A Truly Legendary Breakfast
Saturday 13 October, 9.30pm (PAWS Party, Laguna Hotel, Thailand):
Tonight’s show is the biggest gig of the tour – a headline slot at the annual fundraiser for local charity PAWS (Phuket Animal Welfare Society). There are around 300 people in the crowd this evening and they’re all up for a big one. The dancefloor is heaving and, weaving in and out of the boogying revellers, there’s a chap with an enormous camera who turns out to be here from Channel 11 – which means clips from the gig will be going out on Thai national television later in the week.
We end the first encore with Emily and initially resist calls for a second. However, our hosts are having none of this and we are spirited back onto the stage for another couple of tunes. I am sweating like a mariner. It is hot up here in my suit. Eventually we hang up our guitars and the evening draws to a close. PAWS have managed to raise THB 1 Million tonight, which is fantastic. Good work all round, I’d say.
Next stop is a local bar which is modest in size and utterly rammed full of big English blokes. They have, like us, congregated here for the Rubgy World Cup semi-final between England and France. I won’t pretend to understand, appreciate or even like rugby that much but I have absolutely no qualms about jumping on the glory bandwagon whilst the national team is actually winning games.
So, we triumph at the rugby, the bar erupts, the smaller members of the assembled crowd get thrown around by the larger ones, and everyone piles out onto the street. It is 3am. We are left with seemingly only one option – to retire to our rooms with a couple of bottles of Sang Som (Thai rum), pump up the Guns ‘N’ Roses on the stereo, channel all our discipline into not raiding the mini-bar and see the night through until 6am when we can go to breakfast.
******
So. It is now 6am. In the spirit of true British stoicism we have seen the whole night through and our reward is a delicious 5-star breakfast in one of the world’s top hotels at an hour so youthful that we have the entire dining room to ourselves. We each don a pair of shades and our official Laguna Hotel bathrobes and take our seats for a truly legendary breakfast.
In our heads we look like a rather suave amalgam of James Dean and Noel Coward. In reality, of course, we look like tools. This, in many ways, is what being in a band is all about. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Chris Lightyear