Rod Clements saw considerable chart success with folk-rockers Lindisfarne, penning their hit Meet Me On The Corner. Now an established solo artist, his new retrospective double-album, Rendezvous Café, has just been released. Rod is proud to have worked with the late, great Bert Jansch, and he continues to collaborate with various other kindred musical spirits including Michael Chapman, Rachel Harrington, and Rab Noakes. We trust you’ll enjoy the latest of Rod’s musings in which you’ll find he’s NICELY OUT OF TUNE It takes a brave (or foolhardy) performer to test the truth of the old showbiz adage about the inadvisability of sharing the spotlight with children or animals, and I consider myself lucky to be one of a select group of musicians to have shared a television studio with a pack of disgruntled tigers and lived to tell the tale. Some years ago I was part of a group that was flown out to Switzerland to appear live on a prime-time national magazine programme. Such jaunts used to be popular amongst the music fraternity: the workload would not be onerous, the hospitality was usually generous, and – in those pre-recession times – there would be a record company representative on hand with an expense account at their disposal. Furthermore, one could enjoy the quirks of a presentational style apparently inspired by the early days of the Eurovision Song Contest. But little did we know what awaited us on this occasion. We set up on stage at one side of the large studio. Opposite us on the far side were sofas where the guests would be interviewed. In the centre was a very big cage with a barred tunnel extending out of the building to the car park. The TV cameras had the floor-space around the cage in which to manoeuvre to their vantage-points. We asked about the cage and were informed that part of the show would consist of tigers from a visiting circus being put through their paces by their trainer. Yes, real tigers. We looked apprehensively at the cage and the mountings which (we hoped) secured it to the floor. Wouldn’t the tigers be frightened, we enquired, by the unfamiliar sights and sounds of the TV studio – the lights, the gyrating cameras, the anxious band from England? Oh no, we were assured. The tigers were quite at home with the roar of crowds and the hurly-burly of circus life. It was just unfamiliar sounds that might disconcert them. Like, er, drums and guitars, perhaps? Yes, possibly. But the tigers would have left before we were scheduled to play so we needn’t worry. We worried anyway, as we stood in our positions throughout the preceding items. Then it was tiger time. Half a dozen of them padded menacingly up the tunnel and into their cage. They reluctantly went through the motions with their trainer – sitting, standing, circling this way and that. They looked as though they would rather be somewhere else, and I was feeling the same. Their routine over, the tigers began to head back through the tunnel to the exit. We were on next and the floor-manager stood in front of us ready to begin the countdown, his back to the departing carnivores. Never has a band remained so still and quiet as we did for those endless seconds, and whatever the tigers heard didn’t come from us. Perhaps it was the swish of a camera cable across the floor or the click of a microphone switch that stopped one of the beasts in its tracks and caused the hold-up in the tunnel. The cage wobbled as the trainer tried to disentangle the irritated animals. The floor-manager was gesticulating at us to start. We pointed in silent consternation to the jostling tigers, but the camera’s red light was already on. That was why TV screens across Europe showed a close-up of the singer’s panic-stricken face mouthing the words “But the tigers are still here!” instead of going into the song. The record we were promoting was not a success, though the tigers had certainly succeeded in making monkeys out of us.