Tour 2000

On Thursday 16th March 2000 Cambridge University Brass Band departed on their annual tour, this year to the West Yorkshire area, and were to perform several outstanding concerts in the next four days.

They not only played concerts alone, with groups from Rishworth School, and with Barnsley Metropolitan Band, but they also gave masterclasses to various groups of school children.

The band's performances in concerts were excellent, and they were very warmly received by all their audiences. The children attending the masterclasses also thoroughly enjoyed them, and were extremely grateful to the band for giving up their time to give the classes.

Stones Environmental Training Centre,

Rochdale Road, Ripponden, Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire HX6 4LA

“Go Whippet” coach journey to the heart of the Pennines (well, Birmingham at least).

Afternoon: Schools class at Halgreen Infant School, Birmingham.

Evening: Arrive at the hostel and cook dinner.

Morning: Free time in Manchester.

Afternoon: Short concert, workshop and rehearsal at Rishworth School.

Early evening: Buffet tea at the school.

Evening: 7:30pm Concert at Rishworth School, with Rishworth ensembles and ourselves.

Morning: Free time in Leeds. (Leave hostel at 10am, arrive in Leeds 10:45am).

Afternoon: Playing on the Church steps at Haworth.

Evening: 7:30pm Concert in Stones Methodist Church (adjacent to where we are staying).

Morning: Traditional girls vs. boys football match.

Lunch time: Tidy hostel and leave after lunch.

Afternoon: Trip to Holmfirth (Last of the Summer Wine country).

Evening: 7:00pm concert with Barnsley Metropolitan Band at Silkstone Lodge.

I awoke to the sound of my talking alarm clock announcing that it was “time to get up!” in that harsh American accent that was to make it famous over the next few days, at least to the people in my room who were awake at 4:23am. Finishing my packing was a rushed job because I hadn't left enough time, and I was a few minutes late for the arranged departure at 11am after I had struggled up the hill to Churchill College. I had to carry my trombone and the whiteboard that was to be used in the evening's entertainment; I must have looked like I was struggling but instead of rushing to help me Steve Arnold decided that taking a photo would be much more sensible.

Talking to Christopher McDonald while we watched other people load the coach, it became obvious that he had mislaid his voice and was forced to use an altogether weaker substitute voice that did not sound in any way camp. Definitely not. Anyone who thinks it did sound camp is very much mistaken. ;o)

The coach left Churchill at about 11:15am, which was probably the closest to the arranged meeting time that a CUBB tour had ever departed. Lucy Knights, who was taking the register, informed us for the first time of many that “Richards Rogers Russell”. We then proceeded to take a tour of Cambridge, and to this day I still have not worked out how we picked up Steve Houghton at the Botanic Gardens without stopping. The bus driver this year was called Bob, and fortunately he turned out to be considerably less psychopathic than the previous year's “Link”. After the quick flurry of bonneting with Mike Martin's antimacassar had ceased, Ivor Morris started some serious eating. How he managed to get through an entire six-pack of Sainsbury's Economy (or was it Tesco Value?) sausage rolls is beyond me.

A short service station stop was enjoyed by all, but sadly there was not enough time to squeeze in an Olympic Breakfast at the Little Chef. Most people partook of the dishwater coffee though, and some are still regretting it. Back on the coach it was time to reveal the tour T-shirts, and to the horror of Mike Tildesley they were a very girly shade of blue. The obligatory awful pun read “CUBB Leeds the way in Y2K”, but I don't think the band will ever top the 1999 motto “Wear having a great Tyne”…

We arrived in Birmingham in the early afternoon to play our first concert at Helen Lansley's school. I was not in the cut-down version of CUBB that played in the school, but I am told that the concert was very good and Mike Tildesley's hosepipe routine went down a treat. Those of us who did not venture into the school were taken to a bowling and Laser Quest centre where we split up rather unsurprisingly into a bowling faction and a Laser Quest faction. I was in the bowling group, and we enjoyed a very civilised game which was won by Mike Martin if I remember rightly. The Laser Quest group were caught a little out of their depth on the other hand, when they were told to join a game that was just about to start without attending the all-important briefing. It was then that they found out the game was not Laser Quest at all, but a strange new version which had some very silly rules. Once they had realised that two hands were required on the gun before it would fire they began to get the hang of it, but I think all of them managed to get a negative score. The design details of the two-hand detector on the gun were to become the subject of much debate among the engineers on the coach whilst we waited for the school concert to finish.

On the way from Birmingham to the Stones Centre in Ripponden, which was to be our home for the next few days, Steve Arnold, Mike Tildesley and myself had the task of finalising our preparations for the evening's entertainment. We took several “Family Fortunes” style surveys of the band, asking such questions as “Name something that tour is famous for” (to which the most popular answer was of course beer and drinking), much to the annoyance of everyone else on the coach. It was around this time that plans for the top-secret “Operation Sac” were beginning to be formulated. The Operation is still classified, so unfortunately I cannot reveal the details here, but suffice it to say that when we arrived at the Stones Centre everything went to plan and Operation Sac was a complete success. Shortly before the coach got to Ripponden, we passed the dams that were featured in the film “Dambusters” and Mike Tildesley pointed them out to everyone. This was to become something of a theme for the tour, because he decided that they needed to be pointed out every time we passed them.

At the Stones Centre, some comedy reversing was attempted by Bob; the Centre had a very steep driveway, which we began to reverse into. Unfortunately, the drive dropped off far too steeply and the bottom of the coach has never forgiven the driver. Instead the coach was parked on the road, and Mike Martin breathed a sigh of relief. The reversing had brought back painful memories of Link last year…

Everyone began to settle in, unpack very crinkled band uniforms, and press my talking alarm clock. A preliminary investigation of the pool table revealed that it was broken and had most of the balls stuck inside it. The few balls that were available for hitting in the traditional manner were slowly being swallowed by the table until I decided to remove them from play because they were needed for Band Big Break later on. During the rehearsal before dinner, the poster displaying the traditional Jewish proverb (!) “Love thy neighbour even if he plays the trombone” (or something similar) was pointed out to the trombone section. Interestingly, the neighbours depicted on the poster were all playing trombones except one, who seemed to be playing the double bass. Perhaps the artist got bored of drawing trombones and decided to branch out.

Dinner consisted of fish and chips, sausage and chips or pie and chips. Ivor Morris decided to go for pie and chips, because the pastry in six economy sausage rolls obviously wasn't enough to satisfy his daily requirement and he needed more. After dinner we waited until the Methodists who were in charge of the Stones Centre had come to look around before we cracked open the beer, but some people couldn't wait that long so went to the pub down the road instead. At 9:15pm, we were still waiting for the inspectors to arrive so we decided to get going with the entertainment that was to be provided by Mike, Steve and myself. We weren't completely ready by the time the rest of the band had formed into an audience and wanted us to start, so Chris Muscles amazed them with his club juggling skills while we sorted ourselves out. I got a round of applause for simply walking into the room, which seemed to amuse the bus driver somewhat.

Finally, we were ready to start. Mike and Steve informed the audience and I that they were the hosts and I was the co-host for the evening, but I got my own back in my round “The Price is right” later on; Mike and Steve were my assistants. The first round was a mixture of “Band Fortunes”, “Band Big Break” and some general band questions. For Band Big Break, each team could nominate one of their members to play, or use Ian Craig instead. Not many teams took up this offer however because if they did, Ian would only get 1 second per correct answer instead of the usual 10. The extra comedy element of the game was that the pool table swallowed any balls that were potted, so Steve had the difficult task of preventing the balls from going down the pockets. He failed miserably, and soon the rules changed from “pot as many balls as you can” to “pot the ball as many times as you can”.

The semi-final introduced “Blankety Band”, with a panel specially selected from the audience. I was particularly proud of the flags I had manufactured for them out of pencils and pieces of paper. “Keema Naan” featured prominently in the answers, seemingly independent of the question being asked. I think it was the back row cornets and the sop/rep/flug team who got to the final, but I may be wrong. In fact I have just been informed that I am wrong and it was the front row vs. the back row in the final. Anyway, notable points about the final included the Blankety Band Supermatch, in which the questions were “Bush _” (top answer: “Busherene”) and “The _” (top answer: “The Renes”), and the Price is right. In the Price is right, the teams had to guess numerical answers to questions and get as close as possible without going over to the answers we had made up earlier. Also, the Generation Game round was amusing: one team had to juggle three balls for 10 seconds (and Chris Muscles had to juggle five balls because he had the unfair advantage of being able to juggle three already). The other team had to make toast, preferably in an extremely camp manner, and this was expertly demonstrated by the one and only Gareth Hopkin. After front row team had won the competition, I amazed myself and probably everyone else with my ability to juggle five luminous balls in the dark despite the fact that I had drunk a large amount of beer and port.

Drinking and general debauchery went on well into the night, and people slowly started drifting off to bed. At 4:23am, as is now traditional, we pressed my alarm clock so that it would announce to the world (well, the room at least) “It's four twenty-three a.m.” Eventually, just me, Ivor Morris, Paul Davis and Steve Hardiman remained listening to some incredibly cheesy music until we hit the sack at 5:30am. We decided to leave a classic piece of cheese whose name escapes me playing on repeat for the person who woke up first to discover in an hour or two when the next day was to begin…

I still have not found out who it was that decided it would be a good idea to get up at 7:30am, but someone did and it is surprisingly difficult to drift back into dreamland when people are getting up all around you, even when you have only had two hours' sleep. So I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower. Despite being a mere dribble of water, the shower was surprisingly refreshing, and the lack of shower curtain was nothing compared to the shower buddy system in operation the previous year. In the time between getting out of the shower and going down to the sinks to comb my hair, an impossibly large number of people gasped at the fact that my hair is not always perfectly arranged. I never fail to be amazed at how many people believe it is possible for me to have a shower without disturbing my hair. I would also like to take this opportunity to dispel the myth that it is a wig; I assure you it is perfectly real.

Anyway, back to the morning in question. I made some cheese and pickle sandwiches for lunch, which I'm sure were lovely at the time but must have been swapped for some rank sandwiches before lunchtime. Until we left at 9:30am, I sat in the lounge wondering how tired it was possible to be without actually dying, but as I was to discover in the next two days it is possible to be very much more tired than I was then. The coach took us to Manchester, where we had a couple of hours of free time before we needed to leave. My group went to have a coffee in Lewis' (or maybe Lewis's; I can't remember which it was), and then we looked around the shopping centre. I think it might have been the Trafford Centre, but that's the one Lowri Turner walks around on telly so I could be getting confused. In fact I was getting confused, because I am told it was the Arndale Centre, not the Trafford Centre.

We entered the shopping centre through Marks and Spencer's, then walked through the Bushtube that we had seen from outside and were transported to another dimension. Mike Martin, Christopher McDonald and myself all agreed that it was a marvellous piece of engineering, but Ian Craig was not convinced. After a short tour around the new dimension we had discovered, a trip through the Bushtube in the other direction shrank us to about one third normal size so that the posters in M&S appeared huge to us, and the ceilings were far too high. A quick visit to the Cathedral was all we had time for before we were supposed to meet everyone else, and a woman who obviously had too much time on her hands insisted on describing every detail of the many occasions on which Manchester Cathedral had been partially demolished by bombs. Christopher McDonald seemed to enjoy it though. The rest of the band, and also the coach, must have been through the M&S Bushtube as well because when we got back to the coach park they all seemed to be the same size as we were. Or maybe we had gradually grown back to normal size during the walk back. Who knows, or dares to dream?

When we had all returned to the coach, Bob drove us to Rishworth School where we gave a short performance to the children and teachers there. This was followed by a rehearsal with the children who were to play with us in some joint pieces for the concert that evening. The school catering service provided us with a fantastic buffet tea, which I am sure was infinitely more palatable than the gruel they probably gave to the school children in the canteen. I entertained a few lucky people with some of my card tricks, and finally we played the concert to a packed house in the evening. I think most of us were in agreement that the conductor of the school music groups was a complete mentalist, but he was very enthusiastic.

Back at the Stones Centre, the pool table had been fixed during the day and also someone set up the table tennis table. A very large number of cans of beer were drunk that evening; so many in fact that three more crates had to be purchased the next day by Kate Barlow's parents. We played table tennis, pool, table football and baseball for several hours, and it was around this time that re-enactments of the scene from Naked Gun where Lesley Neilson is the umpire of a baseball game started. “Sttrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiike twwwoo, two two two two two two two two!!” would echo around the Stones Centre many a time from now on.

After I had played my last table tennis game of the evening, many people marvelled at the ritual shaving of my table tennis bat; I tried to explain that I was just cleaning it but nobody seemed to believe me. By this time most people were fairly drunk and Christopher McDonald decided that it would be a good idea to light one of Chris Muscles' fire clubs, so he coated it in cooking oil. If he had been able to find anyone with a match or a lighter, or more to the point anyone stupid enough to give him a match or lighter, the Stones Centre may well have been burnt to the ground.

While most people had been on the ground floor of the hostel drinking and playing games, Duncan Johnston had not been having much fun. He was downstairs in the kitchen trying to write up an experiment or something. With all the distractions of people hitting table tennis balls down the stairs, coming down to get more drinks and so on, I don't think he got very far with it. When he finally gave up and went to bed after I went to see him at about 6:15am, most sane people were already fast asleep. We had carried out the obligatory pressing of the talking alarm clock at 4:23am, and Paul Davis and I had just finished our game of table tennis, which had degraded into a game of hitting the table tennis ball as hard as possible at each other by that time. I think we managed to squeeze in almost 2.5 hours of sleep before we had to get up the next day.

Whoever had decided that getting up at 7:30am the previous day was a good idea had obviously come to their senses, and the occupants of my room started to show signs of life at about 8:30am. We were due to leave at 9:30am again, this time for a couple of hours in Leeds. I decided to give the rank sandwiches a miss, and after a shower and some breakfast we departed. In Leeds Mike Martin decided to lead the way in Y2K; we saw the Tetley brewery and had a lovely walk along the canal. The group I was in had managed to shed most of its members a few minutes previously, because we had lost Chris Muscles and this fact wholly failed to be communicated from the back of the group to the front. So the engineers, who seemed to have congregated at the front of the group, went on down to the brewery and left the others behind looking for Chris. After having appreciated the design of a footbridge over the canal and deciding not to try and collapse it by exciting it at its resonant frequency, we briefly toured the shopping centre of Leeds. A stop at one of the numerous bakeries provided sustenance for the afternoon ahead.

The band's next public performance was to be that afternoon in Haworth, where we played on the church steps. It was utterly freezing because we had to play in our tour T-shirts, so most of us abandoned that idea for the second half and wore our coats. I was instructed to leave my trombone case at the front so that passers-by might be tempted to fill it with cash, but without any money in there to start with it looked like I'd just forgotten to clear my case to the back like everyone else. We made a few pounds though, and after the break I spread the change around the case to make it look like a lot of money. People were much more generous during the second half, and we made over thirty pounds. During the break most of the band descended on a tea shop for a cream tea, and I'm not sure about anyone else's but mine was delicious. When we had finished playing on the Haworth church steps, the coach took us back to the church next to the Stones Centre for a rehearsal.

Meanwhile back in the Stones Centre kitchen the Baritone section were cooking dinner for everyone. They made several vats of leek and potato soup, which turned out to be slightly too much. The soup that was not eaten proceeded to go cold and grow a lovely skin down in the kitchen, and would be the source of much amusement the next day when someone discovered that it behaved in an extraordinary way when splashed around with a ladle. Dinner was followed by a concert in the church next door, which went very well as far as I recall. Perhaps more importantly the concert was followed by a great deal of drinking in the hostel.

Many games of table tennis, pool, table football and baseball, cans of beer and renditions of the Naked Gun scene later, the time was almost right to press my talking alarm clock for the traditional announcement, “It's four twenty-three a.m.” We very nearly missed it that night, but luckily someone was on the ball and spotted the time at 4:21am.

When most of the sane band members had gone to bed, a group of intrepid explorers decided to go on an expedition up the hill on which the Stones Centre was located to watch the sunrise. I think the group consisted of Paul Davis, Steve Hardiman, Ben Russell and myself, but correct me if I'm wrong. We had not got very far up the hill when we realised that Ben was not really up for the expedition and probably would not have agreed to come with us if he hadn't been so drunk. [STOP PRESS: This just in from Ben Russell: “On the contrary - had I been capable of climbing over dry stone walls without killing myself or going spontaneously unconscious at that time I would have been much more up for the expedition than I was. Survival instinct seems to have overridden the loss of inhibitions thing on that particular occasion. (Damn that survival instinct, spoiling all the fun.) But then again I didn't have a hangover the following day either. Perhaps I wasn't drunk at all.”] So we took him back to the hostel, only to find the bus driver making himself a coffee! The time must have been about 5:30am, so my personal opinion is that he was mad to get up that early, but he assured us that he was used to getting up early to do school bus runs and the like.

Anyway, Paul, Steve and I then set out up the hill again, and we had great fun scaling cliffs (well, a fairly tall dry stone wall) and hiking through fields. By this time it was getting extremely cold, and the beer that Paul and I had brought with us was running out. We sought what shelter we could behind a wall, ready to watch the sun come up over the horizon. It was a beautiful sunrise, well worth the trek up the hill in my opinion. In fact, I enjoyed the trek up the hill too and it probably would have been worthwhile on its own.

The trek back down the hill on the other hand was less enjoyable. The mist that we could see at the bottom of the valley was very quickly rolling up towards us, and we found ourselves enveloped in thick fog in a matter of minutes. Visibility dropped to about twenty metres, we took a wrong turning and soon we were completely lost. The cold was also beginning to get to us. Fortunately, common sense prevailed and we walked in the direction we thought was towards the village. Road sounds could be made out through the mist, and we located what turned out to be the road that the Stones Centre was on. Not knowing this at the time, our plan was to keep walking until we reached somewhere we recognised and then re-think the plan. Our luck was in however, and when we realised that we were walking along the road to the hostel our spirits were lifted once more.

I finally finished my last can of beer at 7am when we got back to the rear entrance of the Stones Centre which we had wedged open with a crisp packet. Steve and I had a well-earned cup of tea, whilst Paul decided to try and grab half an hour of sleep before people started getting up. I thought that if I had gone to sleep I would have felt a lot worse, and I was probably right. On the way to the shower I met Steve Houghton and Christopher McDonald, neither of whom were making any sense at all. I told Christopher this, but he later informed me that I had not made any sense.

Thoroughly invigorated by the shower, I went back down to the kitchen to await the annual Boys vs. Girls football match. The people from the church who were in charge of the Stones Centre probably would not have been very impressed if we had played the football match anywhere in view of the church, especially seeing as we had refused to play in their “Songs of Praise” style service that morning. Therefore Bob drove us to a local park to play. Due to the slight excess of male players wanting to take part, the girls' team selected Chris Muscles and myself to join their team. Dave Read was also the girls' goalie, and although he saved many shots on goal, there were just too many attempts for him to have any real chance of stopping them all. The boys' team decided that a having goalie would be a waste of precious striker resources, so they played with their goal protected solely by the occasional defender who decided to drop back just in case the girls got the ball past the half way line.

Not long into the match, an extremely annoying old man who was walking his dog in a completely separate area of the park to the one in which we were playing decided to enforce his own special rule that no fun of any kind should be had in the park at any time. He spouted some crap about it being illegal to play football in a public park, because other people would not be able to sit in the said park and be depressed. The fact that there were no other conscious human beings within a two-mile radius did not seem to matter to him, and the lack of sign saying “No ball games” was also insignificant in his eyes. He claimed to work for the council, but from his general demeanour and lack of knowledge of the park's rules we deduced that he was probably a cleaner in the council offices. That or a dustbin man.

Eventually we decided that he was not going to go away unless we moved our game, and he was threatening to call the police (which was incidentally what we were thinking of doing as well, to arrest him), so we adjourned to one of the full-size football pitches nearby. The reason we had not gone to the football pitches originally was that we thought they were likely to be inhabited by a pair of real football teams in the near future, but this turned out not to be the case. Playing the whole length of the pitch turned out to be less than successful, because running was not many of the players' strong points. Shortly before the pitch was shrunk to half size, Ian Craig viciously hacked me down and I joined Bob and Christopher McDonald on the edge of the pitch to watch the rest of the game with slightly less risk of serious injury.

I have no idea what the final score was; I had lost interest by that time. The boys won fairly convincingly as far as I know. Back at the hostel the cleaning operation was already underway, and the footballers joined in as soon as they had showered and changed. Gareth Hopkin and his minions were preparing lunch, which was to be a very nice sausage casserole with mashed potato. Mike Martin was less than impressed by the cheese topping of this casserole, but I think he managed to force down the rest.

After lunch the coach was loaded, and one final check for forgotten items was made before we departed the Stones Centre for the last time of the tour. Holmfirth was to provide the afternoon's entertainment; it is where “Last of the Summer Wine” is set. By this time I was feeling the effects of having had no sleep the night before, so several cups of concentrated caffeine solution later I had my energy back and we went for a walk around the village. We purchased some exquisite baguettes to eat later on the coach, posed for a photo on a random flight of steps, then Mike Martin and I led the way in Y2K up one of the many hills in Holmfirth. It was quite a steep hill, but the view from the top was gorgeous and the journey passed the time until we had to set off for the coach park. We failed to find any functioning public conveniences, so everyone had to hold it in until we got to the concert venue for that evening.

The concert was a joint one with the Barnsley Metropolitan Band, in a large pub. They had the first slot, so we amused ourselves with the snooker table and some pork scratchings. I forget who was in the snooker teams, which is probably fortunate for them because the single frame they played took almost an hour and even then was not finished. About half way through the game a man had come into the room and signed his initials on the blackboard signifying that he wanted to play on the snooker table. He was less than impressed with the standard of play, but when he eventually got onto the table to give Steve Hirst a game he was not very good either. I don't think they finished the game because it was now our turn to play some music.

After our half of the concert, we played some joint items with the Barnsley Metropolitan Band including Ivor Morris' favourite piece, “The Floral Dance”. The audience loved it, and the mentalist who was conducting us decided that for an encore we would play the whole piece again! The audience couldn't get enough, and we were both relieved and saddened to have just finished the last concert of the tour. There was just enough time for a pint from the bar before we started the long journey home.

On the coach several people made speeches, including Dave Read (the conductor) who thanked us all for playing so well on his debut tour. The committee was thanked, Kate Barlow was thanked (again), Bob was thanked, Paul Bushby's chipmunks were thanked. Actually, I made that last one up. Anyway, lots of people were thanked for what was a marvellous tour. A quick stop at a service station provided much relief to those who had partaken of a pint from the bar earlier, and back on the coach Dave Read and Steve Hirst made sandwiches for anyone that way inclined. Finally we arrived in Cambridge at about 1:30am, thoroughly exhausted, and after numerous goodbyes I made my way back to college and the lovely bed that was waiting for me.