Spyke wrote
Hahaha! Classic!
No joke there Alan, I saw some really attractive girls 'hooking' up with some less than good looking guys at a gig last night. They weren't even in the band, just crew/sound/techs... I counted five different ones with the one band associate. Disturbing...
I once misrepresented myself as a member of Sting's backing band.
This was back in the middle ages - IE 1988. There was a huge Amnesty International gig at Harare. Springestee, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and Youssou N'Dour on the bill. Some friends and I headed North, with a plan to overnight with friends in Bulawayo.
Then we got to Beitbridge and a massive balls up. There was a huge amount of northbound traffic (which was not in the plan, after all, said friends and I had imagined that we were the only people on the planet who even knew about this show). The Zim and SA sides couldn't agree on a strategy. On the SA side they had extra staff but worked regular hours. On the Zim side they had a regular staff complement but stayed open longer. It took us 9 hours to get through customs. We should have been having a braai in Bulawayo by this time.
So we made a decision to drive all night straight up to Harare where, we were convinced, we would be able to talk ourselves into some accomodation.
Well that didn't work out to plan either. We ended up at the Meikles at about 2 in the morning. The reception desk were quite unwilling not to mention unable to help us out as they had a large number of musicians, crew and various other tour personnel in the hotel. I put on my best pommy accent and told them that I was with Sting's band. Eventually the night porter told us that if we insulted him with a sufficiently large bribe he could arrange for us to park our camper van in the hotel's basement and we could doss down there.
We decided to insult him even more and he agreed that we could use a currently unoccupied room to have a shower. But we could only go up one at a time in order to stop us just invading the room. We drew lots and I got to shower first. I took the key, caught the elevator up to whatever floor it was and....
... walked out of the elevator and into a bunch of very large men with sunglasses and bulges under their jackets. They demanded to know who I was and where I was going. I showed them the key and they decided that that was OK because I had to go down the corridor to the right. The corridor to the left was absolutely off-limits because Mr Springsteen and his band had all those rooms.
I thanked them very meekly and went off to have a shower - bearing in mind their suggestion that I make it fast.
The next morning we crawled out of the camper van and went up to the foyer to get some coffee (the insulting events of last night had included morning coffee in the deal). As I walked past the desk there were two very attractive ladies standing there. The concierge said something about "here's the rest of the band" and I realised he was talking to me. The two ladies were Sting's backing singers.
