with Martin Forrer and Jim Tomlin. (He was last off the bus apparently and got there about 2.00am).
Tues. 13.11.07
Jan Brittenden dropped me off in the city at about 11.00 and I found a place that sold disgustingly rich hot chocolates and tried to work out who I could ring on my mobile, which I had been assured was on international roaming. I eventually spoke to Martin and we organised to meet at Al's Bar at round midday. I asked a groovy young gal in a groovy shop where Al's Bar was and walked around there in ten minutes - nothing's too far away in Christchurch and when I arrived thyere I found Trevor and wife Lindsay Hammond chatting to a bloke who turned out to be Al Park, the owner of Al's Bar. We went inside and looked around and chatted until I fielded a call from John Baker, who'd just arrived at the airport. John said he'd pick up Matt and Martin in the hire van - which was just as well as it turned out as it was Christchurch Cup Day, and there wasn't a cab to be had. (I 'm sure the Christchurch Cup didn't have that much significance when I was around in the sixties).
In the meantime, Trev and I had wandered round to Charlie's Music Store - me to borrow a guitar and Trev to get some sticks - where we met John Doyle, who had briefly been Trev's brother-in-law, (I tell you, it's a small town), and Charlie, of course. Charlie very kindly lent me an SX 'Stevie Ray Vaughan' guitar, which looked a bit like a Strat, so I was reasonably comfortable with it.
We fitted as best we could on Al's Bar's three-tiered stage, which, in the same way as a bed-sit in Earls Court, could be best descibed as compact, and fiddled manfully with our allotted amps. Actually, mine was OK. I cunningly took the Vox AC whatever, leaving Jim and Matt non-plussed with their Fender Silver Faces, which were execrable - John said he'd replace them with another couple of Voxes. We ran through most of what we thought might've been the set and promised ourselves to do better the next day - and that was our first rehearsal done.
It wasn't quite the day done, however. Tony had invited me to join him after he'd finished work at St Andrews College at a pub called No. 4 Merivale, so I got John to drop me off on his way to the airport to pick up The Breakaways. The pub was pretty full of slightly tipsy Christchurch Cup revellers, but I eventually located Tony talking studiously at an outsde table to a tall, dark-complexioned, rather predatory-looking woman who turned out to be Ingrid, the school music teacher. We had a bit of a chat, but the weather, which had been warm and windy till about half an hour before started to get quite chilly, and Tony suggested he should take me inside to meet some of his other co-workers.
Thinking this couldn't possibly take very long, I made the decision to leave my black plastic bag, (with everything important in it including my wallet), on the table with Ingrid, and followed Tony inside, glass of bubbly in my hand. (You can see where this is heading, but bear with me). Once inside, we encountered Paul Collins, a mate of Tony's I'd met on a previous visit, and over my second glass of bubbly I explained my theory on why the ABs didn't win their quarter final against the French, which happened to coincide with Paul's theory as it happened, at which point I noticed this elfen-like figure with granny-glasses and goatee, clad in a black beret, black polo-neck jumper and leather jacket, dancing round uncertainly in my range of vision with his hands making a little screen rather like a film director might. He seemed breathless with excitement, and once he'd caught my eye enquired, 'Are you Mike Rudd?'
This animated pixie of a man turned out to be none other than Robin Jenkins, a local and national identity, (Tony had coincidentally mentioned him to me in some connection or other), best known for his involvement with NZ brewers' Speights Coast To Coast series. He'd just been on the phone to John Baker trying to confirm what I looked like, probably imagining that I looked more like a used rock star than the amateur rose grower that I actually do, and he was a little breathless, not so much because he was thrilled to find me, but because he'd suffered five cracked ribs at the paws of his excitable labrador dog on the beach some days earlier.
Being the discerning gentleman that he is, Robin reckoned the return of Chants R&B to Christchurch after some forty one years to be an event of some moment, and was anxious to get the inside running on the way it was all shaping up. As it happened, he and Paul Collins knew each other, and an observation by me about the proverbial (is it a proverb? - I don't really know) six degrees of separation, prompted Robin to tell first one story involving Paul, and than another even more fascinating account to illustrate the point that involved such apparently unconnected bodies as John Clark and Stevie Wonder.
Suddenly Tony's head swam into view and said it was about time we were leaving. It was only then I looked over Robin's shoulder at where my black plastic bag should've been sitting on the table. There was no plastic bag. There was no Ingrid. In fact it was now raining quite heavily, and everybody was now indoors - the joint was packed with steamily noisy and seriously pissed once-a-year racegoers, none of whom could give a rat's arse about a missing plastic bag.
Fortunately I located the five foot tall security guy with the vaudeville moustache and hands-free ear piece that I'd seen earlier, and he claimed that he'd not only seen the bag on the table, he'd actually given it to somebody behind the bar when it started raining - and then he muttered something about 'young 'uns' and mysteriously melted into the madding throng.
I went to the bar and yelled into one of barmen's ear that I was loooking for a black plastic bag - at which he looked harried and went down the other end of the bar and came back holding a black plastic bag - an empty, black plastic bag. I tried to explain that it was a specific black plastic bag I was looking for, full of my personal items, but he was clearly losing patience, so I went and had a much-needed piss instead and determined to find my helpful midget security guy again.
To cut a bleedingly obvious story short, I eventually found my helpful midget security guy and the bag was returned to me (intact), for which I was very grateful. Another lesson learned. Tony and I were heading to the carpark in the rain when John Baker turned up in the hire van with Matt and Martin in tow, having been alerted by a concerned Robin Judkins. There was some momentary confusion before Tony and I slipped out of the carpark and headed to the outlying suburb of Lincoln where the Brittendens reside to contemplate the virtues or otherwise of Outrageous Fortune.
Wed. 14.11.07
John Baker picked me up from Lincoln at a little after 11.00 in the hire van. He'd got a lost on the way, so we were running a bit late for our photo shoot for The Press at the Stagedoor, but John didn't lose his sense of humour as he hunched happily over the wheel. We picked up the three amigos from their Cashmere retreat and arrived at the back of the building that last housed the Blue Jeans Cuisine, and was the original location of the Stagedoor. There were builders standing around chatting and the room where the actual Stagedoor coffee shop used to be was just a blank shell, so we spent a couple of minutes trying to work out where everything used to be before descending into the cellar that was the Stagedoor née Kingbee..
It was a little disappointing to discover that nearly all the graffiti had been soda-blasted off the beams - the exception being the word CUNT still clearly visible. I don't know if that applied to anyone in particular, and I suspect it was there for its own sake. Apart from that, it looked better than the last time I was there. There were pipes and powerleads hanging down, but the floor was relatively clear of debris and we were easily able to work out where the band's possie was. Steve, the new owner, was apologetic about removing the graffiti, but claimed the oil and grease that had soaked into the wood over the years was a health hazard.
When we got to Al's Bar the new Vox amps had arrived for Jim and Matt and we rehearsed till John brought back lunch, then rehearsed a bit more until we were running late again for our TV3 interview, again at the Stagedoor. We all flew off in the van and Trev and I did the interview with young Bev, then the omnipresent Robin Judkins spruiked up the show on camera as well. I didn't see the resultant piece on telly that night, and neither did anyone else apparently, so I'm just assuming it went to air. (It did - see the Videos page for the actual interview on YouTube).
Robin gave Martin and I a lift back to Al's Bar where I'd agreed to meet with Tony Brittenden at 5.30. I'd rung Tony's wife, Jan, back home in Lincoln, but neither of us could find Tony, who's annoyingly mobile-phobic, anywhere. As it was now after 6.00 and Tony was still nowhere in sight, I got another lift with Robin to the National Art Gallery, where Tony had rather mysteriously said we were going. (Incidentally, Robin had a CD playing in the car which I quite liked but didn't recognise, but I should've known I would find out soon enough).
Tony wasn't to be found in the Gallery's foyer either, so I went to the information desk and discovered that a lecture was being given on the Ilam School of Fine Arts, (whose graphic art course I'd so ignominiously bowed out of in 1966), and so I let myself in and furtively found my way up to the back of the theatre where I could survey the audience for any sign of Tony.
After a thorough check confirmed Tony wasn't in the house, I started to pay attention to what was being said by the gentleman with the inevitable laptop powerpoint presentation at the lectern. Some names resonated almost loud enough to defeat the tinnitus brought on by the afternoon's rehearsal, and then, during a roll call of graduates' names, bro' Dick was mentioned, with the speaker hazarding that he'd joined Chants R&B and left for Australia!!!
In the meantime, Tony had blustered into the room looking very debonaire in a white sport coat (sans carnation) and sat himself down in the front row, which is always asking for trouble - and so was the first to be pointed at and asked to account for who he was and what he'd been up to for the past forty years. A few more people were asked to identify themselves, (and by now I positively knew that there were a number of people there I'd gone through Art School with), until a gap presented itself and I stood up and disabused the speaker of the notion that it was Dick that had taken this tangental course with Chants R&B, and, with a little prompting from Tony, advised the room that Chants R&B was playing at Al's Bar on Friday night. And that Al's Bar was somewhere in Christchurch.
What followed later was a charming get-together of nine former Art School students over a splendid meal on which I might reflect at some later date, but you can see how a sub-text to the main theme of the band's reunion is developing here, which made for an intensely interesting time. Suffice to say, on the way home Tony played me a track off the Robert Plant / Alison Krauss album - and you've guessed it - it was the same track that Robin Judkins had been playing in his car earlier! So much unsolicited dovetailing in such a short time really does cause one to question the nature of reality.
Fri. 16.11.07
Thursday was fairly uneventful. We rehearsed, we went home. I extravagantly bought a bottle of Verve Cliquot to say thank you to the Brittendens for so kindly putting me up, and after a couple of flutes Tony slipped into another dimension and had to go to bed early. So here we are on Friday at midday, the day of the gig, assembled for the last rehearsal. Mark fired up the PA's front of house and we did our best to run through the set as we imagined it was going to run on the night. Some of the arrangements still hadn't stuck entirely, but we got through it OK and knocked off at 3.30. John Baker had taken the van to the airport to pick up The Breakaways and so I cadged a lift to St Andrews with the sound engineer Mark. I spent some time in Tony's office while he organised himself and marvelled once more at the Western
memorabilia he has on his walls, not the least poignant being a theatre board advertising Tony's own epic contribution to the Western genre, Lincoln County Incident, (pic) which I'm quietly encouraging him to get transferred onto DVD. Well, I absolutely insist. I was more than a little peckish and had some very rich cheese and bikkies and tried to appear interested in watching a DVD of The Fureys in the USA until Jan arrived. We went for a bite to Tutto Bene, the local Merivale Italian restaurant where I was served an enormous but implaccably gluggy rissotto that seemed to be made with gravy (!) from which I picked out sodden bits of proscuitto to appear to be making an effort. I consoled myself with the thought I was probably doing the right thing by not eating too much anyway.
We arrived at Al's Bar to find the place humming and already about two-thirds full of men and women mostly in their fifties and early sixties. There was about an hour to go before The Breakaways took the stage, and John Baker, (pic right) who was busy taking people's money on the door, rather surprised me when he told me that Midge Marsden was insisting they play a full hour and a half set. Not that I really objected, of course. Midge is very well known in New Zealand, (and has toured in Australia too), and it was at his insistence that they weren't billed as Midge Marsden & The Breakaways, which would've made perfct commercial sense, but would've detracted from the authenticity of the sixties' recreation.
I'm not a great social mixer at the best of times, and when I'm keyed up I'd rather be anywhere else than in a crowd, but I did get to speak to a number of people who were regular Stagedoor patrons, some of whom had photos from the era to prove it. That I didn't get their contact details was inexcusable, particularly the the fellow who said he knew how to get hold of a copy of the original Riverside recording we did as our prize for winning the Battle of the Bands, not to mention the bloke who claimed he knew someone who used to record the Chants' Stagedoor performances on a regular basis! I did find out from Ashley Tait that the Chants' erstwhile manager, Paul Marks, had died the previous year. I didn't know quite how to feel about that, because John Baker had told me that Paul was adamant he didn't want to be approached about his connection with the Chants ever again.
The Breakaways began their set, and I was pleased to note that the sound Mark was pulling was more than acceptable. I pushed my way through the crowd and took some pics with my ailing Sony - Dave Orams caught my eye and looked relieved to see someone he knew. Midge is a special blues harp player, and whenever he played his harp the band's presence went up by several notches. I retired to the back of the room and got caught up in the chatter again, but when next I looked, I noticed the band seemed to have acquired an extra player. At the same time I realised that The Breakaways had chosen the exact same encore numbers as we had, i.e. The Last Time and Little Queenie. What are the odds? Well, on this trip, pretty good it seems.
It turned out that the bonus Breakaway was Shane Hales, formerly with The Pleazers, an Australian band that had arrived in NZ not long before we left for Melbourne in 1966. They had quite some success before Shane went solo and became a Kiwi megastar, so he was well known to everybody in the room - but us. It has to be noted that Shane was slightly the worse for wear, and getting more worn by the minute.
We shambled onto the tiny stage and suffered a couple of gratuitous intros from Shane who'd misjudged our state of readiness - and then finally, we were really ready. It's funny isn't it? All the preparation you do doesn't actually prepare you for the shock of really being there on stage together again after all those years. I suspect it's our Antipodean heritage, unable to contemplate the possibility of some mystical power of the whole that vastly exceeds the sum of its parts, something we coyly avoided putting into words in our idle discussions about the technical aspects of the set, maybe just in case it just mightn't happen, or perhaps because we were afraid it was never there in the first place. Anyway, I said something or other to the audience and looked meaningfully at Matt the Monolith. He raised a quizzical eyebrow and struck the opening chord - and the band seismically lurched and collided with the opening bars of I'm Your Witchdoctor.
I don't know what it felt like in the audience, but it felt like being on a runaway Mack truck up on the stage. It was so LOUD! It was so chaotic, but mostly it was so LOUD! And I'd been right in the interviews I'd done in Melbourne before I left for NZ - our song list was ludicrously eclectic, much more so than the sample we played that night, but it went into the Chants' musical mincer and came out the other end sounding somehow coherent, somehow typically Chants R&B.

1) Mike and Gentleman Jim 2) Marty Forrer 3) Trevor Courtney (pics Andrew O'Connell )
Consider this disparate list of songs and see what you get. After John Mayall's I’m Your Witchdoctor came (in no particular order), Otis Redding's I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, The Graham Bond Organisation's Neighbour, Neighbour, Early In The Morning and Train Time, Them's Mystic Eyes and One, Two Brown Eyes, The Pretties' Come See Me and Don’t Bring Me Down, Manfred Mann's version of Smokestack Lightning and probably Hoochie Coochie Man, John Mayall's Little Girl, James Brown's I’ll Go Crazy, the Spencer Davis version of Dimples, Wilson Pickett's Land Of A 10000 Dances, completed with The Beatles' version of Larry Williams' Slow Down. The Chants' own song I Want Her, a rather wonky-sounding thrash song with an Indian motif grafted into the middle, probably captured where the band felt most comfortable - playing a wild prototype garage-punk version of the blues. (Mind you, this version of the band found the song a little hard going and happily dispensed with it for the next show).
So we finished the main body of the set with Slowdown and I attempted to get off the stage into the cupboard that served as a changing/storage room - and saw a couple of old buggers doddering around in there taking up all the available space. I was just about to testily demand that they allow a hot, sweaty performer to get on with whatever performers get on with when they're waiting to be invited back on stage for an encore, when I realised it was Midge Marsden and the Breakaways' drummer, Bryan Beauchamp. While I was glad that Midge was still there, ('cause I thought it would be nice if he could join us playing harp for an encore blues number), I was also a little shocked at my hasty judgement. I'm the same age as them, (slightly older in fact), but I guess I'm used to being round younger players most of the time, so it was a real shock to be confronted by my contemporaries simply acting their age. It's a moment of realisation that may have future ramifications.
It took a little while to get the encore started. We were all on stage and ready to go, but Shane was relishing his self-appointed role as compere and felt he had to get a few words in. It was while he was rabbitting on that I felt the spirit of the Mike Rudd of forty-one years urging me to do something radical, so I took a swig of water and squirted it at Shane. It had the desired effect, although I have had misgivings about it since, and Shane let us get on with it. Midge was up to play a blues with us as planned, but I had no idea what we were going to do, other than a slow blues. I tried to come up with some sort of blues metaphor for what was going on, but it ended up being a tale of a a bloke being away from home for forty-one years and shacking up with his ex-partner's daughter, which doesn't bear thinking about really.
Despite being gazumped by The Breakaways, we did a version of The Last Time anyway, and various other bods joined us on stage to share the microphones, (including Shane), and then it was over. I got the impression that, even though John Baker had been to a couple of rehearsals, he was a little taken aback at the energy coming from the stage. The crowd, which, as I said, was mostly people of our age and had been on their feet for a long time, seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the show as well, so there was a general feeling of euphoria about the place as we packed up.
Sat. 17.11.07
I managed to have a little chat with Midge as we were boarding the plane the next morning, and he gave me a copy of his latest CD. If he's around I'd like him to record on our next blues CD - he's a blues harp master. Mum was at the Airport when we arrived in Auckland, and I was relieved to see she looked better than the last time I saw her. She's had a couple of major operations since then and they've made a significant difference to her quality of life and she's a lot more mobile. In the afternoon she dropped me off at the Monte Christo Room for our sound check. I imagined that with so many acts on the bill the sound check would be running late, and I was right. I also imagined that the sound check would be largely a waste of time for the same reason, and I was right again, but I shouldn't have let that affect my concentration. The other Chants hadn't arrived yet, so I started doing an interview with Troy Ferguson from Radio NZ, a friend of John Baker's, (seen below being being given a good talking to by Ray Columbus). As I was chatting away I saw the others
walking in and heard them starting to sound check, so I rather lost focus on the interview. I needn't have worried - when I finally arrived on stage I discovered nothing much had happened. We ran through three or four numbers rather perfunctorily, (we only had a thirty minute set), before we adjourned to the accommodation in Wellesley St in the heart of the Auckland CBD. There was no point in my going back to mum's, so I hung around with Jim and ended up having a quite passable Lebanese meal with him and Dave Russell, who was one of the Invaders and remains an indispensable part of Ray Columbus' plans for world domination.
I walked around the Queen St area for a while and was struck by how Auckland had in many ways become just another typical Australasian metropolis, certainly since the fifties, when Dick and I used to be flown up from Christchurch by our grandparents in the August hol's to be fêted for a couple of weeks by our feckless father. A lot of Asian students inhabit the centre of town and there is quite a selection of Asian-style eateries to cater for them, lending the place a cosmopolitan feel far beyond the basic Maori and Islander ambience that was so excitingly exotic to us Anglo-Celtic South Islanders then.
At the end of my travels I found this shop (left) which I thought amusing enough to record, and then sat down for a while to gather my thoughts - and seemingly became the target of some person or persons unknown who rained down empty plastic bottles and cans on me from one of the surrounding buildings prompting me to move out of harms way. I mused on the fact that, while teenagers/young adults were these days a recognised and valued consumer group, with disposable incomes and numerous choices on how to spend it, something that my generation pioneered back in the sixties and seventies, it seemed to have actually made some of these young people more desperate and uncertain. I don't remember youth suicide being such a worrying component when I was that age. I don't know what the comparative statistics are, but unless society used to hide the phenomenon, I think it's far worse today.
The Chants, plus Trevor's wife Lyndsay and his mum arrived at the Monte Christo Room in a people mover, which, while not being a limo exactly, had the desired effect when we pulled up on the footpath and all tumbled out. We trundled down two flights of stairs to the Green Room, noting on the way that the main room seemed to be jam packed with punters.