On The Road continued

The final recruit on fiddle was Roddy Chiong, In February '98 Chiong, who also acts and had appeared as Chinese hit man in Mel Gibson's violent thriller Payback, was at a loose end when he got a message to call Brent Barcus . Roddy was not too enthused when BB talked about a possible country gig and when the name of Shania Twain came up he blanked it. Something nagged at him all night so the next morning he looked her name up on the Internet. Minutes later he was back on the phone to Brent. Then he rushed out bought both Shania's albums and spent the next two weeks practising the songs. After a nerve wracking audition Chiong was hired. After which the band settled down to five weeks of intensive show rehearsals in Lake Placid.

The first casualty of a playing to an audience of 30,000 is intimacy. The first fifty rows have a great time but to those at the back up close to heaven the figures leaping around the stage might as well be Lowry matchstick men cavorting in hell , while the sound in the worst aircraft hangars can be better in the car park. Giant video screens and Mutt's painstaking rehearsals solved some of those problems.

The show blurred the country boundaries from the off. Shania wore tight outfits, revealing her world famous midriff for at least half the set, tirelessly working the stage from side to side, from back to front. The musicians all wore skin tight T-shirts or vests - except the "Groove Regulator" JD Blair in his outsize head phones and ski goggles - displaying buff muscles, tight buns and firm abs, not a paunch or a denim in sight. Musically the show bore as much relationship to country music as the Police did to reggae, the instruments were familiar - but the groove was pure pop. The final number Rock This Country did Def Leppard as proud as the riff, complete with guitar posturing and pyros going off in all directions.

The Tour was a triumph, elevating her from country star to pop superstar without missing a beat. Between May 29, 1998 and January 16, 2000 Shania Twain played 165 shows in five countries (primarily the USA and Canada she also gave seven concerts in Australia, three in the UK and one in Ireland) to over 2.5 million people. The tour grossed US$86 million, the highest grossing country tour in history . Only the Rolling Stones were a bigger draw.