Whip in my Valise

Here for today is chapter 17 of the James Maw Book.
And here also are 2 Whip in my Valise live mp3s:
Whip Ealing College 10th June 1978

Whip Electric Ballroom 31 Dec 1979

SEVENTEEN: ‘XEROX’

As soon as they were back from the gigs in Berlin, Adam decided they should go on tour again, playing nearly all the places they had covered on Parisians. The Xerox Tour was practically a carbon copy of the tour before. They had established a firm following in the North and West, which he wanted to keep. Dave Barbe’s wife, Mandy, had taken charge of the fan club, which had grown to two thousand, she invented the character of Brenda the secretary and wrote to everyone under this guise. The 1978 gig’s had been very ‘bitty’. This wasn’t going to happen any more. No longer would they support anybody, and if anyone supported them, they were to get better treatment than The Ants had frequently received. This was a decision Adam had taken way back in ‘77. They had supported Generation X at Kings College and had been kept waiting seven hours for a sound check, and they decided then that they would never treat a support band like that. No more. Adam went into Do It and said:
‘Right, let’s stop all this beating about the bush.’
He designed another hand out for the fans, printed off lyrics and information. He made a set of designs of what he was going to be wearing on stage.
The tour began with the release of the single Zerox/Whip In My Valise on July 6th, and then dates in Retford, Birmingham, Newport, Leeds, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bradford, York, Liverpool, Middlesborough, Jacksdale, Swansea, Exeter, Plymouth, Port Talbot, Newport and London. Seventeen dates in twenty-four days. Some of the places they played, however, were still the pits, places like Circles, Swansea and Plymouth Woods.
The worst gig of Adam’s life was the one on this tour when they played Plymouth Woods. He was wearing a new type of make-up, which was like a multi-coloured camouflage all over his face. It was the most gruesome of make-up schemes, which made him look as if he’d been mining in a greasepaint factory. The ceiling was very low over the stage with great vicious looking beams at angles. During the second number Adam’s head cracked against a beam and his head split open with a very deep cut. Adam continued to sing but the blood started to flow over his face. Everyone thought it was a stunt, all part of his shocking make-up. He turned round and looked at Andy Warren, Andy went completely white. Adam cupped his hands and they filled with blood, it would not stop, the lights were keeping the wound open. As soon as the gig was over they drove him off in the van to a little hospital in the middle of nowhere. He sat on a chair in casualty waiting for a doctor. When the doctor arrived he walked in to see a young man, covered in blood, with make-up all over his face and wearing a blue kilt.
He looked at Adam and said ‘Don’t tell me, the Martians have landed’.
Adam was losing consciousness a little. He heard a nurse say,‘What’s your name?’ and Dave Barbe replying:
‘His name is Mr. Ant’
As they laid him down he could hear them all laughing. They were whispering, thinking that he couldn’t hear, but as he lay looking up at the little Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck designs on the ceiling he heard the doctor say:
‘Nurse, I think this is a bit deep, a bit nasty, and I think we’re going to have to have a local anesthetic’, and the nurse replied:
‘We haven’t got any. ’
‘Well, Mr. Ant, this is going to hurt a bit’, said the doctor. Adam thought the whole thing so bizarre that he didn’t really feel anything. He just remembers the feeling of his ears moving upwards as they stitched the top of his head together.
After that, he had had enough of the ‘toilets’ - no more clubs, no more awful venues. In future everything was to be better organised.