With our friends Gina, Lisa and Gerry at the Springhead pub in Hull.

Changing Rooms By Kate McWilliam

During our many travels we have put on our gladrags in some weird and wonderful places, kitchens, disabled loo's, broom cupboards, conference rooms, staffrooms, to name but a few. Usually all the band is in one room together but sometimes Joy and I have one to ourselves.
If the venue has proper dressing rooms we have the luxury of hooks for the clothes and a mirror, maybe even a sink, useful but potentially hazardous to a contact lens wearer such as myself (I flushed one down the plughole recently). The theatre dressing rooms are definitely the best, spacious, big mirrors, good lighting and sometimes an ensuite too. Backstage toilet facilities are gratefully received as one always seems to want to go just before one goes on, a little tricky if the ladies or gents are right up the other end of the concert room and you're on in five minutes.
What often happens is the dressing room ends up as extra storage space full of broken bits and pieces costumes from the Christmas panto and extra chairs and tables. In an exaggerated case scenario I'd like to imagine that Laurence Llewellyn Bowen of the flowing hair and frilly shirts comes into a normal room and transforms it into a band dressing room.
"First we need lots of broken chairs and old tables piled across one end. Yes in front of the mirror, perfect. Do we have some dusty bits of tinsel? Even better. Put those at the other end of the room with the fairy wings and the rest of the broken chairs for that Louis the Fourteenth effect."
Some of the best gigs have the worst dressing rooms. One well known venue has a portacabin with a sloping floor and a mirror that makes you look much, much fatter at one end and much much thinner at the other. Another has loads of graffiti and pictures of genitalia on the walls and a toilet that is always in perpetual darkness (have just heard that this has been redecorated and graffiti is outlawed), but when they are your favourite gigs these become characteristic of the place and you'd almost miss them if they weren't there.
One particularly memorable gig was during the eclipse in Cornwall, when our accommodation consisted of a couple of tiny caravans with no electricity. Joy and I put our makeup on by candlelight and struggled to find black tights, skirts etc in semi darkness watched by Cassie the golden retriever.
Tents, portacabins, broom cupboards we've done them all and lost a few bits and pieces on the way. Perhaps one day I'll meet someone wearing my purple frock and Joy's Basque and a laddered pair of tights, a frightening prospect indeed.

..Joy and Kate with what looks suspiciously like.rubber gloves and KY jelly, and Ben in a box

From one extreme to the other.......Isle of Man dressing room.