After a good sleep-in, I spent most of the day getting this website started for the year, while Rita practiced flute for a concert in a few weeks time with her French musician friends. In the late afternoon, Rita went up to the Hall de Paris to get a few extra tickets for this evening’s concert. When she got there around 4.30pm, the queue was beginning to form, since it was first-in, best-dressed. So she rang me to ask if I could bring some cold water and an apple, since the security people had stupidly started the queue on the sunny west-side of the building, rather than going around the shady east side. It was about 37degrees today! When I got there around 5pm, the queue was several hundred people long, so I decided to wait in the shade across the road, and then take my chances when the doors opened. As the first person fainted, and was taken away in an ambulance, I realised I had made a wise choice. Nonetheless, the security people refused to admit they had made a mistake, and made no attempt to move the queue to the shady side of the building. I was soon joined by Vero (who we had bought tickets for) and then later by Geoff&Ginny, who had also decided to come along. Eventually, 2 minutes before the scheduled start, the doors were opened and all hell broke loose, with impromptu queues forming from all directions to the doors. Luckily, Rita and Vero got in early and reserved some seats, but most of the 1000 audience were in the “mosh-pit” in front of the stage, with only about 200 seats available.

Despite the heat, 78 year old Calypso Rose gave a sterling performance, being on-stage for about 60 minutes out of the 90 minute concert. At one stage, as the heat got to her, she walked to the back of the stage just saying “I’m too tired, I’m too tired”. But after a 10 minute break she was back on stage, singing her heart out. She was last off the stage, as she kept coming back to say thank you, as the audience continued singing her name. Maybe not the most technically perfect concert, but an inspiration nonetheless.

As we left the concert hall for the relative cool outside, we wondered what we should now do, until we heard the familiar sound of accordions near the entrance to the concert hall. The band we had seen last year, Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Lunch on the Grass), was playing again this year, and had come down from their venue to capture the audience coming out of Calypso Rose, and then lead them through the laneways of the town in Pied Piper fashion up to their concert site.

They then played a wide arrangement of genres, mixed with choreography and theatre, eventually settling into a great rendition of “Smoke on the Water”.

Later, as per last year, they did several AC/DC songs including "Highway to Hell”, “High Voltage” and “Thunderstruck”. Once again, their performance illustrated the importance of stage presence as well as musical ability.

As we were leaving their performance, we saw John and Irene Plunkett having a drink with friends behind the cloisters just a bit away from the concert stage. So we joined them and had a good time catching up on what had happened in the past year since we last saw them. They were later joined by other bargees who had been attending various concerts and we co-opted a nearby local to take a photo for posterity.