The last day, we went up the mountain 🏔

#ThrowbackThursday …We’d all known each other a long time already, but we’d not played together just as a trio. John, Chris and I had first played together in a 5 piece for our Carole King homage/tribute show ‘Tapestry’, but when we were asked to go to Switzerland 🇨🇭 by a local music agent, it was the first time we’d played as a trio. …The gig was 3hrs a night, no breaks. So we got together for a rehearsal to see how much work there was to do. John and I had done the Joni work before, having put on a Joni Mitchell feature in the middle of my original show at The Ashcroft Arts Centre a year or two before. We obviously knew all the Carole King stuff, both knew a lot of my original songs, and we all knew the regular function stuff that had made up years of gigging between us. Still, a 3 hour set was a lot to come up with. We consolidated all our tracks and sat down together to just jam some stuff out. 5 hours later we came up for air. Sometimes a group of people just gel together. My favourite part of that day was jamming round some 3 chord songs in a mashup, each of us just throwing in a new song as they came to us. We did this for about 40mins. We’ve never done this live although I’ve always wanted to. Such a giggle. Anyway, song pad in hand, off we trot to Zermatt. …It was a manic trip. A lot of driving, and a lot of the satnav trying to send us on roads that were not finished yet. It amused me that the satnav had been updated first. Sort of the opposite problem to satnavs I’d had in the past. If you ski 🎿 you might know that skiers ⛷ are party animals 🎉 but this was new to me. There was an insatiable appetite for Jägermeister and ‘Country Roads’ , dancing on the tables in their ski suits and tabbouleh. The town outside was like a postcard, and poor John had altitude sickness the whole time. We just didn’t realise that’s what it was until the last day. …The last day we went up the mountain. It was Mother’s Day and Chris called his mum from the top of the Mattahorn. We were all feeling a bit squiffy, and realised this is what had been bothering John for days, poor thing.  We’d sat in a cable car going straight up, along a bit then up some more, for over an hour. The views were amazing. As someone who’s mostly travelled for sunshine and scuba diving, I’d not been to a ski resort before. It was an amazing day. …When I was young I dreamed of making music, seeing the world, and having amazing friends. This is what that looks like for me. …#singersongwriter #originalmusic