AND Def Leppard are doing an opening tonight AND there's another v. popular local band playing
somewhere else. Arse. Still, before he leaves Ken apologises and he sez how he liked our soundcheck and he'd like to hear us play again. And he pays us our #55 guarantee. So something goes right.

When we get on stage at 10.30pm the monitor sound is shite (just liked the lads in Gasworks warned) and our audience slowly peters out, to nothing. So we truncate the set and sod off, knackered and not right happy. We shoehorn the van and trailer out of Sheffy and fuck off up the A625 as advised by the geezer Liam behind the bar (all the people there were sound and they seemed to like our stuff, the emptiness was just a bit bloody disheartening... promotions, promotions bloody promotions!). We pull up in the first country layby. It's fucking freezing. I am fucked up, burned out, screwed up so I ask the Rat to give me some quiet and space to kip down, 'cos he's still buzzed. Sound geezer, he takes his blanket and his spliff and goes for a wee walk on the moors. I sink back into the darkness under a pile of bedding with me woolly hat on (just warm enough) and I'm out like the dead.

About 3am the Rat's shouting wakes me up:
Rat: Jon, Jon I can't get in, you'll never believe what I've gone  and done!
Me: Uh? Wah?
Rat: For some reason I thought it'd be really good to strip off and  run around in me furry blanket like a bear, and now I can't  find me clothes! I left 'em in a pile up there and now I'm  worried some Farmer Giles will be off with them or the sheep'll  eat 'em!
[Reality Check: the Rat is currently standing NAKED save for a small hairy blanket in a layby right next to the A625 just 3 miles out of Sheffy at 3am. It is wet and getting down to zero. The Rat has been wearing the 'lost' clothes constantly through 3 days and nights of smoking, boozing and sweating, and nothing, NOTHING with nostrils is going anywhere near 'em. Anything mad, bad or vicious enough to want the Rat's clothes in their current reeking frozen state I do NOT want to meet, especially not when I'm half asleep stumbling around in the freezing cold and pitch dark in the mud on the Yorkshire frigging MOORS. For fuck's sake.]
Me: Phil, we'll never find 'em in the dark mate, kip down now and  we'll look in the morning

Tour Day 11, 3/10/97

I collapse asleep again, but of course the Rat can't sleep, so at 8.30am we're up in the freezin' fuckin' cold out on the moor, giggling hysterically. We wander about a bit and then I spot 'em - there's the Rat's clothes in a sad, dew soaked little pile in the middle of the sheep shit covered heath. Just like a scene out of 'Withnail and I' the Rat runs up to 'em (don't worry he's got his other clothes on his actual body) shoutin' "Great! I'm gonna roll a number right now!".

I stood there looking out over the foggy moor and the road and everything below me, wearing my five layers of clothes, while the Rat sat on the ground rolling up. At that moment I just felt incredibly surreal and mad and really stupid. An appropriate Spike Milligan poem sprang to mind and I shouted it out at the sheep in a booming 'And Now The News' voice:
"The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled,
TWAT."
Laugh? Yep. Pissed ourselves.

So we headed off into Castleton where we spend the day bumbling about the peaks a bit... Staurt drops a whole new loaf off a bloody hill! White sliced all over the fuckin' place! George and Stuart check into a B&B 'cos they can't take another night kipping bent-kneed in the car and I check into the last room in the Peak Hotel pub... 'cos although I can't really afford it, I can't face another night as bloody freezing as the last. An' the Rat gets the van to himself... he's not too chuffed with this, but seein' as he's spent all his tour subs on booze and drugs it's tough shit.

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