Stoke, 12th October 2012.

Stoke was the first proper night of The Killing is Dead tour, and therefore my first proper night of any tour ever.

The Sugarmill is an interesting venue, because the stage is pretty high to start with, and then at each side of the stage there’s an extra ‘booster’ step, so basically being 5 foot nothing, a lot of my view of the stage in that venue is knees. I said something to Kemp about the height of the stage, and he simply laughed in my face and went “HAHAHA CROTCH SHOT!” which was…just delightful. 

Something must have been said about this, because my other resounding memory of this night is Beveridge showing me the hole in the crotch of his trousers and then winking at me. There’s a photo of this happening somewhere. I think Dave, their tour manager at the time, posted it on Instagram. (Ah Dave. You were a dick. And you hate me now. He's blocked me on twitter otherwise I'd go and look for that photo.)

I have a video from Stoke of the song that was to become All Hallows Evil but at the time was known to me as “the first song”, because I wanted to try and watch it back to learn the words. That can be viewed here.

Stoke was where Beveridge asked me ‘What’s the Latin for ‘exploding’?’ from the stage before thrusting the mic in my face. Why the holy hell he asked me of all people I’ll never know, I mean did he really think I might know or was I just there? Who knows. Anyway, I’m pretty sure the answer I gave was something incredibly eloquent, like ‘…Whuh?’ After that gig I made a point of looking up the Latin for ‘Exploding heart disorder’ (Exploding Cor Inordinatio, a phrase that will stay with me until the day I die) and figured I’d just bide my time until he thought to ask me again. He didn’t. I had to basically scream it at him in Wolverhampton. But we’ll come to that later.

The only other thing I remember distinctly about Stoke is asking Beveridge where his stage clothes were, because they’d done an interview/photo shoot with the Attitude clothing magazine and gotten a bunch of free stuff that he’d worn in Rugby, and he told me that he’d forgotten all of his stage gear and had in fact had to go out and get everything he was currently wearing from a charity shop.

Oh I should probably say something about this being the first time I saw The Dead Lay Waiting live. …Yeah. Considering I went on to see them about another 10 times, I was not their hugest fan. I mean they’re really lovely guys (well, most of them are) but their music was just not really my thing at all. I’d gotten into them a bit more by the end of tour but… you know. Future tours with bands like Fort Hope and Dead! were way more my scene.

After the gig I remember giving the guys glowing lollipops, which were nowhere near as exciting as I’d thought they were going to be, they were essentially just tiny glow sticks with lollies on the end. And I have a picture of Pill with kitty ears on with one in his mouth.

Until next time,

Meg Mercury xoxo

EDIT: I went poking around and to my delight I discovered that Dave had in fact unblocked me on his instagram account, meaning I had access to this beauty that I thought I'd never see again.
You're welcome.