TODAY'S FEATURED UPCOMING SHOW: HERNE BAY

This little theatre is one of the more intimate venues on my tour, with no-one further back in the hall than Row H.

Herne Bay, the birthplace of British musician Kevin Ayers, is along the North Kent coast between Whitstable and Margate and only seven miles north of Canterbury. You can reach it from London Ramsgate line from Victoria Station.

I've been there once before, when I'd come in from the cold of freelance writing in the lateish 1970s and was working for United Artists Records in London. Some of us made the trip out to Herne Bay to see a new band the label had just signed, unappealingly named Quint (because the brainchild of a local youth named Graeme Quinton-Jones). They had a really excellent vocalist, but UA did nothing with them. By 1980 Graeme Q-J was producing a single by South Kent heavy metal group Denbigh at Herne Bay's Oakwood Studio, something else in 1982 and then.... I know no more.

Herne Bay's seafront has often been used as a sitcom location, not least by 'Little Britain'. I'm rather fearful that I might have to stay the night in a seafront guesthouse myself.

Two nights after Herne Bay, I'm in Portland Maine. Life on the road, eh?