The Blues, Audiences, Bill Wyman & Metal Detecting....

Peebles turned out to be great. We did our highly honed Blues Odyssey show for the school kids on Wednesday and it tured out really well - considering it was the first time we'd ever done it. In the evening we did the same show for an adult audience, it too went down really well. What was interesting between the two sessions was the differing types of questions asked by the audience. The questions from the school's audience tended to be more general and wide ranging about how the Blues was born out of segregation and how would it have developed if it had come along today. The evening session's questions were more Stones related. The evening went on close to two and half hours but no one seemed to mind. During the show we did a fun piece about who has a right to sing the blues (If you've shot a man in Memphis you do, if you went to public school you don't). As a part of this there's the question of which colours can feature in the Blues - mauve, cerise and beige definitely cannot. As I was saying this I looked down and realised I was wearing pink socks, I'm not sure that even allows you to talk about the Blues let alone sing 'em. That's Bill's daughter Jessie sitting with him, luckilly she was onstage, as at one point I went a slide too far and as I was trying to find out how to scroll back Jessie just leaned over to casually click the right button.

Thursday's audience with Bill Wyman with BBC Scotland's Radio Cafe was also very good. Edi Stark did the interviewing and got some very interesting answers to her probing questions. It can be heard on Wednesday 24th October at 1315 and again at 1915, which also happens to be Bill's 71st birthday.On Friday it was off to Coldingam Priory for some metal detecting with the kids from the local school using Bill's signature C-Scope detector. It was all part of the Scottish Council for Archaeology's adopt a monument scheme. It featured on the Scottish News at 6.30 on the BBC.