Creole Lament/Apache

If you’re planning on a nasty bout of food poisoning whilst on tour in Europe with Bonnie Raitt, it’s probably better if it’s on a day off.

If you’re planning on a nasty bout of food poisoning whilst on tour in Europe with Bonnie Raitt, it’s probably better if it’s on a day off.

Fortunately for me, it was, but the lingering aftershocks were still registering at at the following evening’s concert in Berlin -as with all natural disaters, impossible to prepare for and accurately predict.

Backstage , waiting for my cue to go and join Bonnie Raitt and the band, I was forced to make a quick decision between making haste towards either the toilet or the stage. It was a risk, admittedly. But needs must, and professional tradition dictates that the show go on. So, despite those ghastly potential consequences and those onstage indignities that lie, peppered along that torturous path, I plucked up courage and headed stageward…

The stomach rumblings and Richter-scale tremors did not bode well. The next song on the set list required my vocal warblings in the first bar, and Bonnie was already announcing, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome to the stage…’ So I gathered my wits, gritted my teeth, clenched what required clenching, and stepped out into the spotlight hoping for the best. Things may have been a little wobbly at the start, but I somehow managed the necessary harmonies, solos, intro’s and outro’s without calumny or disgrace. A close shave - but such, dear readers, are the twists and twirls one must learn to expect in this, the adventurous trials of the professional wandering Minstrel.

But, enough of the cut and thrust, the rigours of the touring life. Earlier in the evening, while Bonnie’s band was on stage, rehearsing and soundchecking, I had taken advantage of the out-of-tune upright piano I found in the dressing room and played a Caribbean blues into my iPhone. It’s an instrumental called ‘Creole Lament’ and is a tune I wrote many, many years ago in England on receiving a letter from Louisiana. It bore the tragic news that the pianist, James Booker, had been found dead in a wheelchair in the waiting room of Charity Hospital after a Heroin overdose in New Orleans.