SDE in the USA 2024: Day Four

SDE in the US to see Duran Duran and Tears For Fears (If you haven’t read Day Three, head here)

We were in Las Vegas to see Tears For Fears. This was the main point of the trip, since obviously I had been collaborating with band, management and label on the SDE exclusive on Songs For A Nervous Planet. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith’s celebratory ‘residency’ (three days) was too good to miss and after an okay sleep in the first of two nights in Nevada, today was the big day!

One thing I discovered is the big hotels in Vegas don’t tend to ‘do’ breakfast as part of the inclusive deal. It’s not even a bolt-on; there is no traditional hotel breakfast area with a massive buffet with cold cuts, fruit, cereals, sausage and bacon and a chef offering to make you omelettes or scrambled eggs. They just want you to use one of their resident restaurants or cafes or similar. Since they tend to be really expensive – and in the case of FontaineBleau not really appropriate, anyway – there was only one thing for it – go and find a Denny’s!

Diners are part of the mythology of America for me. I think they are brilliant: booths, free coffee top-ups, friendly staff saying things like “What can I get you, honey?”. That whole bar thing, where some people (normally on their own) sit choose to sit up at the ‘counter’ and eat and drink as busy chefs in the back kitchen cooking to order, with every walk of life coming in and out. They’ve be going since 1954 and are obviously a big chain. On a family holiday to Florida around a decade ago, we ended up in Denny’s virtually every morning with my two daughters loving the endless pancakes, bacon, etc. I know I’m probably romanticising it a little bit but there really is nothing like this in the UK.

I was pleased to discover that there was indeed a Denny’s not too far from the hotel. It was probably a 15 minute walk, but of course no one walks anywhere in a place like Vegas, so it wasn’t the best walk in the world. The car is king in America and if you choose to take the role of ‘pedestrian’ then good luck! The roads are massive and wide and it’s just an endless expansive or concrete, tarmac, traffic lights and infrastructure to allow cars to go from A to B. It can be confusing – especially that thing where the ‘walk’ sign is showing, meaning you can cross, yet cars are still allowed to turn into the road you are in the middle of, although they must give way to people crossing. That can be hairy, although thankfully there was no call for any bonnet-slapping and a Ratso Rizzo cry of “I’m walkin’ here!!”. Nevertheless, the traverse across many big roads meant that at times I rather felt like Steve Martin walking across that “fucking runway” in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but we got to Denny’s in the end and it didn’t disappoint.

We were welcomed in by the person who stands at the front and greets you and pleasingly shown to a booth (I didn’t come all the way to the States to sit at a normal table and chair in Denny’s!). As is fairly well known, you can get huge portions in the USA so you have to bear that in mind when you’re over from the UK. A ‘small’ coffee from a Starbucks or equivalent is quite often closer to ‘large’ over here, and the large ones are like buckets, so choose carefully. Denny’s had some massive looking breakfasts (or ‘slams’, as they like to call them) but a top tip is to seek out the ‘value’ menu which has some ‘no frills’ style breakfasts at great prices. In the end I had two bacon, two (small) sausages, some excellent hash browns, scrambled eggs and two pancakes for just $10, which seemed like a bargain. In America, baked beans as part of this kind of breakfast is not a ‘thing’. Anne suggested that she might share my pancakes, but I pointed out that a) I was hungry and b) you can add a two pancake “stack” to any breakfast for just $2. Denny’s also have proper containers of ketchup on the table, none of this ‘sachet’ nonsense. I’m here to enjoy a breakfast not to stress about two sachets of sauce not being enough for my bacon and eggs! It was great and really did set us up for the day. I’m so sad, I bought a Denny’s mug as a memento and we already knew that we’d be back the following day.

While sitting at breakfast I did a google map search for record shops in Vegas. To be honest, with no car on such a short stay, and with the roads feeling quite busy (preparations for the Formula 1 Grand Prix at the end of November were already underway), I wasn’t expecting to do any record shopping, but I got very lucky because around the corner from where we were sitting was Record City, in what, from the photos on google, looked like a very promising record shop! It was about a 10 minute walk and since it was still only 9.30am, I wasn’t expecting it to be open, but wanted to do a recce for later. It certainly didn’t look open but upon closer inspection the outer metal security gate on the front door was unlocked and ajar, suggesting that we might be able to go in. You couldn’t see inside because the premising have the look of some kind of military dorm from the outside, with few windows, painted in an austere grey, but it clearly was a record shop (“Buy / Sell / Trade – LPs. CDs. Movies. was painted in large letters on the side) and once we were inside, the place was warm and welcoming with the owner/manager and staff member very friendly indeed.

Of course the excitement of entering a secondhand record shop (Record City do new vinyl as well) you’ve never been in before is significant and I could immediately tell I was going to need a good hour or two in this place to even scratch the surface. Of particular interest to me was an enormous laserdisc section (I’m a bit of a collector) where most titles were $5 or $6, with some as low as $3. You just never see laserdiscs in shops in the UK. It’s eBay or nothing. By the time you’ve paid postage you rarely get much change from £10 for a single disc, so $3 felt like a giveaway price. I expressed an interest and the manager said he’d do me a good deal on top of the already cheap prices. Fantastic, but they had so many laserdiscs it was going to take ages to go through them. We had to head back to the hotel so I promised to return later that day on my own for a serious rummage, although I did pick up three CDs there and then to show willing! They were not open on Sundays and since we were leaving on Sunday evening it was today or never, for Record City!

Fast forward to later in the day and I came back and ended up buying about 15 laserdiscs including 90s classics like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and The Player, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out and various others. They gave me a great deal on top of the already good prices and when I asked if they sold laserdiscs very often, the boss laughed and said “not really”. There were still literally thousands of discs in the shop which are going to be there for years unless they choose to dump them in landfill. It pained me that I couldn’t get more due largely to luggage restrictions.

We were of course looking forward to seeing Tears For Fears in the evening. The main event. The feature presentation. A text from the manager confirmed we could come and say hello to Roland and Curt at about 7.30pm, only half an hour before ‘showtime’. Fantastic!

We picked up our tickets from the box office complete with stickers providing us with access to the “family and friends” aftershow and headed down to the bowels of the theatre with a small group of other people and took a lift down to an area that was clearly underneath the main theatre. After much anticipation, Roland and Curt wandered casually out, all dressed and ready to go on stage. Roland’s ‘look’ in particular – his hair, scarf and white jacket – had the wow factor and of course it was lovely to get the opportunity to grab few words with both of the guys and a photo opportunity. I’d seen both of them less than two weeks earlier (for the interview in London) so there was a little bit of joshing along the lines of “what are you doing out here?!” but despite having met them on a number of occasions this felt really special. I congratulated them on Songs For A Nervous Planet entering the UK charts at No 6 (which had happened the day before) and with handshakes exchanged, I said “have a great show” and we were on our way back upstairs to take our seats for the evening’s performance. If it felt a touch Spinal Tap I did not observe any banging on doors and cries of “Rock n’ Roll!!”

The show itself was incredible. The main structure and setlist was, in essence, the same as on Tears For Fears Live: A Tipping Point Film but they had found space to incorporate all four new studio tracks that kick off the Songs For A Nervous Planet album (‘Say Goodbye to Mum and Dad’, ‘The Girl That I Call Home’, ‘Emily Said’ and ‘Astronaut’). Hearing them live and fused into the setlist alongside Tipping Point tracks and all those great hits from yesteryear somehow validated the tracks, even though I already really liked all of them. I wonder if they’ll ever play all four songs in a live set again? They dropped ‘Change’ and didn’t play ‘Secret World’ from Everybody Loves A Happy Ending, but most excitingly they did play the rocky ‘Quiet Ones’ from that 2004 album, the first live performance in 14 years. I’ve always loved that song, so it was fantastic to hear it live (the first time I’d heard it performed since I saw the band at Hammersmith in 2005).

We had great seats about seven rows from the front and people were standing for most of the show and really enjoying the show. The Bleaulive theatre has a capacity of 3,800 so it’s like having Hammersmith Odeon hidden away in your hotel!

At the end of the show I headed to the merch stand because after regretting not picking up a Duran Duran T-shirt in New York, I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. There was a decent range of gear and prices were okay. I’ve seen worse.

With our badges on, we headed for the ‘Family and Friends’ aftershow, which again, was somewhere in the depths of the facility. It really was a small room and I spotted various band members and Roland’s wife Emily. Didn’t see Curt but I turned around and there was Roland with a big smile asking what we thought of the show. We chatted for about 10 minutes which was a wonderful end to a wonderful day. All that was left to do was retreat back to the bar on the first floor of Fontainebleau and talk about the gig and the fun we were having on our trip to America which was about to come to an end. Stay tuned for the diary of the last day on SDE later this week.