Our second tour in 1989 was in fact our first overseas tour – which set the pattern for future tours – even years in the UK and the odd years abroad. This first overseas tour took us to the East coast of Canada and America. The tour started in Hamilton, Ontario where we were hosted by the Methodist church there – but this time it wasn’t on church floors but in church members homes. This made us feel that we really got to know the country and were not just tourists gaping out of coach windows. Mind you, we did do a lot of gaping, particularly when we visited Niagara Falls and the CN Tower for instance. From Canada we travelled south into America to be hosted by the church folk in Franklin Lakes in New Jersey which was conveniently quite close to New York where of course we saw all (well quite a lot) of the sights – Empire State Building, Times Square, the John Lennon Imagine memorial, a Circle Line cruise etc etc. Then it was off westwards into Pennsylvania to a university town called Bloomsburg and then up to a place called Bemus Point in Northern New York State close to Lake Erie. Then it was back into Canada and our last couple of days were spent in the homes of the kind Methodist folk in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. We must add that we were very pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the audiences to our music. It seems that English brass is something quite new to them and obviously quite different to their expectations of blary college brass sounds.
