To the left hand side of this text you can see a message written into my diary by the notorious "MONSTER" Eric Hall. Eric was at this time a plugger for EMI and absolutely brilliant at his job. It was Eric that helped get Cockney Rebel so many appearances on Top of the Pops. He must have opened up my diary when I wasn't looking to write his message....Funny funny guy.

In my dateline I see an appointment with Willie Robertson too, he took me to Morton's for lunch. Now Willie was THE insurance man for the UK music business, he really invented live music insurance for the industry and will forever be remembered as co-founder of Robertson Taylor Insurance . He passed away recently. I had a great relationship with him and loved seeing him in his office with the perennial bottle of white wine by his side. RIP xxx

For this tour the band started rehearsals at E-Z Hire in Market Road, off the Caledonian Road, London. It was a great space and had a cafe of it's own as well as some decent rooms. During this two weeks lots more was going on including hiring one of the business's great set designers of the time, Ian Knight. Ian recently passed away but I was fortunate to see him before he died and recorded an interview with him about his career. It's very interesting material. Click his image for more on Ian.

We then went on to Shepperton Studios where we hired Stage A for full production rehearsals. If you take a look inside the itinerary you will see we hired Ramport Trucking, which was the forerunner to ML Executives, the full production rental company set up by the crew of The Who. It was around this time that ML Executives bought a stage and the big house in Shepperton Studios and I got to hire equipment from them for quite a few tours in the future. The sound system was from Kelsey Ace, owned by Bill Kelsey, an early pioneer of sound systems here in the UK. The lights were from Rainbow Productions, based at the Rainbow Theatre and owned by Dick Parkinson, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. Dick was the stage manager there at the time. John Coppen, who became Dick's right hand man and office manager gives a great insight into these times in a interview he did here, and I recently interviewed John myself for an in depth discussion of lighting production in the early days (for another project....watch this space..). They changed their name to Lairhurst because there was already a film lighting company called Rainbow, but I digress............again.

It was really nice to get a credit on the album, which is also reproduced on this tour programme to the left. For all those hours sitting around at Abbey Road Studios, making a million cups of tea and being around 'just in cas'e. But later on Steve gave me this silver disc that was awarded to him as Producer of the album 'Timeless Flight'. It's been on my wall at home ever since and indeed a very nice reward for my services. Thank you Steve xx