THE VALVES

In October 1978, Edinburgh band the Valves embarked on an eight date Irish tour. Here, drummer Gordon Dair recounts his memories of their jaunt across the Irish Sea. We played in a ballroom at the end of a pier in Portrush (The Arcadia). I remember doing the gig with a towel wrapped round my neck as I had a temperature and a throat infection. We'd come up from the south of Ireland, where I'd gone to a chemists, in Carrick on Suir?, and they gave me a bottle of emulsion to drink for my sore throat. When I went to a local A&E the next day, it was that bad, they told me I'd been sold morphine. They gave me antibiotics and took the bottle away! We also played The Pound in Belfast (twice). At the start and at the end of the tour. I took the van to go and pick up our manager, who'd come over to placate us, and when I got back to the Pound there was a car parked in the space I had vacated. So, I had to negotiate it, what with the bollards and everything, which I did by the bump bump method of squeezing into a space. Went into the bar and there's a man sitting at the bar who turns and says "you got parked alright then?" The was my introduction to CCTV. He had watched the whole thing. And the gig? It was wild. It seemed like the entire crowd was pissed to the maximum it was possible to get pissed to. And to cap it off, a man stripped off and danced naked on a table during our set. After we finished, the bar asked us if we'd like some Guinness to go. Pete 'cat-face' Henry our backline man went out to the van and emptied a half full jerry can of diesel down the drain, brought it in and said "can you fill this up, please?' I later woke up in my underpants on the falls road with a squaddie standing over me. But that's another story. Sadly, Gordon passed away on 17th November 2022. R.I.P.

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