After all that rain yesterday, you’d have expected the rock festival to have been a complete washout.

However, there was no chance of last night’s event ever degenerating into a communal mud bath, because this was the first outdoor festival to be held indoors!

The summer of love has come to Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre in the form of Jim Cartwright’s play Eight Miles High. The whole theatre was transformed into a farmer’s field. All of the theatre staff – and many of the audience too – were dressed in Caftans and had flowers in their hair. The set was magnificent, with the grassy stage extending right into the auditorium so that those occupying the front rows were actually sitting on the grass, picnic style, as the whole audience effectively became part of the show as festival-goers.

This is a play about the music, the hippies, the free love and flower power of the sixties.

My favourite of the whole evening was the Beatles number “A Day in the Life”. I never did get to know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall – but at least now I know how many actors it takes to fill the Royal Court.

This extremely talented cast performed a whole raft of iconic numbers from the days of Sargent Pepper, with a good sprinkling of Hendrix, Dylan and the like, thrown in for good measure!

They gelled like a rock band who had been performing together forever. They produced a sound every bit as good as any band I have seen playing live – in fact better than many! Remarkable when you consider they are a bunch of actors brought together a few short weeks ago to rehearse for this play.

They were all great. Paul Broughton (remember Eddie Banks in Brookside) portrayed a very convincing Hell’s Angel. For me though, the star of the show was Royal Court regular Andrew Schofield (pictured) who played the archetype hippy. Yeh! Far-out maaan!

Last night was the first performance of the play’s month-long run. It is a unique experience not to be missed. Do make sure you get to see this show before it ends on August 16th. It is fan-bloody-tastic!

Update: See the last night review in “comments” (below)

I’m not too sure that my lovely wife Jayne would approve but I must admit that under normal circumstances I would quite happily fantasise over the prospect of sharing a sauna with her and Kylie.

Last night was no kinky threesome however. There were at least 18,998 other people crammed in there with us and the “sauna” in question was the much overrated Manchester Evening News Arena.

Sadly, the Kylie X 2008 concert was completely ruined by the venue’s oppressive heat and diabolical sound quality.

Don’t get me wrong, what her lungs produced was pure Kylie – and what they were wrapped in was, of course, as delightful as ever. But oh dear… her much heralded new band sounded like a recently-formed group of teenage wannabes bent on blowing out the windows at their local village hall!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not averse to loud music per se, but what they delivered last night was a distorted mess that completely drowned out the voice of our diminutive, delectable iconic Aussie heartthrob.

Kylie darling: please sack your sound engineer. We really had no way of telling how good your band was through all the distortion

And my message to the MEN Arena: (definitely NO darling of mine): Sort out your acoustics …and your air-conditioning …and your seating …and your car parking and…

Better still, knock the whole place down and build a proper arena geared more to customer experience than money-grabbing sardine-packing.  And as far as the over-steep upper tiers are concerned, the only customers who might actually enjoy the experience of scaling these would be seasoned rock climbers!

The MEN should take a lead from Liverpool’s excellent new Echo Arena and Glasgow’s equally brilliant SECC.

Biggest doesn’t necessarily mean Best!

EDIT: check out the comments…

Everybody seems to be sixty these days!

Hah! ten years ago, I recall saying the same thing about people being fifty. That’s the way it goes, I suppose. You buy a Volkswagen and everybody seems to be driving one!

Anyway, my mate Patrick earned his bus pass and B&Q discount card this weekend. He’d had fifty guests at his fiftieth and was going to attempt to gather sixty for this do, then seventy in ten years time, and so on. Until, that is, I reminded him of the principles of the inverse square law!

All in all, we had a great day at the Faleur’s. Great company. Lovely food. and the weather even gave us a break just long enough to enjoy the magnificent buffet lunch in the garden.

Photoshop came to the rescue as far as his birthday card was concerned (out with last week’s sexagenarian and in with this week’s) and for his birthday present we went to Zimmers R Us. No-one, but no-one should ever expect a “normal” birthday present from the Birchalls!

Thanks for a great day Patrick & Liz. We’re off now to spend the evening with a forty year old who’s very close to my heart – name of Kylie

PS: Did I mention that Patrick is a pretty mean photographer? Check out his website

Oooooh! Spooooky!!

Bringing up the LL15 1BE location on Multi Map reveals that we are being watched!

The aerial image (courtesy of Microsoft Earth) shows the car park and roundabout top right, with Market Street running down to centre bottom.

Our studio is marked with the red arrow – and there, centre left, just next door to the Ambulance Station in School Lane, is a chisel-featured bloke keeping a beady eye on us!

Total raised to date is fast approaching £3,000

Cheeky Chappie Roger Everett was the “brains” behind the 2008 charity calendar, and we now have conclusive proof of where those “Brains” are kept: He’s sitting on them!