A night to remember!

Mal Pope is a songwriter who co-produced the film Jack To A King, about the 10-year rise of Swansea City FC

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Mal Pope was able to bring the curtain down on the Cwtsh Clos appeal by parading a big cheque for the full amount to the charity live on stage in the Swansea Building Society Arena during his Homecoming gig this week.

(DIMITRIS LEGAKIS/ATHENA PICTURES)

SOMETIMES, when you've had a big build up to a special event the actual day itself can feel like a bit of an anticlimax.

You know, the day after your birthday, Boxing Day or January 2. I have been working towards my Homecoming Concert at the Swansea Building Society Arena for over a year and working on the Cwtsh Clos charity project for 18 months, so you might think that come the day itself there might be a possibility of being a little underwhelmed.

Not this time. If anything, the whole day was more than I could have imagined or hoped for and in the words of those great 1970s pop band philosophers Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons all I could think of was... ’Oh What A Night!’

The trouble with getting the band back together once or twice a year is that we never have enough time to actually rehearse. When you've been friends for 40 years and haven't seen each other since last October there's a lot of catching up to do. We spend as much time telling stories and laughing as we do playing.

I asked the boys to put the date in their diaries a year last September. That was just as well. Nigel the keyboard player managed to fit this in in-between travelling to Albania and Greece before flying out at the end of the week to Zagreb. Ryan the drummer had spent the previous weekend in Scotland and was off to France, and Andrew the saxophonist is soon on his way to Prague.