As we were packing the instruments into the car, this rainbow appeared. We then had a leisurely drive through the Cotswolds to Leamington Spa. A good start.
Ray has played the Temperance before so read this for background on the venue.
This visit is a double header with Benji Kirkpatrick who is also on tour with his arrangements of tunes and songs from Jimi Hendrix. This tour comes ten years after his first Bendrix tour and he has arranged a complete new set of tunes. See here for tour details.
Sound check included Benji teaching Ray the chords to accompany him on Hey Joe. The mandolin was the perfect sound to accompany the electric bouzouki.
Once sound check was complete, we had the opportunity to sample two of the many cakes that are a specialty of the Temperance.
It was a full house and Ray played his set first, starting with The Sky Was Black With Diamonds and moving from guitar to mandolin to piano and back to guitar to finish his set with Mountainside before Benji joined him on stage to accompany Ray on McPherson’s Rant.
After an interval, Benji began his set with Voodoo Child on banjo, the track that inspired him to start re-arranging Hendrix songs. Benji then moved on to acoustic bouzouki, guitar and electric bouzouki. This really was an evening of varied instrumentation.
Today we drive to Beccles in Norfolk to play at the Canopy Theatre (click here for info). This is almost all the way from the centre of England to the east coast. (OK Tom Smallbone, that’s not very far in Alberta but there are lots of roundabouts and traffic between here and Beccles!)
A Visitor On Europe’s Roads 
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