Holiday with the stars
Hawkwind have announced that they are planning to organise holidays where their fans can go with them for boat cruises, vineyard visits or to stay in villas. You get to hang out with the band, maybe have music lessons or jam sessions with them and perhaps go to a gig at the end of the break. This seems like a top idea, although a friend of mine did suggest that if they argue as much as they used to in their heyday, it may not be such a fun time.
The thought of going on holiday with your favourite rock stars sounds like a good one, but the practicalities and the reality may make for a less than perfect break.
Sure, a fortnight spent lolling about by Gene Simmons’ pool in LA sounds good, but if the rock stars came on the sort of holidays we have, I can see problems.
Would you want your daughters to share 10 nights in a caravan in Brittany with Amy Winehouse? “Dad, Amy says we can go to the bar, they’ve got a tattoo parlour and they’ve got coke down there. Can we go? Can we? She’s really cool and says we can drink vodka with her and we don’t have to come back at 9 o’clock for bed. She’s not stuffy like you and Mum”. “Coke?” you’d be thinking. You’d have them sniggering in the back of the car singing “Don’t wanna go to Carnac” on days out. It would be like a living hell with croissants and cocaine.
How would Guns n’ Roses get on playing Pictionary with our girls for 10 nights? Do they have the sort of attention span that could cope with that intensity of game? Would they blush at some of the drawings 15 year old girls can do? On the other hand, how good would it be to “hang out with the guys” drinking beer after the family have gone to bed? Maybe not too good, when you walk round “La musée du champignon et de la vie troglodyte” the next day feeling like death with the girls mocking and calling you a “lightweight” and “a loser” for not keeping up with the band.
As a parent on holiday you have to constantly keep track of the family to make sure they don’t come to harm. I can see it being a nightmare if you had to take the seven members of Madness to Disneyland Paris for a weekend. You’d spend the whole time counting and recounting them. “Right you lot, stand still and let me count you. I don’t care if it is the Night Boat to Cairo, give me a break”. Getting back to Waterloo station with a wife, 2 girls and only 6 nutty boys would not be an option. Mrs Suggs isn’t going to accept “musical differences” as an excuse as to why her Graham is still sitting in “la Légende de Buffalo Bill” at Eurodisney.
The only upside could be that when you first arrive at the park you could announce “”well, boys and girls, welcome to the house of fun!” and smile quietly inside at your own wit.
We didn’t have much money when I was young and taking a family on holiday can be expensive, so we knew not to ask for too much. Imagine Dad’s face if Elton John came on holiday with us and we happened to wander into a florists! “Dad, Elton says he wants 50 of them pink things, they look dead expensive. If you get them for him, can I have one of them buckets shaped like a castle?”
Having a younger sister meant that lazy summer days on the beach were a bit rubbish for me to say the least. On some of the deserted coves in Cornwall, you couldn’t find anybody to play cricket with all summer. Had we taken Showadddywaddy with us, we could have had 4 or 5 a side cricket every day. That would have been brilliant. I don’t know if the TCCB in those days would have allowed them to play in their brightly coloured costumes, seeing as whites were compulsory. I also don’t know how mobile they would have been in soft sand in blue suede crepe platform shoes. They would also have been very hot in those long coats running about in the outfield/ dunes/ incoming breakers. A round of ice creams would have been very pricey and I suspect that Dad would not have let us all run to 99s and a bottle of fizzy pop as well as the basic cone.
