Getting up at 4.25am and driving 200 miles to front a band consisting of an owl on drums and a rabbit-like creature on keyboards may not be everyone’s idea of rock ‘n’ roll, in fact it sounds like ‘The Wind in the Willows” – The Rock Opera
This was my Sunday and the shoot for the promo of ‘Hum Along’.
I drove out to Bristol from Hastings in ‘The Hastings Hummer’ (my Fiat Doblo, a little known but brilliant vehicle that I will bring to the masses!) and arrived on set at about 10am. The director, Peter Lown, is a friend of mine and he had pulled out the stops to bring it all together including pulling the master stroke of employing Russ Henry of Hot Soup to make all the costumes and dress the set. Russ is a designer and illustrator based in Bristol and what he created for the day was an organic, dream-like magical space that reflected the cross-dimensional theme of the lyrics.
Not long after I arrived and I was having my barnet (pronounced barnay – my hair for the uninitiated) straightened by Inma Azorin (who did a great job and is also a dreadlock specialist), when a guy came up to me and introduced himself as Jeff and explained that he would be playing the drums for me today…dressed as an owl.
On stage to my left on keyboards was Al, who when I first saw him was squeezing himself into some lycra tights which he told me ‘made everything rebound’.

Peter and I had never been in a ‘work’ situation before although I had no doubts about the quality of his work having seen his Mini-Masterpiece – “Misfit’ and his short film ‘Sound of the Sun’ but I was impressed by his focus and whip cracking on the set – he was no doubt impressed by my blantant disregard for the right chords while miming to the track!

Charlie Watts when asked what playing with The Stones for 25 years had been like replied, “Well, five years of playing, and 20 years of just waiting around”, Rock n Roll and Film are similar in this regard but I didn’t realise that having someone dressed as an owl on set would lighten the atmosphere of a sometimes long and laborious process this is mainly because when you’re wearing an owl costume, pretty much anything you say or do is funny. Having said that I’m sure Jeff, a filmaker himself, is funny without an owl costume. In the afternoon a few more characters were introduced to the shoot – mainly birds – selflessly wearing balaclavas and dancing madly on a warm day in a studio.
Without giving too much away, Dave whose costume had elements of butterfly in it, had the job of leading me off the stage, into a tunnel created by the aforementioned birds. This gave me an opportunity to use my limited acting experience and I wowed the assembled crew with a masterclass in ‘tunnel acting’, having already blown them away with my earlier display of foot-tapping;-)
At the time of writing I still haven’t seen the result of everyone’s hard work – but I just want to say a massive thank you to Peter and everyone involved…it’s going to be great…