Are we not alchemists?

Sometime around 2.30pm my weary legs took me up the steep staircase leading from the Garden of Eden back into the venue and began the ritual of preparing my stuff onstage.
This is it, the concert my hosts and I have been obsessing over for what seems like forever. Will my voice hold? Also, only two rehearsals with a band I have known for only two days, how good could this possibly work? We will see. The room is packed and expectant as I start the single note repeat of the intro to Wake Up, sounding now like an insistent alarm call.
The band kick in, my voice kicks in, we kick ass! The sound of the band is a revelation because it is not the norm for my usual set up.

Let me explain...

We have three musicians (that's three without me) who are big Neurotics fans and all seem to want to get involved in the band and, whether by design or not, one bassist has got most of the bass parts down pat apart from a handful, that the other bassist knows inside out. So we do a swap around mid set but when either of the bassists are not playing, they performing additional backing vocal duties. Now visually this is different from my norm and maybe a little cluttered but I am billed as Steve Drewett not The Newtown Neurotics and this is my band and they do not have to be three in number.
Actually, the backing vocals are a revelation, everyone contributes and no-one is struggling to play their instrument and sing, if a part is tricky for anyone of them, someone else is covering. They are all great singers.

There is this great part in 'Licensing hours' where at the very end of the song there are a couple of beatlesque oohh la la la la's which I inserted into the song on the day of the recording and worked fantastically, but in a live context Colin could not sing it very well and play his bass part at the same time so it got left out. Years later we may have tried it in the current English line up but I think we may not have as I cannot recall (we have not played together for a while).

Now on this night in Brazil, the oohh la la la's come flying in with great beauty, sung by two people, the line hovers over the aggressive guitar work and velocity of the song, like angels descending from between the lighting of a tropical thunder storm.

This is the beauty; this is the thing we as musicians crave. When the interactions between the players inspire each other to greater heights, and that is happening to me now. I'm not saying we played perfectly, we didn't, but we started playing brilliantly and that is completely different. I felt my soul opening up, my fingers was finding virtually everything I needed without looking all the time. As I looked out at the audience I could see they were really enjoying it, but they were not at fever pitch, however as each song went by, their involvement was directly connected to us, so as we rose, they rose and together we climbed the mountain of punk rock pleasure.

That night, we became alchemists, we turned the stress, the worry and the bile of previous days and transmuted it into gold, we had no need for Eldorado.

The audience went wild. We had to play more, we did and we played Hypocrite, just re-released here and in the United States after originally being released in 1979, and it is another song again, it sounds so different, so right. Strangely though, my voice held up but I sounded very much like Joe Strummer at times with my huskiness which just added to the 'otherness' of the performance.

Once we had finished we could officially call it a 'triumph over adversity' but I am on the point of collapse. However, the love that came back from the audience who came to me to express how much they enjoyed it, more than buoyed me up to finish the evening still standing.

I do not take my music for granted, I believe in it with all my heart but I realise it cannot always be great. Despite its aggressiveness, it is still, in my mind, as fragile as butterfly wings.

The time, the place, the people and above all the band (more on them soon) were just right tonight.

This what I came for and I will never forget it.