OK, back home. That took less time than I had anticipated. Here's the story.
We used to live not too far from Lockerbie. The concert was a charity event, the proceeds going to the Lockerbie Fund, as I recall. It was also intended to offer a bit of entertainment to the folk of Lockerbie, who had suffered in that dreadful tragedy, not that long before. It was therefore not a concert on the list of regular tour dates. Our local newspaper, for which Lockerbie was probably on the outer reaches of its readership, carried an article about it. Mrs twm wanted to go (of course) and got the tickets. It was clearly a general admission event, so she left early to get a good place in the queue. After work, I went home and, as I got ready,caught the local news on the TV (at that time, we had a TV station in the town). The TV news item clearly showed that the venue was no longer a cinema but was now a bingo hall. This meant that downstairs did not have rows of seats but sets of tables and chairs, with all the people sitting at right angles to the stage. The news clip also showed part of the balcony and that had regular seating. A friend of ours had expressed an interest in attending. He was a video trader and wanted to try out a new video camera that he had bought. He and I drove to Lockerbie and, by the time we arrived, there was a long queue. We drove slowly by and there was mrs twm, sitting on a fold-down stool at the head of the queue, intently reading a book. We parked, went back to the venue, joined her at the head of the queue and told her about the seating arrangements. We all agreed to head straight upstairs and grab the best seats we could. As it happens, the front seats on the left were reserved for local dignatories but we got the front seats to the right, on the balcony. I made a tape recording of the whole show but, on the way home in the car, it was evident that the tape had simply not pulled properly through the pinch mechanism, so the resultant recording was unusuable. At the time, we didn't know how the video had come out. Our friend was not happy with it at all. For him, quite experienced in "filming" concerts, he thought it should have been better. He had a good position looking down on the stage, no hassle from security, an unobstructed view of the proceedings in a small venue and he was able to keep the camera fairly steady throughout but .... there was simply too much "white-out" on the faces to make it an acceptable recording; it was below his standards. Nevertheless, we asked him to put it on a VHS cassette, which he did. He may have been a touch reluctant but he did it for us as we had been friends of long-standing.
And that's about it except that mrs twm no longer has a video recording of the Lockerbie show, about which I will say no more.
