After a good munch up in a car park in Woking (soup and noodles on the menu tonight) radio woking we headed over to Radio Woking for our 2nd live interview in Surrey of the day with Roy Allaway and Sylvia Bryden-Stock. The sat nav was set with the directions and we were only 3 minutes away, then we saw a sign “Bridge Closed”. No warning, no diversion, just bridge closed. As we attempted a 10 point turn down a small country lane, an onlooker was watching in dismay with his small dog. His mouth was wide open and we could have sworn he was trying to catch flies. Thank goodness for technology, the sat nav redirected us avoiding the bridge and we arrived at the radio station 10 minutes later.
As we pulled up into the car park, we jumped out to unload the gear again and noticed that either a very large dog had just urinated under our van or the van had a bad water leak. Unfortunately there was no sign of a large hound and it became apparent that the van was losing a lot of water. There was a large puddle under the van which was getting bigger very quickly. This was not a good. We had to get to the radio interview though, as we were live on air in ten minutes. Andy took a quick look under the van and could see where the leak was coming from. We anticipated fixing the van in the dark after the show had finished at 10pm, no worries we have a head torch.
We were greeted at the door by “Roy the Boy” himself; Roy Allaway. He shouted “Rag Tag Misfits” towards us and we knew we were in the right place. We were led through corridors and eventually came to the studio where we were introduced to Sylvia, who was co-hosting the show with Sylvia. The show was due to go live in a few minutes and we had water leaks on the brain, but the show must go on.
“5,4,3,2,1 and welcome, live tonight we have the Rag Tag Misfits…” The interview had started and any thoughts of problems with the van had gone completely out the window. We talked about almost everything including; the highs and lows of living in a van, Janice Long, busking in the different cities, food waste, dogging spots, food banks, The Trussell Trust and bean salads. We performed 2 live tracks and Roy played 2 of our recorded tracks off the new CD. Roy and Sylvia make a great tag team of DJs and our music seemed to go down really well. We can imagine Roy on a breakfast show, with his high amount of energy and enthusiasm, the banter was fun and the time flew. We were surprised that Roy and Sylvia had never really heard of food banks, meaning this was a great opportunity to raise awareness that the food banks exist and that the numbers of food banks are on the rise. They were also surprised on the amount of people (1 in 5) living below the poverty line in the UK. This made a great discussion; it was a wonderful interview, very light hearted and lasted over 90 minutes.
When the show had finished, we had said our goodbyes and stepped out into the dark car park. The van, we need to fix the van. We were both lying on our backs with a head torch on looking as to were the leak was. It was coming through a rubber hose and it was quite a big split. We worked out that it must be rubbing against a piece of metal and had worn away over time. “After thinking why did it have to go now?” and “Why couldn’t it till tomorrow when it was light?” Since we were in a school car park, we couldn’t sleep in the van were it was. Chances are we’d be locked in and have to answer to an angry caretaker. We decided to use a musicians bestest friend in the whole wide world, the one and only magnificent “Gaffer Tape”. That would do the trick, it works for everything from taping leads to the floor to fixing a dodgy mic stand. It really is an essential part of kit and has seen us through many shall we say sticky situations. We wrapped the Gaffer Tape around the split hose(the amount of tape we used reminded us of my brothers present wrapping techniques at Christmas) and we topped the van up with water. It worked, The Gaffer tape had saved the day again.