BLOG 73 8TH Feb 2012

I’m afraid I’ve been a bit slow in getting started with this new Blog. Yes you’ve guessed it… I’ve been incredibly busy. As usual there’s so many things going on. After touring in Peru and Argentina and Europe in November and December with INXS I enjoyed a great family Christmas and New Year at home and got to spend lots of time with grandson Leo who’s growing bigger and lovelier every day. Christmas Eve was our annual Christmas dinner with the Rossi family. And soon it was 8th January 2012 and time for me to jump on another plane and fly to Australia for three weeks with Ciaran and INXS. I stayed with my sister Jane in her house on Palm Beach North Sydney for the first ten days. Ciaran and Donna and their baby son James live just ten minutes from Jane so it all worked out great. While in Sydney I had a great day out at the races with my good friend Michael Watt who had one of his horses running and the day became a bit more special when his horse actually won.

I then moved on to Melbourne where the band was staying for nine days while they played a couple of outdoor shows and spent six days in Sing Sing Studios recording some new INXS songs written by Ciaran and Andrew Farriss. Our very good mate the lovely Michael Keeney flew in from Belfast to produce these sessions. Michael used to play keyboards with Ciaran in the band called Leya before CG went solo and became Joe Echo for four years before joining INXS and the rest as they say is history (in the making).

In Melbourne I stayed with Michael W who was renting a house there for a while during the Australian Open Tennis and I managed to get to watch a couple of excellent matches in the Rod Laver Arena which was quite a special day out.

From Melbourne I moved on with INXS to Canberra where they would play a big concert to 35,000 people on the lawns of Parliament House to celebrate Australia Day. They performed a new Farriss/Gribbin song written especially for this show called ‘We Are United’. This was also shown Live on ABC TV across Australia and you can see much of this show on YouTube ..click here And so it was back to Sydney for a couple of days before heading home to the freezing cold UK. I’ll be putting a few photos from the past couple of months up on my site over the next few weeks. Ah yes almost forgot to mention I spent some time in Sydney with Quo’s original bass player Alan Lancaster and his lovely wife Dayle. Good to catch up again after seeing him in London just a few weeks back. Unfortunately I missed Grandson Leo’s first birthday 20th January 2012 while in Oz.

In amongst all of this travelling I’ve continued to work as a consultant on the new Status Quo documentary being filmed and released initially for the cinema and then all other audio and visual formats and released in several months. It’s a fact that Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster first put a band together at school fifty years ago and from this grew the legend that is now Status Quo.

So I’ll do my best to be more on time with my monthly website updates and apologies to my webmeister Jurgen Adametz who has waited patiently for me to get everything through and up to date.

I’m quite sure 2012 is going to be an exciting and action packed year in many ways.

Love
Bob x