“Pink Floyd and Coach Three” (Pages 42-44)

I sat in the lobby, waiting for the orchestra to arrive. I was feeling decidedly underdressed, as most of the other guests seemed to be smartly suited business people. The waiters fussed around straightening the magazines on the coffee tables and each other’s bow ties. They gazed at me a bit reproachfully, obviously feeling that I was making their lobby look a bit untidy.           

The Orchestra had played a concert in Amsterdam the previous day. They were now due to arrive by coach and have the rest of their day free. Their journey had been scheduled to last for three hours, but there had obviously been a long delay, and it wasn’t until five hours later that the first coach arrived.

The people in the orchestra who got on the first and second coaches were usually the readers and the quieter members, sometimes referred to by the ruder brass players as ‘pond life’. They got out of their coach and filed past a full-size stagecoach in the hotel grounds, which was advertising a forthcoming event, and came into the lobby. The hotel staff sprang into action to help the musicians with their shabby suitcases. The second coach arrived, with much the same result, and then coach three arrived. As they had had a much longer journey than had been predicted, and as it was their free day, they had begun to celebrate early.    

The players started to disembark. One of the principal cellists was wearing a piece of cardboard over his face and was being guided by his friend, a wacky Irish bass player. The hair of one of the trombonists had fallen over his face and he was gnashing his teeth and muttering darkly in Polish. Two members of the brass section were laughing and dancing around the lawn and falling over, then they noticed the stagecoach.

They couldn’t resist it, they all climbed into it, taking their carrier bags of refreshments with them and closing the door. I was thoroughly enjoying watching this impromptu pantomime from the hotel. The outraged mutterings of the staff were growing. The manager of the hotel marched forth and attempted to get the door of the stagecoach open, but it was being held shut. Suddenly it was released and as the door flew open the manager fell backwards on to the lawn. Wiping himself down, he began to mount the steps of the coach, when hands, some of them bearing bottles of alcohol, beckoned him to join them. He turned and fled back into the hotel. The rest of the day was spent with a lot of the orchestra ‘resting’.

As I didn’t need a rest I went for a wander around Hamburg and eventually ended up back at the hotel for afternoon tea. That’s when I spotted Placido Domingo, the tenor, and a man in a white jacket approaching the piano. Placido wasn’t so well known in England at the time, but I had been lucky enough to play with the LSO when they recorded Aida with him as Radames. The whole orchestra had been really impressed and I was looking forward to hearing him sing again. I assumed that the man in the white coat was going to accompany him, but Domingo sat down on the piano stool, while the other man stood by the piano. With a grin Placido started to play some Schubert –Winterreise, I think. The man in the white coat started to sing (rather badly): it turned out he was a waiter at the hotel and a friend. He had asked Placido to play the piano for him.

The next day we did our performance of The Rite of Spring. On a high at the end of the show, still in my tails, I carried my tuba into a waiting taxi which drove across Hamburg to the Pink Floyd concert. I got a cheer as I went onto the stage; the audience obviously thought my white tie and tails looked the part. As the band had promised, they had waited for me and started the piece just after I sat down. 

Afterwards, I changed out of my tails back at the hotel and went to meet the orchestra for a drink. The bar where we met seemed more like a seedy nightclub. Some of the orchestra had been there for a while. I bought a round of drinks and was treated to the sight of one of the orchestra’s brass players lying face down on the stage, happily smiling and naked except for his underpants, which he was wearing on his head. He was trying to dissuade a naked stripper from inserting a candle between the cheeks of his buttocks. It had been a very long and bizarre couple of days. 

When I got home from the tour, John Amis (Kingsley’s brother), who was doing some freelance work for the BBC, interviewed me for Radio 3. It was a rather dull interview and I couldn’t help feeling that it would have been a lot more interesting if I had been able to tell him about the stagecoach, Domingo’s accompanying and the nightclub. Who knows, it might have given the station’s listeners  a bit of a shock.

“Jim Anderson writes in a warm and gently amusing style about his wide-ranging musical life playing the tuba around the world. Not many people have been on stage with Pavarotti and Pink Floyd, played in Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and also with Mr Bean! A perfect book for music lovers who would like a peek ‘behind the scenes'”

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