Rod's diary - Feb 8

Awake, shower, breakfast, emails -- another typical tour morning. Its bags in the lobby by 9.15 am so they can go ahead onto the plane. Back in the room work til its time to leave at about 11. Everyone on time, off we go to airport, cars go straight to steps of the plane, the air crew and our road crew are all on board and prepared so its off we go with Bruce once again at the controls heading for Sydney.

Things are pretty crazy at Maiden HQ at the moment, with lots of emails flying around saying 'ooh this is cool' or 'post this'. So here are a few bits and bobs that have landed in the IM.com inbox today...

Rod Diary Feb 7

Up fairly early as a few things l need to get done. After a couple of hours work and go out to get some breakfast as feeling a bit stir crazy. A muffin with bacon and egg, delicious. Take a 20 min walk then return to room and work. Mid afternoon went back down to studio to check the intro footage with Dave. We spent a couple of hours making a few tweaks and then headed to the venue to be there before the audience were let in so we could run it "live" on screen with the whole intro package (I wont go into detail -- wait til you see the show) which we did and I felt it worked well. It is something we will be adding to occasionally as we go along so it sort of represents the whole of this tour). Also ran it past Steve as I always would when music is involved as the footage of course has music to it. Steve is a real stickler on edits -- as of course you would all expect -- but fortunately this time, for a change(!), he was happy first time round so we were able to use it that night. I think it was a cool idea which works well so hope you all do too.

Rod Diary Feb 6

Sleep? What's that? No chance. Just lay in bed til about 1am head buzzing with ideas (just wait and see what happens at the Forum LA soon!!) so got up and fired up the trusty laptop. Of course Melbourne is 11 hours ahead of London so it was afternoon there and all the UK based emails were flying in so had to keep up with that and prepare a press release draft about the start of the tour (final will prob go up here on tues or wed). I intended to get the Feb 5 diary done but never got to it, so much stuff that needed dealing with. It's incredibly busy right now and thank god I have a great team with Val, Dave and Mary to deal efficiently with all this otherwise I would certainly spin out of control. Not to mention of course my partner Andy who is still on the road with us (his longest road trip ever, must be the plane!!) and Maiden's accountant Peter.