April the1st 1999. A date
never to be forgotten in Talon folklore. It triggered a sequence
of events that would change the course of Talon history forever.
First of all, every T.V. radio station, newspaper, police station,
music shop and of course what seemed like the entire music industry
were informed of our sad plight. Then we waited......... Nothing........
Absolutely nothing. It seemed, despite all our best efforts that
the dream was over. Chris Chaplin then announced that he was leaving
to start up a new business. Perfectly understandable under the circumstances.
We all shook hands and wished each other well. No gear, no sound
engineer and no hope. Then came the phone call.
A midlands based businessman and his wife, (who for
reasons of their own wish to remain anonymous and so for the purpose
of our story will be referred to as Mr &
Mrs Good), were listening to the radio one
Sunday afternoon, when they heard the rather distressing story.
It seems that Mr & Mrs Good were big fans of our musical combo, and after a brief discussion
had decided to come to our rescue. Later that afternoon I received
the phone call and a meeting was set up between Mr
Good and ourselves. Within a few short hours
the entire problem had been solved by two people at the opposite
end of the human scale to the little shit that caused the problem
in the first place. As I drove home from that meeting reflecting
on what had just happened, a wave of emotions came over me. I stopped
the car and am not ashamed to say, shed a tear of eternal gratitude
and overwhelming relief as the full impact of the situation of going
from complete and utter despair to the realization that Talon could
actually go on finally hit me.
Next of course we needed an engineer. Well if anyone
would know where we could find the right man for the job then it
was Dave Morris, after all, he was the man.
His reputation preceded him and his CV read like a who's who. So
I made the call and the conversation went something like this. "Hi
Dave it's Chris. We're looking for a new sound engineer. Do you
have any idea who might be interested"? "Yes" came the reply, "me".............
Now we could really look forward to the up and coming autumn tour,
and the two words that were on everyone's lips were Road
Crew. Our friend and part-time rodie over
the last few months had been Simon (Trigger)
Mcnicholas. Unfortunately, due to family commitments, he was not
able to continue so Si was delegated to employ the two road crew
for the tour. Mission accomplished and job done! The result of his
quest was the duo of Paul (Cannon)
Edwards and Jon Mackenzie.
