Wednesday was another slow starting day. Nothing noteworthy until we got to our evening venue, Castellar del Vallés. There we were met by representatives of the ladies choir with whom we were sharing the show; a lovely bunch of ladies wearing shocking pink blouses which perfectly matched the pink polo shirts worn by a portion of our boys. A photo-frenzy developed once this was noticed.
The venue was an open air stage outside the local town hall. It was a bit worrying when we arrived to see only about forty chairs laid out, but in the typically relaxed Catalonian fashion that I rather like, as the audience strolled in they each went and took another of the folding chairs from the pile by the wall and found themselves a space. I reckon we had over a hundred by the time we started to sing.
The Catalan ladies, lovely though they were, needed a bit of work on their tuning. They also had some interesting accents while they sang Edelweiss and O Happy Day, but I can’t be too disparaging about their pronunciation without wondering what they made of our Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.
The audience was very appreciative though and our set was roundly applauded: Even the numbers that felt a bit more risqué, for what I suspect was a fairly conservative, older audience. The grand finale (My Way) went down a storm and brought a tear to a few eyes. The encore (the Piaf) brought the same sigh of appreciation from the audience as in
After the show Simon was presented with another souvenir of our trip (we really ought to have something to give in return on these occasions!) and then there were nibbles and drinks with the ladies choir. The merchandising guys took €250 in CD and t-shirt sales, which was very good (and probably better than we did on those lines at Cadogan Hall!)
The trip back to the hotel was marked by lots of singing on the coach; for the most part the front of the bus seemed to be trying to outdo the back of the bus, although at times there were probably as many as five different songs being sung at once…
Caroline (our fly-on-the-wall documentary maker) took advantage of the ride to do some interviews, although I suspect the noise eventually forced her to give it up.
Back at the hotel we made the best of the ‘cold dinner’ that the hotel had laid out for us again before retiring to the terrace for a couple of beers before bed.
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