Fifth day of the Ball Of Fire 1997 tour
From the bretagne to Rennes it was the same way back.
L’Ubu in Rennes still exists: ubu-rennes.com.
In Rennes we had this discussion about the french tour poster. Nathan and I found it terrible. Shay found it fantastic. When Rolando came along, we asked him about his choice. When he startet to look at it we said: “Rolando can you see you on that poster?” He was searching for himself.
Then Shay showed with a finger upon someone and said: “This is you”. Then Rolando said to me, I shall take a picture of him with showing onto himself on the poster.
That was very funny, because the poster showing a scene from New York in the 40’s. The most funny thing was, that Rolando played the game perfectly, nobody was sure if he only plays with us or if he really don’t understand the joke. Later I asked him and he was laughing out loud. Of course, he was playing the game with us 🙂 I love these pictures.
At the same time inside the club there was soundcheck. It was quite hot, Lloyd Knibb played without a top.
At the diner there was a big discussion about the recording after the Skasplash tour 1996, where they recorded the material for Ska Titans (Laurel Aitken & The Skatalites, released in 1999). Shay was angry, because the whole session was shit and they had to pay everybody for no result. There was the tempo not straight, the horns not well done and Laurel Aitken not on time and so on. It took years to find an engineer in New York who was able to rebuild piece by piece, bar by bar to fix the tempo and timing and replay the bass to finally release the album in 1999. It was a desaster.
11.45 PM the show is already over and I’m back in the hotel. They played a rare second encore with James Bond Theme. The merchandise was hectic. I sold a lot of posters. But none of Lloyd Brevett’s CD’s and again he was angry about me. I ignored it.
